Pax Pacifica: Terrorism, the Pacific Hemisphere, Globalization, and Peace Studies

Pax Pacifica

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Constructive Peace Studies A Series Edited by TRANSCEND and published by Pluto Press

Searching for Peace: The Road to TRANSCEND, Second Edition by Johan Galtung, Carl G. Jacobsen and Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen Transcend and Transform: An Introduction to Conflict Work by Johan Galtung (Copublished by Paradigm Publishers)

Pax Pacifica: Terrorism, the Pacific Hemisphere, Globalisation and Peace Studies by Johan Galtung (Copublished by Paradigm Publishers)

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PA X PA C I F I C A T e r r o r i s m , t h e Pa c i f i c Hemisphere, Globalisation and Peace Studies

Johan Galtung Forewords by Daisaku Ikeda and Ikuro Anzai

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Pluto Press

Paradigm Publishers

London

Boulder

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any media or form including electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or informational storage and retrieval systems without the express written consent of the publisher. Copyright © Johan Galtung 2005 Published in the United Kingdom in 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA, UK www.plutobooks.com ISBN 0–7453–2003–1 hardback ISBN 0–7453–2002–3 paperback Published in the United States in 2005 by Paradigm Publishers 3360 Mitchell Lane Suite C, Boulder, Colorado 80301 U.S.A. Paradigm Publishers is the trade name of Birkenkamp & Company, LLC, Dean Birkenkamp, President and Publisher. www.paradigmpublishers.com ISBN 1–59451–110–1 hardback ISBN 1–59451–111–X paperback The right of Johan Galtung to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Galtung, Johan. Pax Pacifica : terrorism, the Pacific hemisphere, globalisation and peace studies / Johan Galtung. p. cm. — (Constructive peace studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-59451-110-1 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-59451-111-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. East Asia—Foreign relations—20th century. 2. Peace. 3. Terrorism—East Asia. I. Title. II. Series. JZ5584.A353G35 2005 327.5—dc22 2004025773 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 05 06 07 08 09 10 Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the standards of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library materials. Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

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Contents

Forewords by Daisaku Ikeda and Ikuro Anzai

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Preface

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1. Towards a Pax Pacifica The Pacific Hemisphere Actors A Pacific Hemisphere Agenda for Peace

1 1 3

2. Decolonisation in the Pacific Colonisation and Decolonisation Residual Colonialism: Chile and France

15 15 23

3. Pearl Harbor Day: Theories of War and Peace A Note on Understanding History Before Pearl Harbor: Events Leading to War Below the Events: Trends, Permanents and Theories of War After Pearl Harbor: Theories of Peace

31 31 32 33 38

4. The USA, World Hegemony and Cold War II 45 One More Note on Understanding History 45 A Perspective on US History 47 The Double Triangle: USA/NATO/AMPO vs Russia/China/India 55 The US Instruments: NATO and Japan 59 Does September 11, 2001 Change the Struggle for Eurasia? 61 What Can Be Done? 61 5. Japan/Asia/USA: The Politics of Non-Reconciliation The Victor as New God Japan and Germany under the USA: Some Similarities Japan and Germany under the USA: Some Dissimilarities

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63 63 65 73

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Basic Change in Japan: From Deep Structure to Deep Culture? Processing the Past: The Textbooks Processing the Past: Compensation and Apology But How about A9? Is Japan Heading for a War? Appendix: NGOs and Japanese Youth as Peace Workers Japanese NGO/Youth for Peace: Weak Points Japanese NGO/Youth for Peace: Strong Points, Ten Roles Some Concluding Remarks 6. The European Union: Peace Factor, War Factor, Both or Neither Twenty-First-Century Threats to Peace, in Europe— and from Europe Inside the EU: Upper, Middle, Lower and Excluded Classes Inside the EU: Dominant and Latent Nations Inside the EU: The Superstate and Its Citizens Outside the EU: The Upper Class in a World of Classes Outside the EU: One in a World of Civilisations Outside Europe: One in a World of Regions Synergies for Peace, Synergies for War

74 76 79 82 83 84 84 86 89 91 91

95 97 98 100 101 103 105

7. Towards a Pax Pacifica: An East Asian Community East Asia: Core, Context and the European Analogy The EAC Core, the OSCAP Context and Conflict Transformation Japan-Russia over the Northern Territories/South Kuriles Japan–United States over Okinawa China and Taiwan–Hong Kong–Tibet–Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia Korea, North and South The Relation between Conflict Transformation and Integration Conclusion: Some Problems to Watch

109 109

Epilogue: Pax Pacifica in Yokohama Harbor

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Notes

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Index

165 vi

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111 112 114 116 117 120 123

Forewords

Daisaku Ikeda I never encounter the writings of Dr Johan Galtung without recalling what the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the true scholar, namely, that “He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart”.1 The scholar Johan Galtung, leader in the field of peace studies, is not merely an expounder of theory but a man of action, a man of creativity. Having witnessed in his youth the tragedies that World War II inflicted on his native land of Norway, he became intensely devoted to the cause of world peace, and in the process opened up a whole new field of research. He established a new discipline, one that had never existed before, now called peace studies. Devoting himself at all times to what he perceives will be the key questions of the age, he has become a leader of peace studies, a man whose contributions to that field have won wide recognition, and for whom I myself feel the profoundest respect. In the hope that his spirit of tireless questing for peace might be transmitted to the young people of Japan, I made arrangements in the past to invite him to Soka University, the school I founded in Tokyo. In his address to the students on that occasion, he emphasised not only the theoretical side of peace studies but stressed that, “although the study of history is important, what is of even greater importance is the struggle to transcend history”. These words, I believe, convey the true essence of Dr Galtung’s studies for peace. There are several characteristics that mark Dr Galtung’s research. First is the fact that he approaches the problems not from the viewpoint of the great powers or the political leaders who head them, but from that of the ordinary citizens of the various vii

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nations, those who suffer most from the current state of affairs. His vision is marked throughout by a warm humanitarianism. A second characteristic running through his work is the fact that he is not content simply to analyse the present situation. His analyses, along with the acute reasoning guiding them, are backed up by his wealth of experience and active approach: he strives constantly to provide society with alternatives that will remedy the ills presently afflicting it. In the series of dialogues between Dr Galtung and myself that appeared under the title Choose Peace, he remarks: “Throughout my life, I have tried to adopt the policy of accepting, instead of passing up, challenges.”2 The present work, Pax Pacifica, is the product of confrontation with one such major challenge, that presented by the simultaneous terrorist attacks launched against America in September 2001, striving as it does to broaden the horizon of peace studies in the twenty-first century. For the terrorist attacks of 9/11, occurring just as humanity had taken leave of the twentieth century, the “century of war and violence”, and was stepping forth in what it hoped would be a brighter future, have confronted us with problems of the utmost gravity. 2000, which marked the beginning of the twenty-first century, was designated as the “United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilisations”. But instead of dialogue, the entire world has been shaken by its extreme opposite, terrorism, the “violence that heeds no questioning”. The immediate crisis seems, at least for the moment, to be over; but we are left with the question of how to prevent further outbreaks of such terrorist activities. As many informed individuals have pointed out, we must also somehow overcome the problems that serve as a breeding ground for terrorism and afflict so many of the people of the world; the poverty, the economic disparities, the discriminations because of race and religion—what Dr Galtung calls the “structural violence” of our present world. Among these many problems, of course, is that of peace in the Middle East, one that the twentieth century failed to solve and that casts ever darkening clouds over the scene. In order to build true peace, what is most needed now is positive vision and imaginative power. I believe I am not alone in thinking that Dr Galtung’s “practical wisdom”, based upon worldwide travels and an unbiased observation of actual conditions, offers great hope for just such vision. viii

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Dr Galtung made clear his attitude toward terrorism when he declared that “Nothing can justify crimes against peace and humanity, whether by OS [“other side”] or US”.3 He has also stated his conviction that the true solution to the problem lies not in “the vicious cycles of retaliation,”4 since violence only begets more violence, but in international cooperation that transcends national and religious boundaries to substitute “virtuous cycles”5 for the vicious ones of the present. Moreover, he is strongly convinced that the new wave of peace must arise among and be led by the people themselves, drawing its strength from civil society. I am in complete agreement with these views, in the dialogues conducted between Dr Galtung and myself, in which we discussed reforms in the United Nations and the importance of the power of the people, along with many other issues, we found that our opinions coincided on numerous points. We agreed, for instance, that the attainment of peace must be carried out by peaceful means. With that aim in mind, I believe that it is important to set up some sort of international system for the prevention of terrorism and armed conflict, and to do so as soon as possible. I have in fact made various proposals toward that end. Happily, plans are now underway for the creation of such a system, to be known as the International Criminal Court (ICC), which will be based in The Hague, Netherlands. It is my conviction that the creation of such an organisation will enable us to insure that the twenty-first century is substantially different in nature from the twentieth century, to move from an era of “solutions through force” to one of “solutions through law.” The power motivating the creation of this new era, as Dr Galtung stresses, must be dialogue, the kind of exchange of opinion that opens the avenue for the expression of unlimited human possibilities and impulses toward the good. The twenty-first-century world must base itself not upon confrontation but upon harmony, not upon division but upon solidarity. Buddhism, the faith that I follow, employs a parable to illustrate the way in which lives are intimately linked with one another, the parable of the two bundles of reeds. Let us suppose that there are two bundles of reeds. So long as the two are leaning against each other, they stand up. In the same way, because there is a “this”, there can be a “that” and because there is a “that”, there can be a “this”. But if we take away one of the ix

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bundles, the other will topple over. In the same way, if we take away “this”, then “that” cannot continue to exist; and if we take away “that”, then “this” cannot continue to exist. In my discussions with Dr Galtung, one of the conclusions I arrived at was that the attainment of a peaceful world based on nonviolence and dialogue can never be accomplished unless this sense of interdependence and respect for the dignity and importance of life is firmly implanted in the hearts of individuals everywhere. In the present volume, Dr Galtung treats this and many other problems relating to peace studies, viewing them from a variety of angles and searching for new approaches to their solution. Globalisation, a trend that promises to dominate the world of the twenty-first century, is among the topics he takes up, as well as the vital importance of dialogue and nonviolence, and the role to be played by women, young people and non-governmental organisations. In geographic terms, he deals with questions that are global in scope, but, in proposing the concepts and practical measures he believes should be adopted, pays particular attention to the peace and stability of the Pacific Ocean area. Dr Galtung has repeatedly stressed that he is calling upon young people not to be “peace researchers” but “peace workers”. In 1996, the year following the publication of our dialogues, when I met him in Tokyo, I remember him saying: “There are many students who understand my theories. But what I want to see, even if they are few in number, are students who can put them into practice”. My own hope is that the present volume will be read not only by specialists in peace studies and international affairs, but will be taken up and studied with care by young people throughout the world, for they are the ones who ultimately will be responsible for the peace and happiness of humankind in the twenty-first century. Dr Galtung himself has said, “peace is possible. So long as dedication and dreams and understanding exist”. Young people, I know, have the stuff needed to carry on the spirit expressed in these words of Dr Galtung. It is my fervent hope that they will. In closing, I would like to pay tribute to Dr Galtung’s long years of dedication to the cause of world peace, and to this book x

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of his that will help to guide us through the uncharted waters of the post–terrorist attack era, by quoting the words of H. G. Wells: “The hour is late, but still amidst the deepening shadows we may be in time. Build up an acceptable vision of a new world, make not a flimsy gesture of good intentions, but work, work hard, to produce a reasoned and tried and tested common plan that will hold human minds together in a new order in the world”.6 Daisaku Ikeda President, Soka Gakkai International May 2004

Ikuro Anzai I am director of the Kyoto Museum for World Peace attached to Ritsumeikan University, a 105–year-old private university with about 35,000 students in eight colleges and graduate schools. Dr Johan Galtung taught peace studies as a visiting professor at the College of International Relations there for three years, when I had a very fortunate chance to be acquainted with him. It was an honour for me that I also had the chance to co-author a book entitled Is There a Crisis in Japan? with Professor Galtung. I have been a researcher in the field of radiation protection and peace studies with a fairly strong hope to combine my academic works with citizens’ activities for peace and safety. I have recently been testifying in court in favour of the A-bomb survivors (hibakusha) who are bringing lawsuits against the Japanese government. The plaintiffs demand that the government acknowledge their diseases as after-effects of atomic bombing so as to be able to exercise their legal rights for medical care as hibakusha. It is my humble contentment as a scientist to be able to contribute to the protection of the weak in our society. Professor Galtung is a peace researcher who has been playing an important role, in a sense as a witness testifying in the “Global Court of Peace” in favour of the weak on Earth, based on a broad and profound knowledge of the present world and its history. He is, so to speak, a contemporary Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who was extensively well-versed in logic, nature, society, art, and many other fields of human activities. I sometimes feel that he seems to have xi

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the compound eye of a dragonfly, the keen olfactory nerves of a dog, the supersonic wave sensor of a bat, and the flying capacity of a kite, which gives a clear bird’s-eye view, and is equipped with a highly-efficient computer system and a time machine for traveling to the past and the future. Aristotle, it is said, made an interesting mistake. He thought that the eel grows spontaneously from the soil because he failed to find a fry of eel in any river, although he made an extensive observation of nature. Today, it is well-known that the eel grows in the sea, not in freshwater, and Aristotle’s scientific mistake was due to a limitation of observation. But the contemporary Aristotle has very extensive and comprehensive observational faculties, which enable him to commend more clearly and distinctly on wide range of current topics. Thus, in this book, Professor Galtung discusses and proposes a possible prospect for a comprehensive Pax Pacifica, sometimes using suggestive metaphors, which will inspire us to develop our own idea on peace, on the Pacific and on peace in the Pacific. I am currently president of the “Article 9 Message Project”, an independent movement appealing to the world from the concerned citizens in Kyoto. As has been widely reported, nine distinguished Japanese intellectuals, including Professor Shuichi Kato, another contemporary Aristotle in Japan, strongly called on Japanese people to protect Article 9, thereby having a considerable impact on concerned citizens. The “Article 9 Message Project” is one of the citizens’ movements that was stimulated by their initiative. In addition to many citizens, a large number of scholars, artists, Buddhist monks, poets, and so on sent us inspiring messages for protecting and developing the pacifism stated in the constitution. Many people feel that the pacifism explicitly stipulated in the Preamble and Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan is now at risk. Since the formation of a coalition cabinet of the Liberal-Democratic Party and the Komeito (Clean Government Party), a series of socalled emergency legislations has been brought into existence, and the outer moat for the amendment of the constitution seems to have been filled up. The Prime Minister of Japan often quotes an old saying, “Lay up for a rainy day”, in order to justify the extravagant self-defense forces and reproaches the opposers for not proposing responsible alternative security measures. xii

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In a recent book, I proposed a security policy for Japan in conformity with the pacifism of the constitution. Key points: drastic policy conversions to nonalignment and neutrality; reconfirmation of constitutional pacifism by the National Diet of Japan and its acknowledgement by the United Nations; legislation of Fundamental Diplomatic Law for Peace and Coexistence; conclusion of peace treaties with all nations on the bases of equality, impartiality, reciprocity and non-aggression; reconfirmation of peace-oriented principles such as Non-nuclear Principles (not to possess, not to produce, not to allow introduction of nuclear weapons); Restrictive Principles on Arms Exportation, Principles for Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy, etc.; reorganisation of SelfDefense Forces into Frontier Guards Unit (devotedly defensive) and Disaster Relief Unit (non-military); establishment of a Committee for Peaceful International Contribution in the National Diet backed up with a high level of research activities of a National Research Institute for International Contribution and with sufficient supply of useful personnel by a College for International Contribution, inviting peace-related research institutions of United Nations to Japan; promotion of enriched peace education in elementary, secondary and higher educations; development of sincere efforts to foster common recognition of history, especially with the countries Japan invaded in the past; and promotion of international cooperation in the fields of politics, economics, science and technology, and culture. In this book, Professor Galtung provides us with a number of useful hints as to the security issues surrounding Japan by referring to the situations in North and South Korea, China, Taiwan, Russia, India, and so on which will stimulate our incentive to build alternative security policies that are more peaceful and consistent with the Constitution of Japan. Ikuro Anzai, Ph.D. Professor, College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University November 2004

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The chapters in this book were written on board PeaceBoat, a cruise ship run by a Japanese NGO of that name. It was their 35th voyage around the world, 106 days from Tokyo to Tokyo, visiting places of general, peace, development and environmental interest. To date, more than 50,000 people, with extraordinary experiences of togetherness and reflection, have benefited from 46 voyages (23 of them around the world) that have brought people together across conflict borders. Have a look at www.peaceboat.org/english. The voyage began in Guayaquil on November 21, 2001, passed Rapa Nui, Tahiti and Samoa and ended in Kobe at Christmas. 9/11 was hanging like a thunder cloud over our voyage, as it did over the rest of the world: “The world will never be the same again.” Here is a short pre-history. While Distinguished Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Hawai’i, I directed the Pacific Hemisphere Project, launched in 1988 to come to grips with peace and development in the Pacific Hemisphere. Field trips included Alaska, British Columbia, the US West Coast, Mexico, Central America, Panama, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Tahiti, American Samoa, (Western) Samoa, Fiji, Palau, Papua, Micronesia, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Japan, RyuKyu (Okinawa), North Korea, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Viêt Nam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. My first publication was Peace and Development in the Pacific Hemisphere, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989. This is the second and final publication. The Pacific: Stiller Ozean, in German. How could it live up to its name? It is not very pacific, as many have commented; among them Jack London in his superb Tales of the Pacific. The social xv

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typhoons—war, misery, pestilence, colonisation, environmental degradation—generally came from the eastern side of the Pacific, from the occident, and before that from the western side of Europe: Spain and Portugal, England and France, and the Netherlands. They reached East Asia from both sides. Once, only once, did an attack come from the other direction, from the orient eastward on the occident, and then only half way across the Pacific: Pearl Harbor. The shock effect was of 9/11 magnitude: “You are not supposed to hit back, you people. Stay in your place.” As “Pacific” indicates, this book has a dual focus—on the Pacific Hemisphere and peace. The reader is welcome to both, as a modest introduction to the Pacific Hemisphere, and to peace studies. It begins with an overview, then examines the Pacific Islands, then the major Rim powers, then the European Union and then a possible future East Asian community. I am grateful to Tatsuya Yoshioka and Rachel Armstrong for the kind invitation to join the PeaceBoat cruise; to Daniel Vincent, Javier Sagues, Shinsaku Nohira and Kensaku Ishimaru for hosting us so well on board; and to Jörgen Johansen and my wife Fumiko Nishimura for good, pacific, dialogue companionship. Johan Galtung Perth, Western Australia, March 2004

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Towards a Pax Pacifica

The Pacific Hemisphere Actors We are exploring peace in the Pacific Hemisphere; the region of the world washed by the waters of that giant ocean and some adjacent waters. We need an overview and what follows is a division grouping some countries together into eleven “actors”. On the Eastern Rim of the Pacific we have three actors: Canada, the United States and Latin America, lumping together Mexico, Central America, Panama and Andean South America. In the Pacific itself we have two actors: the Pacific Islands (Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia), and Australia/New Zealand. On the Western Rim of the Pacific we have by far the heaviest load, six actors: Russia; China; Japan; the mini-Japans/Chinas (Japanese economy and Chinese culture)—Singapore, Taiwan, special-status Hong Kong, South Korea; North Korea and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian) countries: the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore again, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Viêt Nam, Brunei. And the Northern and Southern Rims, the Arctic and the Antarctic, the self-appointed hub, Hawai’i, the potential hub, Okinawa, and colonial countries—even if they are only in, not of the Pacific Hemisphere, unlike their residual colonies. Parts of Latin America certainly belong, as does Russia, and not only because it has the longest coastline. Geopolitically all of the former Soviet Union was seen as part of “the Cold War 1

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Table 1.1. The Pacific Hemisphere: Typology and Overview Western Pacific

Central Pacific

Eastern Pacific

Russia Far East

Pacific Islands Polynesia Melanesia Micronesia Hawai’i

Canada Yukon British Columbia

Japan China

Chile Rapa Nui

“Mini-Japans/Chinas” South Korea Taiwan Hong Kong Singapore North Korea

(France) French Polynesia Wallis and Futuna New Caledonia

ASEAN (Southeast Asia) The Philippines Indonesia (East Timor) Brunei Singapore Malaysia Thailand Viêt Nam Laos Cambodia Myanmar

(UK) Pitcairn (USA) Guam American Samoa Hawai’i Australia Norfolk

United States Alaska Washington Oregon California Latin America Mexico Guatemala El Salvador Honduras Nicaragua Costa Rica Panama South America Colombia Ecuador Peru Chile

New Zealand Tokelau

system” in Europe, whereas Pacific Latin America was part of the Western Hemisphere. Geographically, however, they both belong to the Pacific Hemisphere, which is rapidly gaining in salience. But it is not the same as Asia/Pacific which stops short of the Eastern Rim, and includes land masses not washed by the Pacific. Table 1.1 provides an overview of this very complex region. The focus is on Western/Central Pacific and the USA. Depending on what we mean by “the population living on the seaboards of the rim countries” we are talking about 2–2.5 billion human beings, perhaps some 40 per cent of all humankind. Of these, 5 million live on the Pacific Islands, a ratio of 1:400 or 1:500, which also indicates their vulnerability to their neighbours. And among those neighbours we have four of the six big powers of today:1 the United States, Russia, China and Japan. Relative to their world status in 1945, both China and Japan are ascending, while Russia is descending and the USA may be culminating. 2

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Although Europe today, emerging from the divisions of the Cold War, is becoming a much more dynamic place than it was during the lost generations of the “Long War”, 1914–45, and the Cold War, 1949–89, it is hard to beat the Pacific Hemisphere’s racial, cultural, economic and political diversity. The biggest water-mass in the world still keeps countries at a distance and serves to preserve diversity, even with exponentially increasing trade and communication. In Europe, the source of a homogenising dynamism lies with the formation of the fifth superpower, the European Union,2 transforming the rest of Europe into its periphery. However, this dynamic diversity of the Pacific Hemisphere can very easily spill over into massive violence if it is not tempered by symbiosis and equity. Both are needed, together, as necessary conditions for peace. The concern of peace studies is the reduction of violence, including the threat of violence. These are noble goals to be achieved by peaceful means. Peace obtained by unpeaceful means is not worthy of the name, nourishing, as it does, cultures of revenge and glory. It never stays peaceful.

A Pacific Hemisphere Agenda for Peace Peace studies is concerned both with the direct violence that kills quickly, for instance by war, and the structural violence that kills slowly, through exploitation, repression and alienation. This applies not only to the situation at present, but also to the future, and the past. There is the need to cure disease, to prevent disease and, importantly, to heal disease, overcoming the traumas produced by previous diseases.3 Together this adds up to six important and problematic tasks. They should to be approached with an open mind, with the hope that proposals for peace by peaceful means flow from the explorations. We start with the direct violence of the past, focusing on the USA, in which Hawai’i and other First Nations are incorporated. Traumas abound. The USA entered the Pacific War of 1931–45 through the trauma of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and ended by committing nuclear genocide on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan suffered the traumas of being the victim of those genocides, 3

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committing their own, and losing the Pacific War. The USA also conquered half of Mexico and colonised Hawai’i with the coups of the businessmen/Marines in Honolulu in 1893, leading to annexation in 1898, the conquest of Guam the same year, American Samoa the year after and the Philippines right after that. The USA exercises cultural/military control over Palau, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Countless military interventions in Latin America add to the picture, as does the US occupation of Japan, the Korean War, the Second Indochina War and bases in Okinawa and the Philippines. Yet the Pacific Hemisphere is where the USA suffered its first non-victory in the stalemate with China/North Korea in 1953, and its first defeat, moral and military, with Viêt Nam in 1975. Historically these events may stand out as turning points in the brief history of the US Empire. The militarily unbeatable could be beaten.4 In Europe the USA emerged victoriously from World Wars I and II, as also in the Pacific War. But not in East Asia. Moreover, the Pacific Hemisphere is also the region where the USA was economically defeated, at least for a period, by the structural violence skillfully wielded by the Japanese economic superpower in the 1980s. The metaphor of a “Pacific Basin” may not be so ill-chosen even if far too wet as an image to carry the connotation of immense, strong land-masses full of vitality. In a basin, one may sink and drown; but also struggle to keep afloat. Viewed from Europe this is a region of intense backstage drama, not the relaxed US display of victorious, even generous—if somewhat high-handed—equanimity Europeans are used to. The Latin American “backyard”, considered and treated as such, is well known in Europe, but not the East Asian “backstage”. For a superpower to reconcile the self-images of winning the Cold War front stage with brutal repression in the backyard, and defeat at certain points backstage, is not easy. To be traumatised, something else has to be healthy: suffering lies in the contradiction between health and trauma. Nor is the USA alone in being traumatised in the Pacific Hemisphere. Traumas hit victims and victimisers alike.5 Spanish, Russian, German, Japanese, American, Dutch, Portuguese and British empires 4

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all found their watery graves in the Pacific Basin. And the French? Coming. How can we address, not to mention redress, these festering traumatic wounds in the body politic? How can we reconcile? Traumas can easily be processed into new violence. One possible approach is to talk it through. Invite those Others, for instance Hawai’i, to the wounded US Self to talk things over. Invite other Others. Use the alo’ha6 spirit for a fa’a pasifika7 approach, flexible, generous, dialogical—a gigantic group therapy, among giants. Try to understand what happened, and why. Why was the karma bad, how can the karma be improved? What was the yin, what was the yang; how was the harmony lost? These are all metaphors from the Pacific Islands and East Asia. There is much wisdom in them, as in the path-breaking Polynesian (Hawai’ian) ho’o pono pono.8 Use the tremendous healing resources of the Hemisphere. Let all cultures contribute, including the Christian-legal culture with its focus on confession-atonement-forgiveness, confession-punishment-new beginning, legal redress, and compensation. Let no topic be taboo. Involve actors on all sides as well as their internal critics, who may or may not agree with the actors on the other side. Make much of the deliberations public, and certainly the proceedings. And then repeat it over and over again, with new actors, groups or people. The past has to be taken seriously: it is too serious to be left to historians. It holds the key to the future, and the future the key to the present. The goal is shared understanding of shared history for a shared future, not being content with apologies and compensation. Co-construct the past by sitting down together, paying deep attention to counterfactual history: what were the missed opportunities for avoiding these wars? Let us then move on to the direct violence of the present. Today there is no major war in the Pacific Hemisphere, only local wars in Mexico and Colombia, Indonesia and the Philippines. But direct violence also includes threats of direct violence with three major components: deployment of offensive weapons-systems, long range with extensive destructive potential; supported by a militarised structure (e.g. a military-industrial complex) and a militarised culture (e.g. expansionist, missionary ideas). How do we deal with this rather massive, unpeaceful syndrome? Leaving the deeper-lying structural and cultural roots 5

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aside for the time being, the answer is clear: get rid of offensive weapon systems, or at least their forward deployment in the Pacific. US military doctrine has changed, adding to the tools of macro-wars between states and the micro-war of selective killing of individuals, the localised social meso-wars with RDF (Rapid Deployment Forces) and LIC (Low Intensity Conflict), and global mega-war with tools like Star Wars: offensive space-based weapons systems, spy satellites, later possibly nuclear generators and geo-stationary mirrors. And the 600-ship–six-ocean navy. The Hawai’ian archipelago has long played a major role here: so does Wake Island.9 Scrap it all. Denuclearise. Vacate bases and forward deployment in general. Leave JCS 570/2 to history.10 It is on the Western Rim that we find the real problems: the US bases in Japan, Okinawa and South Korea (coming back to the Philippines?), the Korean Peninsula, China-Taiwan relations. Also, the mini-island conflicts: the Tokto islands between South Korea and Japan; the Diaoyu (Senkaku) islands between Japan, China and Taiwan; the Spratleys between five states. Threats all over.11 What, then, is the alternative to this massive potential for the direct violence of the future? The most advanced democracy in the world, Switzerland, discussed this in the autumn of 1989. In that country 100,000 citizens can take the initiative to hold a referendum, in this case over the abolition of the Swiss army by the year 2000. The motion was defeated, but 35.6 per cent voted in favour (55 per cent of the younger voters as against only 20 per cent of the older, leading to the obvious conclusion that the young should send the old into the army, and into a war, rather than the other way round).12 Several types of alternatives were discussed; some of them may be of interest to the Pacific. Instead of RDF, use some of the barracks and general military infra-structure in Hawai’i, Guam, etc. to invite UNPKF, the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, when there is a solid Security Council mandate to do so. Given the history of direct and structural violence in the region, preventive pre-stationing in the geographical centre of the Pacific, deployment before violence—as in Macedonia during the Yugoslavia wars—and not after, might be useful. UN-owned and -run observation satellites would be a part of the equipment, and Hawai’i is well suited as a staging area. Then comes transarmament of the US military to non-provocative, defensive defence (NPD), making creative use of the Coast6

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guard and the National Guard as defensive forces.13 Add some defence against incoming aircraft and missiles with a clearly defensive, land-based DEW (directed energy weapon), aiming upwards only. Educate people all over the Pacific in Gandhian nonmilitary defence, using noncooperation and civil disobedience. Most people had no idea what to do. Maybe governments prefer it that way. Finally, we should consider the general idea of a service for peace, building on the great US tradition of the Peace Corps, possibly internationalising it for the region as a whole. There is no end to the social work, development work and environment work to be done, and certainly not only in the poorer regions of the Hemisphere. To be peace-building, assistance should be a two-way street with people from the Third World helping out in the First World with social work, including care for the aged and the terminally ill in the richer countries, as these are groups often left more isolated than their opposite numbers in countries where there is a tighter fabric of social relations. Let us then move on to the structural violence of the past. This took many forms in the region; the major one being colonialism. Outsiders simply take over the lands of the native population, saying, “you have good land, let me run it for you”. Incredible, but true. Three things may now happen: • The native population is a majority, the settlers a minority. • The native population is made a minority through extermination, emigration or immigration/settlement. • The native population is a minority; the settlers a majority. In the first case, historical rights and majority rights coincide and self-determination is less problematic. Independence usually came about during the 1945–75 decades of decolonisation, often under UN auspices. Not only the US unincorporated possessions, but also Tahiti (“Polynésie française”) fall into this category, and maybe Kanaky (“Nouvelle Caledonie”). Decolonisation may take some time, but will probably have to come, sooner or later, even if the French continue to do their best to retain their colonialism. As to the second case: unfortunately, it, too, is simple, because it is easy to marginalise a minor minority. We find cases in all 7

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countries, on both the Eastern and the Western Rims, and not only in the USA. Transformation to the third case may be possible. The third case is the most problematic. The historical rights of the native population point to decolonisation; the majority rights do not. Decolonisation cannot come by voting. What would be needed would be new human rights, giving more weight to the historical rights of the past.14 Hawai’i falls into this category. What images do we have? Without images nothing happens. In the beginning is the image. One possibility for Hawai’i is territorial division: having one part (one island, or a major part of the Big Island) de-incorporated and de-annexed, with sovereignty as full internal autonomy, even up to full independence. The Hawai’ians themselves would decide the form of government, including the choice between (constitutional) monarchy or republic. The same goes for the choice of economic system, between a (post)modern or more traditional economy, or both. Another possibility would be functional division with full Hawai’ian sovereignty over certain functions or issue-areas (precontact preservation; many aspects of land use, investment and settlement policies, language use, etc.). Still another possibility would be political division, with two chambers in the legislature, one for native Hawai’ians and one for all citizens, or whatever the appropriate term. Each chamber would have veto power. In case the veto is used, or in other cases of conflict, joint committees would attempt to reach compromise, in the best tradition of the US Congress. The issues would be the same: the use of space, the sacred points in space and time, language and culture in general, but with more opening for compromises and more creative conflict transformations than the other two formulas. Clearly, proposals such as these do not exclude each other, and they would also compete with other proposals. In any case, the issue will not wither away. More likely, it will increase in salience and force from a breeze to a gale, a storm, a hurricane in the decades to come. Moreover, any country in the Pacific Hemisphere, or anywhere else for that matter, will increasingly not be judged according to military might—except negatively if the might is too high and used to establish right—but according to 8

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the sovereignty they are willing and able to accord to their dispossessed native minorities.15 Let us then move on to the structural violence of the present. The Pacific Hemisphere is the region where long-lasting structural violence has been inflicted by the USA on most Latin American countries and many Southeast Asian countries, as well as the Pacific Islands, through economic exploitation and by support to highly repressive regimes. But then it is also the region where Japan has been treating the USA in much the same way as the USA has been treating Latin America. The term used here is linguistically ugly, but crystal-clear: thirdworldisation. Among the characteristics is a trade relation based on vertical division of labour with raw materials and agricultural products going one way and sophisticated industrial goods the other; with massive poverty and misery suffered by the unemployed and unemployable; massive inequality with a tiny elite on top serving as a conveyor belt for the centre country; and with solid harmony of interests between the elites. That situation may lead to massive violence, in the form of national wars of liberation, or people’s wars of liberation to acts of terrorism, state terrorism, or to threats of future violence in general. Take Hawai’i, for instance. It has been exploited economically by both the “Mainland”, and by Japan. In spite of, or because of, being the 50th state of the USA, Hawai’i essentially buys sophisticated goods and services from either, in return for tourism, and some simple agricultural products including marijuana, said to be a major source of extra income as well as a major form of vegetation. The situation is typical of a Third World country, sufficiently rich, with sufficient services to avoid major misery and unemployment, and with a climate and general health conditions sufficiently propitious to provide the highest life expectancy in the USA, even in the world, if the Polynesians are disregarded.16 But then think of the potential if Hawai’i were given true autonomy. Hawai’i could do a tremendous service to the region by becoming a model of sustainable, self-reliant development. The options are not limited to a Mainland-oriented or a Japanoriented style of dependent development. There could also be a Hawai’i-oriented path, less dependent on either. For this to happen, both import- and export-substitution would be needed. The islands could easily be self-sufficient in 9

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foodstuffs if diversified agriculture were properly encouraged— which might depend more on the massive interests of the shipping lines, and the networking of certain corporations “serving” the islands from the mainland, than on competitive edges enjoyed by agricultural products produced elsewhere. The key to that competition is obviously in developing some specificity, building on the comparative advantages of Hawai’i. But the condition is to swap the colonial mentality for courage to start secondary and tertiary sector enterprises in, by and for Hawai’i. How about alternative medicine/health? There is very much interest now in bio-organically grown food. Hawai’i’s comparative advantage may not be on the supply but on the demand side, possibly out-competing not only the usual hormone- and pesticide-infested sector, but also the marijuana sector. Why not make health—preventive and regenerative health through an adequate life-style, and not just curative health through adequate medical services—Hawai’i’s trademark? Moreover, small farms, and many of them, could be accompanied by small factories and small firms, and many of both of them. Why couldn’t Hawai’i run a watch factory or assemble cars (at least, scooters)? Energy needs can be met by solar and wind parks and, of course, solar-powered cars, with local self-sufficiency as the goal, not wasting almost all of that generous renewable gift. This also goes for intellectual and professional resources. The colonial mentality of always seeking expertise on the mainland is self-destructive. Why, for instance, should local media use so many syndicated columnists, when equally good or better commentators are easily available in Hawai’i? When most people use local dentists rather than going to the mainland? In no way should this programme of self-reliance be interpreted as self-sufficiency. Nobody is self-sufficient. But setting high goals has always been the essence of development, for the person, the local community, the country, the region. To get out of underdevelopment, ambition is needed: hard work to clear the many obstacles on the way. Hawai’i is in a privileged position to do this, and could thereby serve as an example for others. The basis could also be laid for more equitable relations with the many and vulnerable Pacific Islands and island-states. Finally, the category of the structural violence of the future. How can we avoid inequitable, unjust, alienating economic, political, 10

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and cultural arrangements in the future? Answer: by having dialogues about the problems beforehand. The general key is selfreliance: building local, national and regional capacities, even if only among small islands;17 and through equitable international transactions with partners at the same level so as to avoid inequities and dependencies. An adequate forum is needed. There are international forums, including the UN, for national, regional Pacific and world problems. But not for the Pacific Hemisphere; other forums are too functionally or geographically limited.18 A Pacific Hemisphere Forum (PHF) would be useful for the above purposes, maybe under the United Nations as an economic commission (complementing or dividing existing UN commissions), and also as a security commission, an Organisation for the Security and Cooperation in the Pacific Hemisphere, like the Conference (now Organisation) for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). All the countries listed under the eleven actors above would be members. The venue could be Hawai’i, if the USA would take courageous and imaginative steps to undo the military coup of January 1893 and the annexation of 1898, restoring at least a major part of the sovereignty to the rightful owners of the archipelago.19 New Zealand, Aotearoa, is closer to that goal, including the very real possibility of bilingualism. With Maori or Hawai’ian as additional administrative languages, the countries would change. New Zealand inserts itself more positively in the Pacific Hemisphere than the USA. But does Aotearoa have the courage to go that far? Sooner or later, yes. The centre and the periphery sides of the coin should be seen together, lest we give in to that non-holistic, intellectual mistake called “area studies”; the same to international studies as specialisation down to the smallest organ and function of the body to health studies. Studies of colonialism and imperialism in their 19th-, 20th- or 21st-century varieties have to focus on a system that includes “out of area” colonial actors operating through the international system who manage to pervert, often at least seemingly irreversibly, the domestic structure of countries in the Asia/ Pacific. Pacific “area studies”are not good enough. The roots of those major interventions were domestic, on the other side of the globe. Perhaps this is true of their undoing as well? One thesis as point of departure: the causal flow of change is 11

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more from the domestic to the global levels than vice versa. Just think of how the inner changes in the Soviet Union changed the global system completely, paving the way for a USA-led New World Order. Of course international pressures played a role, but probably more in postponing those changes than in causing them.20 January 17, 1893—the year the Hawai’ian Kingdom was overthrown by a group of businessmen backed by US Marines, followed by its annexation in 1898—was a true day of infamy. The centennial ceremonies starting January 16, 1993 were more important than the December 7, 1991 ceremony as commemoration of brutal statecraft.21 Maybe some day we shall have an independent, multicultural, multiracial Republic of Hawai’i? Everyone, including the USA, would have much to gain. Wounds, if they are not dressed and healed, tend to fester. However, efforts to undo the direct and structural violence of the past, counter the violence of the present and forestall the violence of the future would be of scant avail if the underlying cultural violence is not addressed. The cultural violence legitimates the other two, whether as “civilised vs primitives” and “Christians vs heathens”, or as the more modern “developed/advanced vs underdeveloped/backward”. Whatever the terminology, the function is to make past wars and oppression, present forward deployment and inequities, appear so natural and normal that they can be reproduced into the future. Countertrends are growing in regions bordering on the Pacific—on the Australian east coast, all of New Zealand, on the US/Canadian west coast, in Hawai’i. Not only the traumatised, but also the traumatisers, are emerging from the stupor and numbing that have accompanied the colonising and the exterminist shockwaves from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Maybe we are finally on the verge of some flattening of those extremely steep Self-Other gradients, inflating Self and deflating Other, that have marred the relations of the white, Christian West with everybody else in the world? To have a lasting impact, any such process must be accelerated through challenge and constructive peace culture work, based on human rights and the idea of “everybody being born equal”. Let us conclude with seven sets of proposals, as set out in tables 1.2 and 1.3. The costs are minimal, except to some military 12

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Table 1.2. Pax Pacifica—Goals, Processes and Indicators: Forms of violence CULTURAL VIOLENCE US: Manifest Destiny and Theology UK: Under US cultural umbrella France: Mission civilisatrice Japan: Sense of superiority Others: Tendency to agree Violence as conflict termination Militarised cultures (US, UK, F) Patriarchy PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

DIRECT VIOLENCE colonial wars, genocide among colonial powers Pacific War 1931–45 guerrilla, counter-guerrilla Korea, Viet Nâm wars forward deployment, bases offensive defence, threats RDF, LIC capabilities terrorism, state terrorism political violence from above political violence from below

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE Western colonialism trusteeship colonialism Japanese colonialism blatant exploitation militarism, JCS 570/2 militarised structures economic exploitation • by Japan • by the USA, the West hegemon rivalry hegemon condominium

Table 1.3. Pax Pacifica—Goals, Processes and Indicators: Forms of peace CULTURAL PEACE celebrating unity-of-humankind softer versions of religions Buddhism, Quakerism, Baha’i nonviolent conflict resolution gender parity PAST

PRESENT FUTURE

DIRECT PEACE karma approach to traumas never-ending healing reparations, apologies complete decolonisation restore sovereignty • (part of) territory • bicameralism • bilingualism withdraw forward deployment denuclearise the Pacific creative conflict resolution conversion to UNPKF UNPKF in nonmilitarised areas conversion to defensive defence a UN/PHF development service creative conflict resolution

STRUCTURAL PEACE karma approach to traumas never-ending healing reparations, apologies textbook revision

scrap JCS 570/2 self-reliance I self-reliance II Pacific Hemisphere Forum Sub-regional forums affordable communication affordable transport

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who will have to be retrained for more nonviolent and defensive roles. The benefits could be enormous. Peace is a cooperative, “increasing-sum” game, and an infectious process using the si vis pacem, para pacem mechanism. For a true fa’a pasifika.

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2

Decolonisation in the Pacific

Colonisation and Decolonisation Colonialism can be viewed as a specifica under the genus of “ownership”; in the Roman Law tradition dominio. The ultimate owner, who can own, use, possess, dominate, is an individual. And the ultimate thing that can be owned, used, possessed, dominated is anything. To dominate is to do whatever one wants—like a man with “his” woman under patriarchy, parents with their children under “parentocracy”, and slave-owners with “their” slaves under the institution of slavery. The ultimate slavery is colonialism, a whole people owned by the “mother country”. All were parts of the Roman system, so similar that they were each other’s metaphors as normal/natural parts of the social order. Slavery was the first to go in the Western world, abolished in the nineteenth century; one of the last to let it go was that pinnacle of freedom, the USA. Next to disappear were the colonies, through the decolonisation of the twentieth century (although the USA is still colonising peoples they conquered, the First Nations, the Spanish-speaking, the Hawai’ians, the Inuits). There have also been basic changes in the classical family system with both patriarchy and “parentocracy” yielding, with backlashes, also in the USA.1 Colonialism meant ownership of the whole people-land nexus, the colony, acquired through overseas or territorial expansion. 15

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The “mother country” metaphor was used to legitimise, like raising the children—the slave metaphor would have been more appropriate. The sum total of people-land entities acquired constituted a colonial empire; an indispensable part of being modern. Renaissance was to be Born Again, rediscovering the Roman Empire as archetype. The state system and enlightenment came later. Colonialism and imperialism were thriving under both. Decolonisation reverses colonialism, and comes in two parts or stages: sovereignty, reconstituting the dominio of the people over their land; and independence, the right of people to be an independent actor at the world level. Sovereignty means internal self-rule, domestic independence, and independence external selfrule as an actor on the global arena. Today this implies UN membership, a flag, a national anthem, in most cases an army, etc. Both sovereignty and independence are matters of degree rather than absolutes. Moreover, we can have either without the other. Colonisation is an extreme exercise of power; decolonisation, in principle, an extreme exercise in the devolution of power. Of power there are four kinds, generally flowing upwards, with cultural power legitimising economic and military power that in turn serve as bases for political decisions:

POLITICAL POWER (decision power)

➝

➝ MILITARY POWER ➝

ECONOMIC POWER

➝

➝

➝

(reward power)

(punitive power) CULTURAL POWER (normative power)

Colonialism begins in the mind, with the distasteful idea that other peoples/lands can be owned, and the accompanying notion that they ought to be owned. In the Occident, the Roman Empire was, as already mentioned, the archetype, inspiring not only Christian but also Islamic imperialism (the “dynasties”), 16

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from the seventh century up to the Christian colonialisms based on Papal Bulls from 1493. In the beginning this meant Catholic (Portuguese-Spanish, then also French, Italian and Belgian) colonies, and then Protestant (Dutch-English-Danish-German) colonies. But the step from “could” to “ought” presupposes some feeling of legitimacy, beyond simple military or Darwinist “might is right”.2 A culture which is singularist, the only valid culture, and universalist, valid for the whole world, like Christianity or Islam, equipped with missionary commands, meets those requirements (or were, indeed, designed to meet them). So do secular offshoots like liberalism-capitalism and Marxism-socialism; and the underlying faith in human rationality and dignity, from which spring science and human rights. The Occident was predestined to become coloniser and to stay that way. How did it do it? Not just by “discovering” foreign lands, which of course had already been discovered by the “exotic” peoples to be possessed. Four ideas in their culture made them colonisers: • only when we have come there do these lands really exist; • among us, “first come, first see, first possess” (veni, vidi, vici); • ultimately ownership is individual; and • communal ownership, owning together, means no ownership (according to the res communis = res nullius principle). In their wake came missionaries for singularist/universalist faiths, exercising evangelisation (for religion), propagation (for ideologies) or education (for science and rights). They added colonising their souls to colonising their lands and bodies. In their wake, or together with them, came the traders, the planters and industrialists, the bankers and the economists. The merchants and their successors were interested both in land and people— both in their bodies as labour, meaning as slaves, serfs, workers, employees, and their souls, with demands, as buyers. The military would mark the land with fortifications and bases for their ultimate power over people and land: the power to kill. The clerics and the merchants might help by telling them whom to get rid of, such as pagans refusing baptism or local craftspeople producing goods competing with imports or the settlers. 17

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Then would come the administrators, setting up colonial empires as an organisation. Decisions would start to be taken, produced from somewhere inside that machinery, and be read to the natives in tongues they did not know. Centuries of colonialism, basically against the will of the peoples colonised, testify to the solidity of this total package when well crafted. The British were usually held to be the master-builders. But their settler colonies on the Atlantic seaboard were also the first to go, in 1776. What became then of the United States of America? Did it become the archetype of decolonisation? No, it had nothing against settler colonisation, but without sharing the spoils with the “mother country”. We can now use this model to develop some ideas about decolonisation as a process. Two processes can be distinguished: decolonisation from above, through negotiation with the coloniser, and decolonisation from below, fighting the coloniser. Let us start with the latter, the archetypal process, the struggle. Again, it starts in the mind, with ideas of self-ownership, of owning oneself and the land. Next is self-determination, here seen as doing one’s own decision-making. The family and slavery metaphors come to mind. If the coloniser sees the empire as a family centred on a mother country, or a mainland (as in the case of Hawai’i), then children may see it the same way and become independent through adolescent-like revolts, claiming their right to adulthood, to be masters of their own fate, to make their own decisions, right or wrong, to own themselves. If the colonised are treated like slaves, then next to come, in addition to the above, will be slave revolts. Decolonisation begins in the mind, with the decision to be your own decision-maker. The next, or concomitant, steps, would be economic self-reliance and struggle against the violence of the oppressors. But how? One approach is through countervailing violence, usually resorting to guerrilla tactics. Today this is called “terrorism”. Given the coloniser’s military strength and supply base in a “mother” country far away, beyond reach, guerrilla bases must be secret, and attacks unpredictable. Thus, there is nothing new in terrorism, including attacks on and by civilians, by fighters not in uniform. Gandhi developed a nonviolent approach, not through equal or superior military power-over-Other, but by way of an im18

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mune system against the violence of Other through power-overSelf, based on self-respect + self-reliance + fearlessness. On he who is fearless, military power does not work; on he who is selfreliant, economic power does not work; and on he who has selfrespect and his own identity, “mother country” culture does not work. The sum of the three spell independence. You want to be independent? Behave as if you are, using all three. Like goals, like struggle. Colonisation took time to take root. Decolonisation also takes time. There is much to uproot, many old and new plants to nurture. Skip any stage on the way to sovereignty/independence and the outcome will be a deformed birth. Without self-respect and dignity, how can there be self-ownership with the rights and duties that entails? With no practice in self-reliance how can there be self-management of one’s own economy? With no experience in standing up, forcefully, not violently, how can there be sovereignty, let alone full-fledged independence? This becomes a major dilemma with the “decolonisation from above” scenario, through negotiation between coloniser and colonised. There is no real struggle, because the coloniser does not want to hang on to the colony, whether for fear of a struggle he wants to avoid, and/or because that struggle is already lost in his mind. He has come to see colonialism as basically wrong. He may even initiate a process of decolonisation, taking colonised people by surprise. They may be catapulted into sovereignty and independence in as many months as the colonisation took centuries. The outcome is predictable: rather than having a sense of dignity and own worth, the self-colonised mind is more ready to imitate the ex-coloniser than ever before. Rather than self-reliance, there is the dependence on hand-outs and neo-colonial strategies; rather than building one’s own security, the dependence on bases and protection. Catholic and Protestant Europe colonised first the Americas, with the Caribbean, then most of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Add the Orthodox/Russian colonisation by contiguity, not “overseas”, and we get the Tsarist/Bolshevik empire, still intact: which is what Chechnya is about. Add Muslim Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, like the other two parts of tripartite Europe also involved in colonialism, and also still intact: this is what Kurdistan is about. 19

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The USA became a “mother country” with overseas colonies from 1898, walking into the shoes of a decaying Spanish empire with the Spanish–American wars in the Caribbean (Cuba) and the Pacific (the Philippines, Samoa, Guam; killing 600,000 Filipinos), annexing Hawai’i in 1898 after the military coup in 1893 had established settler colonialism. This was 1776 in reverse: first settle, then install mother-country colonialism. Decolonisation from the mother countries began where colonisation started, in the Americas, first in the north with Washington-Jefferson, then in the south with Bolívar-Martin-O’Higgins. Settlers all. A century and a half was needed to reach the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. The World War II rhetoric of democracy, freedom and human rights proved as hard to reconcile with colonialism as it had been to reconcile with slavery one century earlier. They all united in beating non-western colonialism in the form of the Japanese empire. And they all stuck to their own—till they were beaten. In the Pacific,3 decolonisation followed the negotiation scenario from above and the three alternatives in the UN Charter Art. 73,4 for mother-country colonialism only: integration with the mother country (in the French colonies as a DOM—département d’oûtre mer, or overseas department), free association (roughly equivalent to sovereignty, TOM—territoire d’oûtre mer, or overseas territory), and independence, with full control also over foreign affairs. Independence was achieved between 1962 and 1980 by Western Samoa, Nauru, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Tonga. Later on came the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and Palau,5 giving a total of twelve independent countries. “Free association” status was given to three: Cook Island and Niue (New Zealand), and the Northern Mariana Islands (USA). This leaves us with eleven territories that are still neither independent nor in free association: Norfolk (Australia); Pitcairn (Britain); Tokelau (New Zealand); Guam and American Samoa (USA) and French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia (France). And, often forgotten, Hawai’i (USA), Irian Jaya (Indonesia) and Easter Island (Chile). Eleven jobs to do? From this list of eleven the old No. 1 coloniser, Britain, is conspicuously absent (Pitcairn, with its 6.5 square km and, in 1991, 56 20

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inhabitants is not much of a possession). But Australia, New Zealand, USA and France are all hanging on to something, not always against the will of the people. Why? Settler colonialism? The USA, Australia and New Zealand were once British possessions, and have all undergone processes of decolonisation. Colonised and colonisers being of the same nation, if not the same class,6 the task was easier. This might have inspired settler colonialist self-righteousness as certified foes of colonialism, and through that an unrealistic image of their own reality. France was never colonised, and so see their own colonialism as a mission civilisatrice, and not only as an opportunity for France, but as an honour for the colonised. Only the wilfully malevolent or severely misguided can be against any such arrangement, and they should be treated accordingly. The British were, hypocritically, lamenting their White Man’s Burden. Their stints of “duty in the colonies” were usually of very short duration, so well depicted in Somerset Maugham’s many short stories from the Pacific Hemisphere—before they returned to their foggy North Sea island. Australians and New Zealanders, with some of the highest living standards in the world and in other ways admirable social constructions, live on stolen land under dark clouds, much undone reconciliation work, and nothing to learn from the mother country. The French built homes and intermarried, mission civilisatrice. Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, is covered with French commercialism. Niamey, the capital of Kanaky, to which Paris sent convicts from 1853 (as London had with its “transports” to New England and, from 1776, Australia), has monuments and street names taken straight from French provincial towns. Maybe the French feel at home. Why? According to the Pacific News Bulletin (October 2001), these are the “Ten Uses the World has for a Pacific Island”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A testing ground for atomic and hydrogen bombs. A target for ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads. A country club for military personnel. An incinerator for unused chemical weapons. A dump for toxic and radioactive waste. A ghetto for people whose villages get in the way of [1–5, above]. 21

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7. As a model of a beautiful and pristine environment. 8. Someone to bully when you are too small to bully anyone else. 9. Somewhere to sell your food when it’s past its use-by date. 10. A centre to process [read “dump”] refugees. How are such crimes of colonialism/domination possible? First, we are dealing with very small entities with average populations well below 100,000, except for Papua New Guinea and Fiji. This does not mean that they are culturally without identity or economically non-viable: Iceland and Luxembourg are also small but among the richest countries in the whole world.7 A sustained struggle may be difficult, however. On the other hand, for the coloniser a little money goes a long way when distributed as a bribe to so few people. For many to rule the few is considerably easier than the other way round. Second, in the Pacific the colonisers got their divide et impera dream fulfilled with tiny specks of habitats hundreds, thousands, of miles apart. Colonies by same coloniser were not even neighbours as if dice had been thrown to divide the booty. Moreover, they may well be small because one of the old tasks, to absorb a “population surplus”, has disappeared with dwindling Western birth rates. And, third, a basic topic: with units that small, even a small settler population can tilt the balance above the magic 50 per cent mark so crucial in democratic theory, making democratic rights majority rights, and relegating the historical rights to the waste-basket of minority rights. If “self-determination” is interpreted as what the Self, present and counted, determines, then settlers would be favoured. If interpreted as the historical Self before “contact”, not present, not counted, then the indigenous population would be favoured. If it is interpreted as the indigenous here and now, present and counted, then the question is simply where they stand. Like the case for the settlers, which of the three options they prefer, given the right to determine the future of their old lands, is an empirical question. But which approach is finally chosen is not a public-opinion empirical question: that is also politics. “Democracy” has often served the settlers well. A little story from Kanaky summarises that point neatly: A Kanak was sitting outside his little house contemplating the fine 22

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sunset. Two Frenchmen came by, saw the Kanak and said hello, and the Kanak invited them in for a drink and a bite to eat. The conversation was lively and friendly, and in the end the French said au revoir. The next day they came back, once again at sunset, and the Kanak said “Welcome! Let’s continue that nice talk from yesterday!” “Well,” said the French, “we were actually wondering whether we could have a look at your house?” “No problem,” the Kanak said, and in they went, from one little room to the next. And the Kanak heard one of them say to the other, “You know, you could take that room, and I could take the other”. “What!”, shouted the Kanak, “you want to take my rooms? And what shall happen to me?” “You can sleep outside in the garden, as you people are used to”, was the answer. The Kanak got angry and rolled up his sleeves, flexing his muscles. “No violence!” one of the French shouted. “Democracy! And we are two, you are only one, we are the majority”. To laugh at if it had not been so deeply tragic. And not the least to the West itself by giving that precious idea, democracy, a bad name.

Residual Colonialism: Chile and France Let us look at two case studies, “Easter Island”—hereafter Rapa Nui—and “French Polynesia”—hereafter Tahiti. Rapa Nui, under Chilean control, is best known for its numerous statues, the moai, large heads with very stereotypical expressions and small bodies.8 How such heavy things could be moved such long distances by such primitive peoples has long been the subject of much Western research: a search for something technically “advanced” to absolve researchers of the charge of primitivism? The West is fascinated with multistorey houses, towns with straight streets, anything that smacks of engineering. A people may have the most beautiful way of solving conflicts peacefully, like the Hawai’ian ho’o pono pono (“setting very right”), also 23

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known in Tahiti as patuatini (“togetherness for reconciliation”) and done in slightly different ways in other Polynesian countries, such as Samoa (based on the matai system and the singlestorey, oval-shaped fale houses). Or among the Maoris in Aotearoa (New Zealand), also used by the pakeha, the white people, as well as in Australia for restorative justice (see the epilogue). However, the narcissistic West looks in the mirror to find—itself, unable to admit learning from others. But Rapa Nui was not good at handling conflict. As it is the point on earth most remote from other inhabited places, little is known about their devastating wars, cannibalism, human sacrifice, fertility and sex cults.9 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were social catastrophes.10 A brief history reads as follows. Separate local chiefdoms to 1861; 1861–77, warlords supported from the outside;11 French Protectorate, 1878–88, leaving 350 live inhabitants;12 colony of Chile, 1888–1966 and from 1966 an integral part of the Chilean state, Valparaiso province,13 although it has no representation in the Santiago parliament, being “too small”.14 It has a Chilean governor and a Chilean naval and carabinero presence, and also a Rapa Nui parliament. PeaceBoat made it possible to meet one of the leaders of the independence movement. This is hopefully a fair rendering of his position, held to be typical: We want both independence with membership in the United Nations, and good relations with Chile. We do not think these two goals exclude each other. We have an age-old institution, the Ancient Council (Consejo de Ancianos), with one representative from each of the 36 family names on the island. The Council is compatible with the parliament, and meets each Sunday after Mass. Our land was always communal where use is concerned. Even if ownership was individual, or by some other family, anyone had the right to cultivate some patch for bananas, breadfruit, etc. Only if he stopped cultivating would the right to the use of that patch pass on to somebody else. Chile does not respect that. They take land and sell it to Chileans as their private property with exclusive land use. The land issue is the basic issue, but there are also problems of transport, education and development. We have a wonderful climate and no industry, no pollution. People can live off the sea and the land, and can become very old. They are used to being economically independent. We could have hotels for older people, for instance from Canada, who might like to pass the 24

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winter here. Tourism is our only cash economy. But we want to decide ourselves how to use it.

The Pacific News Bulletin is an organ of the NFIP movement (For a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific). It sees support for the people of Rapa Nui as an important component of the broader decolonisation struggle in the Pacific, and stands in solidarity with the people as they defend their rights and cultural heritage. NFIP also urges governments to recognise the right of the Rapa Nui people to self-determination by supporting calls for the United Nations to inscribe Rapa Nui on its list of non-self-governing territories. There is a long way to go. Chile may not yield its mini-empire easily. In addition to the Rapa Nui people there are also Aymaras and Mapuches within the borders of Chile. The government may, like all colonial countries, fear a domino effect. In the meantime, solidarity from the outside and evolving sovereignty, including over land, are called for. The residues of the French colonial empire have survived in the Pacific more than elsewhere. Why is this the case? First, the possessions are small: French Polynesia (pop. 196,900 in 1990, 70 per cent Polynesian; 235,000 in 2001), Wallis and Futuna (also in Polynesia, only 14,575 in 1989; 20,000 in 2001) and New Caledonia (in Melanesia, pop. 152,386 in 1989: 44 per cent Melanesian, 40 per cent white, and 190,000 in 2001)—so, between 333,000 and 500,000. Second, they are geographically scattered, surrounded by former possessions of other colonial powers, separated from them by a different metropolitan culture as well. French Polynesia has 75 inhabited islands, covering 20 degrees of latitude and 25 degrees of longitude. Communication and transportation are costly; power accrues to him who can defray the costs. Third, they lie far from the metropolitan centre, Paris. This was also the case for the other colonies, so the coloniser rather than the colonised did the travel, defining the colonised as the problem and the colonisers as the solution. Yet, the major reasons why the three are still French overseas territories—and for a long time with the French President as head of state and a High Commissioner from France as head of 25

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government15—are found in France and have to do with the peculiarities of French colonialism. Small European countries, like the Netherlands and Portugal, gave up. Britain, trained in giving up colonies, declared a policy of decolonisation in 1962. But not France. (Or the USA.) The French are there for a mix of cultural, economic, military and political reasons. All four have a special interpretation in the French context and mentality, giving us some clues to the answer. Culturally, the French have always regarded their colonialism above all as a mission civilisatrice, even mission assimilatrice,16 placing their own culture not only above that of the colonised, but also above the culture of other colonisers. To be colonised by France, like being raped by a king, is not a crime but an honour; an induction into a corpus mysticum. To want to get out, to become “independent”, is a sure sign not of rebellion but of some mental deficit. Live with them, give them education and time to catch up and they will see the light. To uphold colonialism is also to uphold the myth, with some reality to it, that even the colonised share this exalted image of French culture. If colonialism unravels, then the myth can be saved only by labeling the rebels insane and showing the world what happens to such people. Declare a “No!” to being a French colony, and the French depart—leaving nothing behind (as in Guinée), or destroying them in a colonial war (Viêt Nam, Algeria), making the poor fate of the rebel a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they should do better after independence than before, the myth would be shattered. Economically, the French have little to gain (the nickel mines in New Caledonia notwithstanding). Moreover, the faithful are amply rewarded, the aid flowing into French Polynesia being to the tune of US$2,250 per capita (1986). But there may be another gain to be made. Being in the Pacific, these three possessions are gateways to the Pacific twenty-first century, as is also Viêt Nam, where French atrocities were only overshadowed by those committed by its successor, the USA. Militarily, the Pacific plays a role in French geopolitics. In recent years, the USA has been testing on its mainland, after having tested 66 A and H bombs in Micronesia and devastating people and land. Russia and China have also been testing on their own soil and the UK seems to have given up testing alto26

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gether, having once used facilities in the Pacific. But France has continued testing in Moruroa, French Polynesia, since 1966. In the June 15, 1989 elections for the EC (now EU) Parliament in Tahiti the turnout was only 12 per cent, as the Polynesians had decided to boycott the elections. Continued testing was a major issue for the population. Testing was an issue for the Front National (Le Pen’s party): after all, France might need such possessions once again, the way de Gaulle had used Congo-Brazzaville during World War II, as a place to reassemble and gather strength for the reconquest to “save Western civilisation”. The authors of such political propaganda evidently see the Pacific as more hospitable to Western Civilisation than the West itself. The military argument goes beyond the need for a testing site to develop and sustain French nuclear independence, of some importance not only for French independence from the NATO/ USA “nuclear umbrella”, but also for the French-German axis within the military nucleus of the European Union and for the EU itself. Politically, the Pacific possessions give some sustenance to those who still seek comfort in the shadows of the crumbling French empire. There remains some display of the power of yesteryear, making France still a three-continental colonial power, taking into account the highly residual Djibouti in Africa and French Guyana in South America. Beyond the use of colonial possessions to feed a power-hungry French elite and convince the world that “we are hanging on in here” comes the use of the Pacific possessions as an overflow area for lost colonies. Some 15,000–20,000 French people, or Algerians of French descent, settled in Kanaky, tipping the balance more in favour of the whites. Having “lost” in Algeria, the hardcore would not countenance losing once again; meaning that white “twice born” settlers could be counted upon to do the job for France—and the Vietnamese in Kanaky could probably also be counted upon. The nuclear testing in Tahiti was another political refugee from Algeria: the testing used to be in the Sahara. What conclusions follow? The French concerns can best be addressed by defining them as illegitimate, which ultimately can only be done only by the French themselves. There is also the possibility of finding some functional equivalents. Thus, the French might be able to convince themselves that, rather than in 27

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some francophone specks in the Pacific, the real battleground for the French culture is within the European Union, and from there the whole ACP (African, Caribbean, Pacific) system of former colonies.17 Economically, the way the French enter the Asia/Pacific depends more on the quality and price of their products than on clinging to possessions that also give France a bad name in the area. The consumer products marketed by such giant chains as Carrefour and Leclerc, in Papeete, for instance, are attractive. Militarily, the French might one day outgrow the Napoleonic infantilism of confusing power with power to devastate others and learn to rely more on using softer power. And does France really believe there is much grandeur in politically lording it over Melanesians and Polynesians who have been oppressed and exploited for a century and a half? Who would conceive of that as an indicator of greatness—and are those people worth listening to? Could it be that they are mainly found among die-hard conservatives in France, and more particularly in certain parts of Paris? And could they soon tire of the whole thing as something left over from the past—a concern of their parents’ generation, because their parents were personally involved? Feudalism died slowly during the nineteenth century, as Victor Hugo describes so marvelously in Les Misérables: colonialism should have been dead and buried by the end of the twentieth century. Would a more mature approach to global politics not be to play an even more constructive role in the UN by having alternatives to Anglo-American belligerence and in the EU by making the EU a soft superpower, if that is not an oxymoron? As to the overflow from colonies lost: there are almost no more colonies to lose so there may also be no overflow. Better return to France, or join the new independent country. In short, France can only gain from the independence of these “possessions”. A debate is needed in France, not a grand débat, but a petit débat. The Kanaks seem to want independence and the settlers who cannot stomach that would have to be absorbed by France itself, not using former colonies as a dumping ground for the debris from lost colonies. The Tahitians may be of a more mixed mind, the economic gains also speaking with a loud voice.

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The place has a high material standard of living, but is exorbitantly expensive. Assimilation has its costs. It would be better to drop the old Gaullist pressure-tactics of “stay with us or else”, continue the aid for some time maybe under the EU umbrella but encourage a self-reliant economy. France should have not only a moratorium on testing: it should abandon testing completely and the signing of the Raratonga Treaty helps. If France believes so much in testing, then let the French, not the Tahitians, suffer the consequences. Do the innocent testing right off the French coast. The Pacific would revert to a population of mixed origin, now also to a large extent European, proving that homo sapiens is a species capable of inter-breeding. All these people are perfectly capable of shaping their own future, together.

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3

Pearl Harbor Day Theories of War and Peace

A Note on Understanding History Pearl Harbor Day, 2001. More than 60 years ago, on December 8, 1941 (December 7 in Honolulu), the “Day of Infamy” as Americans call it, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And more than 70 years ago the Japanese invaded Manchuria, the “Manchurian Incident” as the Japanese say. Today the Zero bombers in the tora! tora! tora! surgical operation that destroyed the US Pacific fleet1 would have been called “terrorists”—a generic term for all who think, speak and act badly of and towards the USA. The conclusion drawn is, in the words of Clausewitz, to hunt them down “by all necessary means”, crushing them by bringing justice to them, or them to justice. First an unconditional capitulation, then identify the main culprits, bringing them to the justice of a military tribunal, meting out capital punishment if proven guilty. Give the rest a New Beginning, raise them to become pro-USA, with USA economicpolitical-cultural access, and military bases for protection. Which is what happened. This is also what has been tried after September 11, 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq, so there may be a pattern here. We are exploring the US way of acting in deep, violent conflict. Let us now examine “Pearl Harbor” with this agenda: 31

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1. Explain Pearl Harbor in terms of what happened before, at the surface level of political and military events by: • looking at the events as seen by the USA; • looking at the events as seen by Japan; • looking at both together. 2. Then the phases and trends, particularly political and economic. 3. Then the permanents, particularly in structure and culture. 4. Finally, identify possible interventions for peace: • after, as factual history, with the question: did they work? • before, as counter-factual history: what might have worked?

Before Pearl Harbor: Events Leading to War Let us start with a US view of what Japan had done: 1879 Annexing the RyuKyu islands, to become Okinawa ken. 1894–95 Colonising Taiwan. 1904–05 Defeating Russia, starting with the February 8, 1904 Japanese attack on Port Arthur, proving the non-West can beat the West. 1910–11 Colonising Korea. 1931 Invading Manchuria. 1937 Invading China. 1940 Japan, Germany and Italy conclude the Tripartite Pact. 1940 Invading Indo-China. 1941 Neutrality Pact with the Soviet Union. Conclusion: Reader, you see what kind of country Japan is? Expansionist, colonialist, wanting space. Next in line: Hawai’i, then the West Coast of the USA! Now, a Japanese view of what the USA had done: 1853–54

1893 1898 1898–1910

Invading (calling it “opening”) Japan, Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, Kanagawa Peace and Amity Treaty. Military coup in Hawai’i, deposing the queen. Annexation of Hawai’i. Invading the Philippines, killing 600,000 natives. 32

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1920s–30s 1937 (July) 1941 (July)

1941

US/West gaining important enclaves in China. Roosevelt in Chicago: “quarantine” against aggressors. Roosevelt: freezing Japanese assets, no oil. Hull, Secretary of State: “not the slightest ground for any compromise”. (November 26) “withdraw from (Indo-)China, renounce Tripartite Pact!”

Conclusion: Reader, you see what kind of country the USA is? It has its sphere of interest with the Philippines on our side as of the Pacific as we agreed to in the (“secret”) Taft-Katsura Memorandum 1905, and now it even strangles us! Very much more can be said.2 The grid can be fine-meshed, down to cable traffic, by the minute. The closer to that major event, the finer the grid historians impose on the time axis to identify proximate events as the breaking points. Both lists are biased. But by intermeshing the narratives we get a reasonably good interactive guide to the history of the two major Rim Powers vying for power in the West Pacific.

Below the Events: Trends, Permanents and Theories of War Let us now go below, one level deeper, leaving this focus on events, used by many historians much like the media produce news, focusing on persons, mainly elite persons in elite countries, as the actors behind negative, or at least potentially violent, acts.3 Let us focus on the periods, the stages which soon become old and hence not reported, and the trends. Each day may bring a mini-change not worth reporting, but the sum of many small quantities can add up to a new quality, unnoticed by the media. First, a period/trend perspective on economic relations. The first cycle of US–Japan relations, from Commodore Perry (1853– 54) to Pearl Harbor 1941, had four relatively clear phases:4 The exposure phase. Japan was opened up (the sexuality of this metaphor is significant), forced out of self-imposed Tokugawa isolation by the USA, and exposed to US goods and values. The imitation phase, Meiji-Taisho. Japan engaged in imitation with 33

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enthusiasm, in a collective learning process of massive scale. One motivation was to prevent more Perry and retain autonomy, learning the Western ways; another was genuine enthusiasm for the goods, the ways of producing them, and for some US institutions. The conflict phase, from early Showa. The roots of the conflict are clear: Japan wanted to apply what it had learnt, and had ideas about production and marketing to promote Japanese interests whereas the USA wanted Japan to serve US interests. The war phase, from mid-Showa. This was preceded by warlike activities, the most important being strong rhetoric and hostile economic actions, from trade wars with unbridled competition and defensive tariff and non-tariff barriers, to offensive economic sanctions and embargo. Military warfare can be seen as the continuation of warlike activities by other means: first using economic, political and cultural power, and then military power. Both Japan and the USA were parties to these economic phases, but that is not necessarily the case for the political phases. They may take the shape of concepts and plans developed domestically, secretly, to be enacted when there is a “window of opportunity”. They are below the surface, but protected by secrecy rather than by unawareness, unlike the economic phases above. They are more subjective than objective, but also more than fantasies. Let us then look at three US phases: US Mainland; Western Hemisphere-Regional; the World-Global. Three centuries for the first phase (1600–1900), one for the second (1820–1920) and one for the third (1920–2020), with some overlaps. The global reach period is divided into three sub-periods after the First, Second and Cold Wars: 1920–40, 1940–90, 1990–2020. (See also Chapter 4.) We are talking about conceptualisations and projects that have emerged from the US centre of decision-making. A truly universalising, global reading of “Manifest Destiny” to prevail slowly took shape around the turn of the nineteenth century. Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt were important for Manifest Destiny 25 to prevail in the Western Hemisphere/Pacific in Panama and the Philippines. But Gore Vidal’s thesis in The Golden Age focuses on Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, and how to win a world war by provoking key potential adversaries (Germany, Japan) into attacking the USA, then setting up a world regime (League of Nations, United Nations) and using that regime to rule the world. 34

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The corresponding Japanese vision would antedate the USA, but not by much. Let us say that the first US vision accompanied the first landings in Jamestown 1607/Plymouth 1620. The first Japanese visions must have accompanied Hideyoshi Toyotomi (grand minister in 1586, expelled Jesuit missionaries in 1587, confiscated swords from the people in 1588, ruling all of Japan in 1590) during the two invasions of Korea; the Bunroku campaign of 1592–96, and the Keicho campaign of 1597–98. The vision was both to stop Western colonialism, and to initiate Japanese rule. This vision was then reactivated after Tokugawa isolation as dai-to-a expansionism.6 So there is expansionism of long standing, in both, but with three important differences: • US expansionism was universal; Japan’s was regional towards neighbour countries similar to Japan7 and Western colonies. • US expansionism was offensive, nothing threatened the USA after 1812, whereas Japan could claim a defensive “Asia for Asians” role in addition to an “Asia for Japan role” of regional expansionism. • Japan was already provoked by the West; the USA had to provoke Japan. But there is more to it, something constant, permanent, which the two had in common throughout the period under consideration, and beyond. Both were by now unitary states where foreign/security policy was concerned, as opposed to confederations of states (USA) and clans (Japan). They were born in almost the same year: the USA as a result of the Civil War which ended in 1865, Japan as a result of the Meiji Restoration/Revolution in 1868. Both suddenly became capable of acting—even proacting, not just reacting—internationally, and had straightened out internal rule by killing natives, whether Indians or Ainus. They were inducted into a very powerful structure (table 3.1). For the USA this carried no mystery: it had been born into the system by separating from a mother country that was a seasoned master in all three.8 For Japan it was more problematic, as all of this was the opposite of Tokugawa. Hideyoshi was a man of the past; and neighbouring China, unitary for more than 2,000 years, 35

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Table 3.1 The State

The State System

Colonies, Empire

Laws, secrets and national interests

Right of war; for national interests

Upper caste based on racism

had no empire and looked moribund. Other neighbours were all colonies, except Siam/Thailand. So Japan looked to the USA and Europe to study state-building. In addition to England and France, there were two countries similar to Japan: Italy and Germany, unitary states from 1861 and 1871, in the same cohort. Japan imported law from Germany, to the point that German became the legal language in Japan for a long time. The Japanese adopted Bismarck’s state welfare, his army, and his war doctrine, Clausewitzian, as models. The empathy with each other’s lack of colonies, and sense of being excluded from the upper caste of states9 must have been deep. Italy had less prominence, but later, under Mussolini, there were the same motivations, and growing capabilities. What we have identified so far is not a cause of Pearl Harbor, but maybe a necessary condition. Both countries had the capability to conduct a war: a state. They were both in a state system that legitimised wars, provided they were “declared”—a strange condition, possibly a residue of feudal chivalry (the “challenge”), possibly Christian (John 1:1). Militarily, if wars are to be fought “by all necessary means”, then surprise attack, as used by Japan in Port Arthur and in Pearl Harbor, makes much more sense. The USA was no stranger to undeclared warfare either, but often claims that what it is fighting are not wars. So both the USA and Japan had capability as unitary states, with secretive elites empowered to define “national interest”, like chiefs of staff with monopolies on defining “strategic interest”. They had motivation rooted in the phases and trends in political and economic doctrine and they had frictions due to military events of a magnitude that could be processed into a casus belli, a case for war, if so desired. But there was something missing, something not covered by the useful formula capability-motivation-circumstances/opportunity. That formula looks too self-serving. A vision of Higher Purpose is missing, something that could justify any sacrifice, any cruelty. 36

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Table 3.2

USA Japan

Chosen by

With promised land

And a mission to expand to:

The Christian God: the people Amaterasu-o-mikami: The Emperor*

The United States

The hemisphere, the world dai-to-a Asia-Pacific

The Japanese archipelago

*Then Prime Minister Mori gave this an epigrammatic, very forceful expression a short time ago: “Japan is a divine country centered on the Emperor”. Sounds like early Meiji, but was said in Heisei.

Enter, like Hamlet’s ghost, the very powerful deep cultures (see table 3.2). So we got the two god-drunk megalomaniacs with divine mandate, one universal, one regional, approaching each other in battleships and tanks on the same narrow lanes, mining that lane for the other, with increasing speed, daring the other to yield. Forget about Pearl Harbor, provoked or not. The war would have come anyhow. By now we have some explanations; some might even say Pearl Harbor is overdetermined, leaving no space for free will. But levels 2 and 3, phases and permanents, are not theories of war explaining Pearl Harbor, only more than sufficient to predict belligerence. If events had been somewhat different, “Pearl Harbor” would have occurred somewhere else.10 The explanation is rooted in something more solid, a powerful structure, a powerful culture, not in the chain of events. Where/when it shows up as war is circumstantial. The explanation is 3+2+1: permanents + trends + events. But these are theories of war. Where in all of this are the theories of peace? By changing levels 2 and 3 factors, as we shall see later. But given that levels 2 and 3 had been operational for some time, why did the war not come earlier? The vastness of the Pacific was probably a major paxogen, a peace-conducive factor. Japan and the USA were well separated. Close vicinity would have been explosive. China was much closer, and that is where Japan attacked. In China a major cultural factor was absent, however. The Chinese have a notion of being chosen, with promised land between the tundra, the desert, the mountains and the sea. But there is no mission, no duty to bring Chinese-ness/dom to the Barbarians. True, there is a sense of duty to defend China against 37

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the Barbarians—from the west, north, east and south. But the strategy is defensive, changing more recently from army-based defensive defence to navy/air/missile-based offensive defence. The Higher Purpose of China is in, by and for China. We can read this explanatory scheme in the order 1–2–3, or in the order 3–2–1. The readings supplement each other. The reading 1–2–3 is prompted by the question: “why did they act that way?” Actors produce events, two actors make an actiondialogue. But why those actions, not others? Some answers are provided by level 2, prompting again the question why? Go to level 3, without stopping, and you will find good answers. They had the right and duty to do so and in addition the capability. The reading 3–2–1 is prompted by the opposite question: given that basis, “how would we expect them to act?” Chosen by God with sacred land, mission, state/army and expansionist political, racist, economic doctrines, what do you expect? Right, and that is just what we got. But explanation is not determination. They were not compelled to do so. They could have done otherwise. How? Why? And why not?

After Pearl Harbor: Theories of Peace The basic reason for these explanations, or theories of war, from a peace studies point of view, is to formulate some hypotheses, some theories of peace. One approach would be to remove one or more causes or, more softly expressed, conditions, of war in the explanation. But that can also be dangerous, letting the logic of war direct the logic of peace. We should not merely remove bellogens, war-conducive factors, but also introduce positive paxogens, peace-conducive factors, specific to these actors and circumstances. Let us first indulge in some generalities. The essence of a theory of peace may read as follows (summarised in table 3.3). Equality/symmetry: what you give to/demand of one give to/ demand of the other; treat them symmetrically: Equal treatment. Equal power and privilege. No injustice. Equity/reciprocity: a flow from one to the other demands a counterflow, reciprocity, of the same value: 38

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Table 3.3 Aspects of peace

Distributive

Relational

Two similar words Alternative words

Equality Symmetry

Equity Reciprocity

No exploitation. Equal benefit. These may not be sufficient conditions for peace, but they come close to being necessary conditions. If similar actors/parties are treated in an unequal, asymmetric way, do not expect any peace. And if a relation is set up between them that is very inequitable, do not expect any peace either. So the theory is more than injustice and exploitation leading to violence as the negation of peace, than that equality and equity guarantee (sufficient condition) peace. But those two words serve as good road-signs to peace. Japan and the USA each got the war they were probably seeking. This second Japan–USA phase of the Pacific War 1931–45 lasted less than half the first: from Manchuria to Pearl Harbor, ten years; from there to ceasefire, not even four years. The first was about colonisation by time-consuming structural violence and genocide by massacre; and the second about capitulation by quick direct violence, based on wealth and ingenuity, genocide by fire-bombing, and genocide by atom-bombing. The victor then did a thorough job of trying to wean Japan off war and turn Japan towards peace as understood by Washington. The Americans correctly realised that they had to work on level 3, even if US historiography is mainly at levels 1 and 2:11 Section (a), to obtain the military victory over Japan: 1. nuclear genocide on Hiroshima-Nagasaki after de facto victory; 2. stigmatising many Japanese leaders as “war criminals”; 3. sentencing them to death and executing them; 4. depriving Japan of possessions, including parts of Japan; 5. making them pay reparations to countries they had attacked. Section (b), to stabilise the military victory over Japan: 6. making the Japanese state transparent to USA through occupation; 39

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7. depriving Japan of the state right to war through Article 9; 8. establishing bases in Japan; in Okinawa as symbol of US victory; 9. having the Emperor renounce any divine status; 10. introducing the sovereignty of the people through democracy. What is wrong with this approach is easily seen. First, the approach is asymmetric. Differences between Japan and the USA before the war were minimal, afterward they became maximal because Japan had lost the war. The USA could impose conditions on Japan. If the USA also had imposed Article 9 of the Constitution (A9) on itself and had renounced any idea of being God’s Chosen People with a mandate, then we would have been on to something. Section (a) above is victor’s justice, adding the US self-image as executor of near-divine punishment by nuclear bombing. Section (b), with total demilitarisation, curtailing state sovereignty and shifting legitimacy from a divine Emperor to a sovereign people, is more original, and custom-tailored to Japan. Japan was treated after World War II much like Germany after World War I; the result in terms of revisionist sentiment is well known.12 But those (b) approaches were not all bad. A9 made the Japanese see militarism as an evil, and a vast but dwindling peace movement has been clinging to A9 as a peace guarantee. But in sentencing Japan to peace the USA acquitted itself, climbing even higher in self-righteousness as if all US wars are for peace. Second, after pacification, Japan was mobilised for US military purposes in the Cold War and the Korea, Viêt Nam, Gulf, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. AMPO and “guidelines” undermined A9. Military bases and cooperation were deepened and included (temporary?) stationing of nuclear weapons. Militarised Japan, punished to demilitarisation forever, was remilitarised. A similar process took place in Japan’s ally, Germany, beaten into surrender for the second time. Victor’s justice forced Germany to renounce its beliefs through de-Nazification, and then inducted Germany into US military policies. The victory had condemned the vanquished to peace, but not the victors. Asymmetry never works. 40

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However there was a difference. Germany was admitted into the European Community by its former enemies, and treated on the basis of equality and equity. Had there been an East Asian Community with Japan, the Korean Peninsula, China, Taiwan and Viêt Nam, admitting Japan, regional peace might have come to Japan. And Germany reconciled; Japan did not. So much for what in fact did happen. Both countries are today mobilised in the most recent US war, against “terrorism”. The elites of both countries seem so far to have accepted the US vision of the world in terms of good and evil, using militarist means towards exterminist ends, and exhibit a submissiveness to the USA normally shown only to divine instances and/or as a part of unconditional surrender. But Germany then said “no” to Iraq: Japan did not. What would be the alternatives to victors dictating “peace”? We turn to levels 1, 2 and 3 to identify points for possible intervention so as to bend the trend of events away from war and towards peace. A key to that exercise would be to identify underlying conflicts and ask how they could have been transformed. That means less focus on events, trends and permanents, and more focus on parties, goals, contradictions. A discourse switch. A clear example of conflict is written into the three discourses “Asia for Asians”, “Asia for Japan” and “Asia for the West”. The last two positions are illegitimate; only “Asia for Asians” can be legitimate. A conflict transformation could have started with the West saying “we renounce on colonialism, but give us X years to build it down to zero”. If such a position had been communicated to Japan the militarists would have been deprived of their best argument. A major part of the onus would then have been on the West if it did nothing that could have averted Pearl Harbor. Also for the USA: relinquish the grip on the Philippines, and you may have been saved the humiliation of Pearl Harbor— unless, that is, the USA saw the loss of the Pacific Fleet as an entry ticket to the Big World War Ball. A massive anti-colonialism movement in both countries might have helped. The Quakers were ahead of their times, but their message did not spread in Japan and the USA as it did in England. Americans were against colonialism, but not their own, 41

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on the US mainland, in the Pacific and at the same time in the Philippines. Would democratisation of Japan have helped? Not if the people had internalised authoritarianism and the cult of chosenness. In Japanese thought the Emperor was descended biologically from the Sun Goddess; in US thought the sacredness rests with the sovereignty of a God-chosen people. Democracy may be one step towards peace. But the people have to become unchosen, with no global privileges, no exceptionalism. The USA has not reached that stage, nor, it seems, has Japan. Regulation of economic conflict might have helped more than disarmament. And dissociative policies, interacting less, staying away from each other like couples unable to live together. Objection: they did this for some time, practicing the Taft– Katsura spheres of interest. That did not help the peoples under US or Japanese control and attack. There was the Japan–USA war. But there was also the other war, against Asia, to be discussed. Let us now summarise. To explain Pearl Harbor the key factors are the level 3 permanents structure and culture. Then, level 2 trends were ominous but could have been detected. The level 1 events were produced by the interaction between levels 2 and 3. And yet the drift towards war could have been stopped at any time by initiatives to solve the underlying conflict, like an initiative to revise the Versailles Treaty in Europe. The onus for those massive acts of omission rests on the Allies. It did not happen, because deep in their culture there is an element of might is right because it proves that God is behind the victor. To practice the right produced by the might is a duty. But the problem is that whatever the victors demand of the vanquished to make them more peaceful they also have to demand of themselves. Any glaring asymmetry will never produce peace. The conclusion is that removing causes of war in one party is not enough, we must build causes of peace in all. Examples: 1. substitute for Chosen People the idea of Sacredness of Humans and Life and their basic needs, no person more sacred than others; 2. substitute for the Promised Land the idea of a Shared Universe as our Common Heritage; 42

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3. substitute for the idea of spreading own culture the respect and dialogue with others to enhance life/human-promoting aspects; 4. substitute for a US-dominated interventionist regime a soft UN-rooted global governance more based on (federations of) local authorities and NGOs, less on states; 5. substitute for armies A9 defensive defence, everywhere, and soft UN peacekeeping with police, with 50 per cent women, and nonviolence; 6. substitute for the idea of controlling others the idea of controlling yourself, with fearlessness, self-reliance, dignity; 7. substitute for economic producer competition consumerproducer dialogues and more producer-producer cooperation to produce affordable products for basic needs; 8. substitute for a heavy focus on economic growth a heavy focus on economic distribution; 9. substitute for waiting till conflicts become violent competence in transforming conflicts nonviolently with empathy and creativity; 10. substitute for endless cycles of traumas and retaliation competence in reconciliation. Perhaps a tall order, but not impossible with more peace-oriented policies. In addition, very cheap, relative to what we pay to kill people to win wars and lay the basis for the next war. In spite of all the violence and conflict incompetence in the present there are moves in all these directions.

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4

The USA, World Hegemony and Cold War II

One More Note on Understanding History The USA dominates the Pacific; but how did that come about? History can be seen as one damn fact after the other, as one period after the other, or as a long, infinite stand-still. In the first vision chronological time, khronos, is dotted with events, kairos. In the second vision the kairos, the time capsules where things happen, when history is plastic, are the borderlines, the transitions, between the periods of more easy flow. In the third vision khronos and kairos coincide, and time stands still, for a long time. Those perspectives can also be referred to, as above, as history as events, history as periods, history as permanents.1 Fernand Braudel’s famous triplet captures the same: les événements, les conjonctures, la longue durée. As a diagram the event perspective would show up as a string of points above the horizontal time axis (the vertical axis can be anything), and the permanent perspective as a line parallel to that axis. For the period perspective there are many possibilities: parallels at various distances from the time axis, curves with maxima, minima, and inflection points where the curve form changes from concave to convex and vice versa. They all define transitions. Which is the “correct” perspective? All three, of course. Events can be understood in terms of periods, like the “Cold War” or 45

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the “Age of the Merchants”. Periods can be understood in terms of permanents, the “ça” in plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Like deep structure, like deep culture. The raw material for macro-history as opposed to event-history.2 Historians can be classified according to their preference. History, however, cannot. History is all three: some kind of sum of events, periods, permanents and more. A colossus like the USA produces and consumes, sends and receives huge amounts of events. Some events qualify as news and are deposited in public space by the media.3 The listing of events is a record. A story using events as stepping stones, spinning threads connecting them, is a narrative, for grand events, a grand narrative. Macro-history adds to grand narratives an additional why, not only the what of grand narratives.4 One explanation would relate narratives to periods; another to the permanents. A narrative, like 9/11, could be expected given the nature of that period (like the Middle East conflict, or USA/Arabia), and/or of some permanent (like the Christian– Muslim conflict). The short-term period or long-term permanent is unfolding, realising itself as a narrative, which relates to the period as a discovery expedition or a political administration to its programmes. The perspective of unfolding is a harmony perspective between events and periods, short or long. More sophisticated perspectives would also focus on contradictions between permanents and trends, as Marx did in postulating that the mode of production will have to change as the effects of new means of production accumulate. The social relations have to adjust to the technology. Or, vice versa, how about technology adjusting better to what humans want? In the interface between change and permanents something may have to yield. The change may come to a grinding halt, exhausted by the limits posed by the permanents. An example is the famous “limits to growth” relative to the “carrying capacity of the planet”. One will have to yield. Stop the growth, or else there will be an environmental collapse. This is the stuff the drama of history is made of, the ruptures. To get an adequate reading of history we need all three levels.

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A Perspective on US History A periodisation used in US historiography is “administration”, usually a multiple of the four-year term of presidential office. This is convenient, but not so subtle as Schlesinger’s periodisation with expansion-contraction cycles, EC-EC cycles for US history.5 For any periodisation the rules for classifications apply: exhaustive of the total period to be explored, mutually exclusive with relatively sharp cutting points, but perhaps also with a “transition period”, and with a fundamentum divisionis, an underlying principle like “presidency”. Maximum homogeneity within, maximum heterogeneity between. Thus, Schlesinger’s EC could be spelt out as four periods before a repeat of the cycle: expansion, defeat, retreat, wait, EDRW, then repeat. Or Sarkar’s “Ages”, the kshatrya-brahmin-vaisya-sudrakshatrya cycle, first dominance by the military, then by the religious/intelligentsia, then by the merchants, then by the people who revolt and then bring the cycle back to the military again. KBVSK, or MiReMePeMi. The focus here is on the grand narrative of US expansion from the early seventeenth century; from the eastern seaboard6 west-, north- and southward to the Pacific; then beyond, west and south (Monroe Doctrine), into Hawai’i-Samoa, striding into the carcass of the Spanish empires in the Caribbean and the Pacific as the century turns; then beyond the Western Hemisphere to the Global Reach, using World Wars I and II, and the Cold War and the minor Korean, Viêt Nam, Gulf, Yugoslav, Afghanistan and Iraq wars to step into the carcass of the Soviet Empire.7 Zoltan Grossman’s listing of 133 US military interventions for the 111–year period 1890–2001 was analysed, dividing them into relevant categories from this angle, looking for trends (see table 4.1). Less intervention over time, more tendency to join somebody else’s war. But the data are sometimes difficult to classify. Then onward towards the Universal Reach, landing on the Moon, developing an arsenal of space-based weapons, ultimately planning to colonise Mars, already appropriately named for a US arrival.8 And towards the rupture between this enormous expansionist trend and something more permanent, the limited ability to handle all the contradictions between actio and reactio.

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Table 4.1

Join somebody Intervention in Intervention in Intervention in Intervention in Occupation Other

else’s war internal war internal conflict the USA US territories

Total number

1890– WWII (%)

WWII– CW (%)

CW– 2001 (%)

18=13% 36=25% 13=9% 16=11% 3=2% 26=18% 30=21% 142

10 23 15 18 2 25 8 61

13 34 7 5 4 9 29 56

20 12 0 8 0 24 36 25

Decline and fall of the US Empire, like all empires will then follow the accumulation of those contradictions. A tentative periodisation of US expansion in four phases is: US Mainland; Western Hemisphere/Regional; the World/Global; Space/ Universal. As we outlined in Chapter 3: three centuries for the first (1600–1900), one for the second (1820–1920) and one for the third (1920–2020), with some overlaps. The global reach period falls into sub-periods after the three major wars: 1920–40, 1940– 1990, 1990–2020. The universal period starts with the Apollo landing on the moon in July 1969. So much for the periods with “expansion” as theme. Of the countless events only a few will be brought into focus. What is the underlying permanent, the longue durée? Underlying “expansion” is “expansionism”, defining the former as a behavioural pattern and the latter as an attitudinal, deep cultural character trait of the US psyche. This is too tautological, of course, unless it is spelt out in detail. And that is what will be attempted below. Braudel counts geography, for instance the Mediterranean coastline, among the permanents. The changes over time are minimal, and yet graciously compatible with military fortification and protection; with harbours for navies (the decisive battle, Lepanto in 1571, “stopping the Turks”); with trade (major cities are port cities); with tourism (beaches and hills); and with a beauty inspiring the arts for millennia. Potentially an incredible unifier for that “Region of the Olive Tree”, the Mediterranean. Also the division of countries into islands, coastal and land-locked is along geographical lines, using access to the sea, the Bolivian slogan, salida al mar as fundamentum divisionis. The early US settlers came from the British Isles, that small wind-swept, foggy archipelago in the northwestern corner of 48

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Europe. The biggest of them, England, Scotland and Wales, named itself “Great Britain”, and was settled by Anglo-Saxons; with a Gaelic population on the Western rim and on the second biggest island, Ireland. There was some safety in being an island had it not been for the Romans, and for the Vikings with their swift ships, sacking Lindisfarne in 875, then conquering England in 1013, and as Normans in 1066. Eventually it recovered with the world’s biggest navy, defensive and offensive, to Rule the Waves. The British honed their imperial skills on the nearby Irish, starting in the twelfth century, and continuing today. They learnt conquest, plunder, contempt for others with prejudice/discrimination, repression, torture (the cats of Kilkenny), cultural domination, exploitation, the supremacy of ideology over human suffering like during the potato famine when aid would be against sound market principles and so on; all of this amply practiced in the colonies to come.9 They learnt to be Janus-faced, to develop Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde personalities—either one being the persona for the other—combining the cultured, liberal and gentle with man, ruthless in his self-righteous punishment expeditions to bring the uppity, the restless among the subjects, to justice, and/or justice to them. Combine island invulnerability with quick overwhelming force for defensive and offensive purposes, and there is already a deep structure, a capability that can be used for imperial purposes. This fatal deep structure must have been in the subconscious baggage, in the collectively shared mind of those gentlemen from Devon who came to Virginia in 1607, and possibly even more so in the clerics from East Anglia who came to Massachusetts in 1620–29. The place of arrival looked different. A narrow coastal strip with a vast, endless territory inhabited by savages, beasts, and threatening untamed wilderness. So they started working with a goal sprouting from their subconscious mind. The USA became a mega-version of their mother country, a quasi-island, washed by oceans east and west; with a pacified Canada, mainly tundra, to be watched, to the north; and a Mexico cut down to half its size in the 1846–48 war, pacified, mainly desert to start with, to be watched, to the south. Ocean-tundra-ocean-desert. Not a perfect copy, but not too far from the original. And an endless, inviting sky over almost endless lands. 49

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The location was compatible with an offensive military doctrine, protected—like for the Vikings and the Mongols and somewhat less so for the British—by a nearly invulnerable natural retreat. Red Indians gave the settlers the opportunity to practice their skills in direct violence, by people pre-trained and pre-traumatised, particularly the “border riff-raff”.10 The early British settlers started immediately. The First Americans, referred to as “Indians” in the Spanish tradition, were conveniently divided into “friendly” and “hostile”, with the soft power of trade with trinkets, evangelism and diseases meted out to the former, and hard power with expulsion into reservations, vigilance and extermination for the latter. The new settlers relied on their gunpower superiority over bow and arrow in killing civilians, women, old men and children, just as the US/UK global bombing brothers would later rely on air superiority to exterminate civilians all over the world, the UK starting in the Middle East, continuing in Germany and Japan, and so on and so forth. Bad habits, when deeply ingrained, die slowly. But then the settlers parted from the British model. The African slaves gave them the opportunity to hone new skills in structural violence supported by muskets, dogs and ultimately the military. Like the British they also had serfs and indentured labour, the very common people. But slavery went some steps further in dehumanisation, engaging in selective breeding and the buying/selling of human beings like cattle. As for the British, invulnerability was imperfect. The British did what others had done to them: they invaded the USA. So did the French, siding with Other as they had done on the British Isles. And the USA went on to imitate the British in return, building the world’s even bigger navy, defensive and offensive. The British finally submitted and receded into a “special relationship”, as the USA even walked into the carcass of the UK empire, like Mandated Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan, some Caribbean islands, and then the “white dominions”. Canada indeed and ANZUS (Australia–New Zealand–USA) is not called ANZUK. Next event: In 1941, Japan did a little aerial nest-picking on a small island in periphery USA, and was brutally punished for that sacrilege against God’s Own Country with two nuclear bombs. Invulnerability restored? Not quite. Soviet ICBMs and SSN-19, it became known, could be launched from submarines 50

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close to the US coast. That cloaked the invulnerability doctrine with a thick layer of doubts. The obvious answer, the NMD, the National Missile Defense, arrived later, convincing few, delighting the contractors. And then came September 11, 2001, and turned doubts about invulnerability into certainty about vulnerability. What we have been experiencing in the wake of 9/11 is an exercise in dissolving cognitive dissonance, between: Thesis 1—the US homeland is invulnerable; and Thesis 2—9/11 shows that the US homeland is vulnerable. Solution: 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, was the work of One Evil Actor. Remove it by war and military tribunal and invulnerability is back. That exercise, however, will not succeed. Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, may have been to the USA what another Pacific event, Port Arthur, February 8, 1904, was to Russia: a surprise attack that presaged the end. Vulnerability became highly visible in global public space. Japan may have made more of a dent into European, not only Russian, expansionism than Japan herself is aware of. 9/11 was, indeed, a confirmation. Russia made a comeback as the Soviet Union; so too did the USA, as the sole global superpower. In both cases vulnerability remained, however, rearing its unpleasant head when overextension led to the inevitable accumulation of contradictions. Thus we put 2020–25 as the end of the US imperial exercise, 30– 35 years after the Soviet collapse. As Pearl Harbor followed Port Arthur 35 or so years later.11 Close to four hundred years of expansion, accompanied by an enormous amount of bloodshed among men and women, red, black, brown and yellow, and some white. Military conquest has preceded and preserved huge economic, cultural and political penetration. One interpretation would be that military power defines a capability. For the intention behind, look at the other three power dimensions. There is also the third element, the circumstances, the opportunities, the open windows; events to be explored later. But to see military power only as instrumental to economic, cultural and political power underestimates the fascist view of force just for the sake of force, to bask in the glory of victory and the submissiveness of Other. And the other three may also have been used only to prepare the ground for the ultimate intention, 51

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to establish a viable military base, or “fort” as it used to be called. We could even define expansion as the extension of the domain and scope of any power, but usually in a pattern of concentric circles. Like national-regional-global-universal, the four stages of the US imperial exercise. This may sound weird. But remember what was at stake. First, to prove to Self and Other that God backed the USA through a chain of victories from defeating the British in 1812 all the way to the defeat by Viêt Nam in 1975. Second, as secularism and Darwinism gained a hold, to prove to Self and Other who was the fittest in the struggle for survival, having the backing of both God and Nature. No minor task, bolstered by US political/military doctrine No. 1: the USA must never appear weak. There have been changing foci for military power after World War II, from East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America to West Asia, with considerable overlaps in time.12 But, are they the actio of offense to expand further, or the reactio of defence of the perimeter? And how does defence slide into defeat and an EDRW pattern with short, tactical and long strategic waiting till the final defeat, the decline, fall and end of the US Empire? We have outlined a deep structure of expansion: the combination of an invulnerable “world island”—UK, USA—locus with strong, highly mobile military force. Then 9/11 as a more decisive turning point than that minor premonition, Pearl Harbor. But we still have not identified the other longue durée that could motivate and sustain this enormous effort to dominate, beyond the capability that flows from offensive capacity and invulnerability. For this we have to look again into deep culture for the option of conquering the whole world, or building Festung Amerika, or both. The third option, building peace, seems not to be on that agenda. The Americans have their own expression, “Manifest Destiny”, combining the explicit and obvious with inevitability. Missionary, as expected from a nation covenanted with God Himself, using the Jewish Chosen People/Promised Land in a hyphenated Jewish-Christian form that excludes Islam from making inputs into US deep culture. The secular message is the first and only free society—meaning a society that gives people the chance to show their worth and be rewarded accordingly. But that is also a test. He who fails has only himself to blame. The punishment has a name: misery. 52

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You may enter as one of the huddled masses, or by conquest. Whoever works by the rules will be amply rewarded, and that reward also has a name: private property. The essence of freedom is to use private property to get more private property. The message in the deep culture is dualist: US society vs the Rest. The West is in-between and has to be watched, but some like the UK, are very close. The message is Manichean. The USA is the shining castle upon the hill. One of the prophets of this religion, Samuel Huntington, has then promised the Armageddon of a clash of civilisations between the West and an IslamicConfucian alliance. Another prophet, Francis Fukuyama, has promised a Paradise Regained as End of History, with US electoral democracy and neo-liberal values and institutions triumphant all over the world. This US version of Matthew 28:19, “go ye therefore, and teach all nations”, makes the establishment of US business and US culture, protected by US military a sacred duty, and not merely a right. A deep structure with a geographical base, and deep culture with a Christian base, have provided the USA with the capability and the intention of classical strategic analysis. They are compatible. Not by chance did God bless His Chosen People with that felicitous locus, turning the wilderness into natural parks, the beasts into zoos, and the natives into reservations. After centuries of hard work tilling the Lord’s vineyard. But better watch the second in power, be it China, Russia, the Indian Union or the European Union. How about the circumstances, the windows of opportunity? Can we find a formula for the many US interventions abroad after Manifest Destiny Phase 1, the US Mainland, had been completed? Granted that many of them were simply punishment expeditions, or other forms of defence of what had already been conquered. How did they make new conquest without really trying, as the saying goes? Answer: by stepping into somebody else’s internal or external war13 with fresh troops, winning that war on the legitimisable side, using the victory to extend the Manifest Destiny domain. And by stepping into the carcasses of dead empires. There will be a military base, stationing of troops,14 US business and the hyper-successful US plebeian culture, outranking Christianity with its Penta-M: Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Michael (Jackson), McDonald’s. 53

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All the same, neither business nor military is primary. Primary is the mission. The Spanish wars against the people of Cuba (José Martí), Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines (José Rizal)15 fit this model. So does the US participation in World Wars I and II, according to Gore Vidal16 (The Golden Age). So do the Korean, Viêt Nam, Gulf and Yugoslav wars; and the Afghanistan campaign, using the Northern Alliance when 9/11 made clear who was “right” and “wrong”. And then the Iraq war, again for resources and bases. In most cases of US overt (Pentagon) or covert (CIA), or “low intensity” interventions the goal is to help the USA-friendly win or counteract USA-hostile forces, and then have friends implement the phases of Manifest Destiny. Interventions are seen as being in the US national interest. As a covenanted, free society, the national interests of others, human interests, world’s interests, nature’s interests do not arise. In this kind of “free” world they all derive from satisfying US national interests. Those circumstances, the windows of opportunity, come to the US leadership as events, some of them possibly provoked by events initiated by that very same US leadership. What then happened can be explained as unfolding of the permanent, both the deep culture and the deep structure aspect. There may be a division of labour inside that leadership, with ideology-conscious politicians more informed by deep culture, and the action-driven corporations and bureaucrats in the executive more informed by directives, memoranda, opinions, rulings. More than two centuries of history have harmonised them. Historians, fueled as they are by written sources, will tend to pick up the latter because of the paper trail they leave behind. Early in the twentieth century a link between the double permanent and the urge to go on with Manifest Destiny emerged. This was the famous geopolitics of Sir Halford John Mackinder:17 Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the world. A recipe giving a pivotal role to the conquest of Central/East Europe and the control of Siberia and Central Asia. These were areas conquered by Nazi Germany, militarist Japan and Communist Soviet Union, and then commanded by the victories of the Soviet Union. The collision course of all three with those in the USA who believed in controlling the world via 54

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the control of Eurasia was obvious. The problem was not the dictatorship in all three, how to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz to save Jews, or similar issues. The problem was the race for world hegemony. And the geographer/politician Mackinder saw the Central Asian plateau with railroads as the successor to the British Isles with a navy. All this is clearly seen from the key document JCS 570/2. Planning for postwar bases began in 1942, barely a year into the Pacific War, when Franklin D. Roosevelt requested the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to prepare a global study of bases for an “International Police Force”. The military complied by presenting JCS 570/2 to the president in the autumn of 1943. Prepared by the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, JCS 570/2 divided the world into three areas: “participating or reciprocal military rights” (Atlantic locations), “exclusive military rights” (Alaska, the Philippines, Micronesia, Central America and the Caribbean) and “participating rights” as one of the Great Powers enforcing peace (Indochina, eastern China, Korea and Japan).18 The “three areas” correspond, roughly, to the NATO system of April 1949, expanded in scope and domain 50 years later; the TIAP system (Tratado Interamericano de Paz) or Rio de Janeiro system, of 1947; and the AMPO system based on the US–Japan Peace Treaty of 1951. The foundation was JCS 570/2 1943, and by late 1945 the military high command had come to the consensus, reflected in the Joint Chiefs of Staff document 570/40, that bases in the Philippines, Marianas and the Ryukyus would be the most vital in the Pacific.19

The Double Triangle: USA/NATO/AMPO vs Russia/China/India The key post–Cold War instruments for world hegemony are the expansion of NATO and the deepening of AMPO (the USA-Japan system). When this had become clear by 1995–96, the present author offered a rather obvious prediction in The Eastward NATO Expansion: The Beginning of Cold War II?20 To start with, it should be noted that discourses trying to capture the NATO expansion tend to be Euro- or Atlanto-centric; in other words misleading from the very beginning. A global 55

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perspective is necessary to understand the Washington perspective: the USA has seaboards on two oceans, so it stands to reason that the USA has not only a Europe/Atlantic strategy but also one for Asia/Pacific. The major strategic partner in Asia/Pacific is Japan, the treaty being AMPO. Corresponding to the eastward NATO expansion, there is now a westward AMPO expansion both in terms of the definition of the theatre of joint US–Japan commitments and of the scope of those commitments. Thus we can talk about a coordinated pincer move aiming at the Eurasian landmass and Russia/China and Central Asia in particular. Potential enemies are designated by expanding to the perimeter of Russia, China and Islam, and even beyond. The former are big enough to be interesting as enemies, one for its nuclear arsenal with delivery systems, the other for its army. But in addition there is the Muslim world, the major producer of what the USA sees as “rogue states” (Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran) and gives pariah status in the world system. The message is classic: any big power is supposed to be jealous of any other big power. Originating as a Christian fundamentalist state the Christian/Muslim split can be invoked. The former is presented as a law of political science, the latter of theology. The USA, Russia, China are striving for world hegemony, so are Christianity and Islam. Only one can be No. 1. The West/USA has many problematic relations, one of them with China, where Prince Charles “forgot” to apologise for colonialism and drugging a whole country with opium. Russia and China together could draw the obvious conclusion: if the USA sees us separately as its problem,21 how about the two of us operating jointly? Not to be forgotten: the former Soviet Union enjoyed good relations with India. They are being revived, and the “Eurasian landmass” might muster about one half of humanity against that Western/US pincer movement. But even if that should not happen, what definitely will be revived will be the Russian arms industry, also in order to compete with the West economically. A glance at the map is sufficient to predict a Russia-China-India alliance comprising 40 per cent of humanity. Using a key law of social (and natural) reality, the dialectical principle of actio-reactio, a push in one direction will sooner or later generate a counter56

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push, although not always in the exact opposite direction and of the same size. A high level of arrogance x ignorance, of Jean Piaget’s absolutism, what “they” do is never generated by what “we” do, only by their own evil intentions, meaning that theirs is actio, not reactio is needed not to see this. The answer is not proactio, acting ahead of time. Good, but that proactio also has consequences. What is needed is to foresee those consequences. In a talk in the Slovenian parliament in September 1998 this theme was developed a little further.22 To have NATO expand eastward, and at the same time AMPO westward, in terms of the support, logistical and otherwise, given by Japan to the USA, will easily be perceived as a pincer movement. In-between is the Eurasian continent, the source of geopolitical evil in US strategic thought (Latin America being an easily controlled backyard, Africa being insignificant). The Middle East is a key part of Eurasia, so is South Asia after the nuclear explosions of India and Pakistan, so is Central Asia with its oil, so is Southeast Asia. And so are indeed Russia (with Ukraine and Belarus) and China, not to mention the problematic Eurasian peripheries, Korea and the Balkans. Thus, a global superpower has its reasons. What will be the reaction? A reactio of (about) same size, and with (about) opposite direction. Russia and China will settle grievances (e.g. over the Ussuri river) and start exchanging military information; China might like to reinforce agreements with Pakistan and Russia to reinstate agreements with India; in addition Russia will pick up what the USA defines as pariah states—Serbia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran—and support them in the UN. The whole region may cohere against the USA. Welcome to Cold War II, after Cold War I=World War III? This might also be a welcome to something worse: the opening moves for a World War IV more devastating than anything else, with three “recognised” nuclear powers on one side, and four on the other now that India and Pakistan have come out of the closet. This is not a “clash of civilisations”—both triangles are too diverse for that—but a clash of the richest regions in the world: USA-Canada+EU+Japan23, and No. 2: Russia+China+India. That places Azerbaijan, the five former Soviet Central Asian republics, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, in addition to Islamic countries in the Middle East, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, the whole Arabian peninsula in general and Saudi Arabia in particular, in an in-between zone. South Asia and Southeast 57

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Asia are peripheral, but North Korea is not. Many of these countries had friendly ties to the former Soviet Union which never managed a good relationship with the Muslim world, nor with the Third World in general. Let us have a closer look at the well-known article by a key member of the US foreign policy elite, Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia”24 for its Pacific Hemisphere implications. The title already reflects a US/Western tendency to think big and arrogantly. Some of his basic points: Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to America’s primacy (italics mine). A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia (p. 50). Comment: A clearly expressed, hegemonial ambition by the Third World region.25 What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and historical legacy (p. 51). Comment: Global primacy = hegemony; Historical legacy = Manifest Destiny. In the short run, the United States should consolidate and perpetuate the prevailing geopolitical pluralism on the map of Eurasia. This strategy will put a premium on political manoeuvering and diplomatic manipulation, preventing the emergence of a hostile coalition that could challenge America’s primacy, not to mention the remote possibility of any one state seeking to do so (p. 51, italics mine). The only real alternative to American leadership is international anarchy (pp. 51f). Comment: Not one word on the equality/equity peace option. In a volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role (p. 52). Comment: US presence will take the form of an occupation? Also against popular will? Its [careful strategic calculus] should be to divert Chinese power into constructive regional accommodation and channel Japanese energy into wider international partnerships (p. 68). A disoriented Japan, whether lurching towards rearmament 58

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or a separate accommodation with China, would spell the end of the American role in the Asia-Pacific region … (p. 63). Unlike China, which can seek global power by first becoming a regional power, Japan can gain global influence only if it eschews the quest for regional power. Americans and Japanese must first set in motion a triangular political-security dialogue that engages China. Such three-way American-Japanese-Chinese security talks could eventually involve more Asian participants, and later lead to a dialogue with the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe. That, in turn, could eventually pave the way for a series of conferences by European and Asian states on security issues. A transcontinental security system would take shape (pp. 63f). Comment: With the United States at both sides of the table. Geostrategic success in that venture would be a fitting legacy to America’s role as the only global superpower (p. 64). Comment: Any effort to manage, even micro-manage, others (Russia should become a confederation of European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic; Ukraine should see itself as a part of Central Europe; the European Union must admit Turkey, etc.) without giving them the same realistic chance to micromanage the USA is known as hegemony, certainly fitting to “America’s role as the first and only global superpower.” Brzezinski’s article expresses clearly what the USA is in fact doing, and carries the seeds of its own destruction because of the counterforces it produces. Any effort to conceive of the world in terms of regions and states, as if human beings did not matter, is bound to fail because of the popular forces it will generate, for instance against the WTO and the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment). To have a geostrategy is questionable; to threaten, even kill a major part of humanity as objects for own security and enhancement is beyond questionable. The word for this is not geo-politics. It is geo-fascism.

The US Instruments: NATO and Japan The Heads of State and Government of the North Atlantic Council 26 issued a communiqué with the Alliance’s Strategic Concept: 59

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24. Any armed attack on the territory of the Allies, from whatever direction, would be covered by Article 5 and 6 of the Washington Treaty. However, Alliance security must also take account of the global context. Alliance security interests can be affected by other risks of a wider nature, including acts of terrorism, sabotage and organised crime, and by the disruption of the flow of vital resources. 29. Military capabilities effective under the full range of foreseeable circumstances are also the basis of the Alliance’s ability to contribute to conflict prevention and crisis management through non-Article 5 crisis response operations. 31. In pursuit of its policy of preserving peace, preventing war, and enhancing security and stability and as set out in the fundamental security tasks, NATO will seek, in cooperation with other organisations, to prevent conflict, or, should a crisis arise, to contribute to its effective management, consistent with international law, including through the possibility of conducting non-Article 5 crisis response operations.

This is clear: all issues, all places, “with all necessary means”, and within NATO’s interpretation of international law. And Japan? Some excerpts from an article in Der Spiegel:27 “Against the danger there is only one remedy: Japan needs her own atomic weapons” (interview with Shingo Nishimura, MP). “The government of Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi made available $ 1.7 billion to build Japan’s own spy satellite”. Nishimura: “We need our own aircraft carrier, cruise missiles and nuclear warheads. Japan must become a normal country”. “Japan has today an army of 243,000 men, and pays for this around $42 billion annually.” “Parliament decided to appoint, for the first time for 52 years, a committee for possible revision of the [1947] Constitution.” Taku Yamasaki, possible successor to Prime Minister Obuchi: “Article 9 must go” “A9 denies Japan the right to go to war.” Tomohide Murai from the National Defense Academy: “The Chinese understand only the language of military threat”. Add to that the re-legitimation of the Hinomaru (flag) and the Kimigayo (hymn) as official symbols, and the picture is ominous.

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Does September 11, 2001 Change the Struggle for Eurasia? Not much. There remains the basic underlying pattern, the struggle for Eurasia, pitting the USA with Rooseveltian NATO and AMPO as supports, against the biggest countries in the world, Russia-China-India. Active Russian diplomacy has continued, securing a Sino-Russian Treaty of January 2001, and understanding (although explicitly stating it is not an alliance)28 with India, a new alliance with North Korea. The China–India link remains weak. The military budgets for 2002 showed 13 per cent increase for Russia, 11 per cent for India and 14 per cent for China.29 But other things are also happening. All three have worries about Muslims: Russia particularly with Chechnya, India with the Muslims in Kashmir and with Pakistan, and China with Muslim separatists among Uighurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang, where Han Chinese comprise less than half of the population. In the “Shanghai Five” forum (China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) China has been urging common resistance to Islamic terrorism. September 11, 2001 was a gift in disguise to the USA: the new conflict formation against “Islamic fundamentalism” could now take the upper hand. That does not mean that USA/NATO/AMPO vs Russia/China/India suddenly disappeared. It continues underneath. But the USA could use the situation to conquer Afghanistan, partly by proxy (the Northern Alliance), with oil pipelines and military bases benefits. The people behind 9/11 were Arabs, partly motivated by the Palestinian situation, and indeed Saudi Arabs motivated by the situation in their country. The well-planned air war was against the Taliban/Pashtoon regime and Al Qaeda, killing two flies with one blow, combining the two conflict formations and effectively occupying most of Central Asia. But for how long?

What Can Be Done? We have to protest against a world war foretold—not sit in wait like governments, waiting until major violence has occurred. NGOs must disseminate information, organise hearings, propose

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resolutions if there is conflict, denounce manoeuvering for world hegemony. A major task of NGOs in the OECD region would be to establish links with Russia-China-India, Belarus-Ukraine, IranIraq-Syria and the Central Asian republics. Another task is to challenge US ally governments to question the USA NATO/ AMPO policy: (a) because the USA as the leader presumably knows best, and (b) because if distrusted the USA may not help in a crisis, and (c) because fallen clients are in for the harshest treatment, like Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Aidid, Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden. Among 19 NATO members there must be more non-lapdog members. Finally, we need an effort to rebut a rhetoric often engaged in by those Americans who seek world hegemony: this analysis is anti-American! Not at all. It is perfectly possible to be: anti-slavery/colonialism without being anti-English; anti-Nazi without being anti-German; anti-Fascist without being anti-Italian; anti-militarist hegemony without being anti-Japanese; anti-Quisling without being anti-Norwegian; anti-Stalinist without being anti-Russian; anti–post-Stalinist socialism without being anti-socialist; anti-jungle capitalism without being anti-market; anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic, and anti-world hegemony without being anti-American. The present author is all ten. Of course there is a relation between slavery/colonialism and something English (like deep culture/structure); down the list to the relation between hegemony and something US.30 The relation is not unambiguous; “something English” is broader. There are other roads that could have been travelled. Our task, together with anti-hegemonical Americans, is to explore those alternative roads—and then travel them.

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5

Japan/Asia/USA The Politics of Non-Reconciliation

The Victor as New God World War II is over. The two powers1 that tried to challenge the Anglo-American hegemony over the world, Germany and Japan, are lying with broken backs after VE and VJ days, both fire-bombed, one atom-bombed. Some of the military defeat was due not only to military inferiority, but also to stupidity and arrogance. Had they only liberated people and built empires, from colonialism in the Asia-Pacific for Japan and from Russian national bolshevism in the Soviet Union for Germany, they might have gotten away with it. Instead they opened a two-front war, bombing Anglo-Americans— a very self-righteous nation, well trained in atrocities and arrogance, but not in being bombed like so many others had been. Japan had occupied Korea, Manchuria, parts of China, Hong Kong, Indochina, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, most Pacific Islands and the RyuKyu islands and Taiwan in the nineteenth century. With the exception of China, Korea and Thailand all were colonies which added an element of liberation. Japan had committed atrocities in China (the Nanjing massacre and Unit 731) and in Korea (comfort women), far beyond anything defined as regular warfare. On the other side of the world Germany, with a similar past, had occupied 25 countries, wholly or partly. It had committed 63

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atrocities in all, and genocide against three ethnic groups, the Jews, the Sinta-Roma and the Slavs, again far beyond Clausewitzian warfare.2 The Anglo-Saxons, on top of the world, rightly condemned both Japan and Germany to peace. But they did not condemn themselves to peace. They continued their own colonial wars, the UK less atrociously, the USA more so. US belligerence took on pandemic dimensions, starting right after the end of the war in the Pacific, continuing until the withdrawal from Saigon, and up till today. The numbers killed by the USA in the Korean3 and Viêt Nam4 wars came on top of the killing in the war against Japan, and on top of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. If leaders lead with that much violence, they should not be surprised if some followers follow. Nor if some victims respond in kind. An enormous amount of violence had been unleashed on Southeast and East Asia, much by Japan, most by the USA. East and Southeast Asia had attacked neither Japan, nor the USA, but acted according to the old French adage, cet animal est très méchant, quand on l’attaque il se défend.5 Two big powers killing each other, over the right to kill in Asia? Green light for the USA? What happened then? Again, compare with Germany. Like Japan, Germany had been exposed to genocidal fire-bombing by the USA and the UK. And yet, today Germany has good enough relations with all to play a leading role in a European Union with 17 of the formerly occupied countries among its 25 members. The past is not forgotten; there is no collective aphasia. There is reconciliation; there is closure, even much healing. Why and how did Germany reconcile and the USA and Japan not— either with each other, or with East Asia, meaning Viêt Nam/ Korea for the USA, and particularly China/Korea for Japan? Japan has shown an incredible inability to reconcile, sticking to flawed peace treaties that stipulate compensation but are unable to express apologies or to face the truth of the past, as demonstrated in the textbook issue.6 The question is not only the analytical why, but the difficult questions of what and how, for Japan’s acts in East Asia. In the USA there are still wounds festering from the attack on Pearl Harbor. But, in that country the issue of tidying up its own violent past, in the present, for a better future, seems not even to 64

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arise. One of the rights of the victor is the right to define the rules of moral accounting. “Complaining about Hiroshima? Ever heard of Pearl Harbor? That is the answer.” But that formula does not work for the Viêt Nam war, so “tragic mistake” is used instead. And then came 9/11 and brought the past into the present with both of them throwing shadows far into the future. There is some explanation in this. The USA and the UK both know perfectly well that they are on top of the world, and in their better moments, probably alone with themselves, something about how they got there. But the USA, as pointed out, is aiming for more. In any act of reconciliation the perpetrator has to distance himself from some of his own violence. But to reject a tool used in the past that you are planning to use in the future is hard. You may be held against your own rules. The Anglo-Americans are rule-ridden people, maybe more afraid of breaking their own rules than of killing any number of “uppity” local people because they refuse to follow the rules—imposed by the Anglo-Americans.

Japan and Germany under the USA: Some Similarities After World War II the USA became the therapist ready to cure Japan and Germany of their belligerence. But if the therapist happens to suffer from the same disease, the therapy may perhaps be more like the work of a very efficient retro-virus, rebuilding patients for more of the same. In the words of former Prime Minister Mori, Japan is “a divine country centred on the Emperor”. Something like this: Sun Goddess Emperor Apparatus Japanese people With the Emperor, tenno, seen not only as an Emperor gratia dei, by the Grace of God, but as a biological descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu-o-mikami,7 Japan set itself apart from others, chosen by divine forces. The dominant ethic was vertical, defining 65

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relations upward of submission/obedience, and downward of ordering and making use of underlings—but also of caring for those below. The Emperor had an apparatus, traditionally the court of the samurai, later the bureaucracy/army/corporations, the shi-sho8 (samurai–merchant) alliance. Bushido, “the way of the military knights”, was that vertical ethic, with themes like honour (also national), loyalty (also to the state), courage/daring, duty, endurance, and suicide. But: also of chivalry, politeness, benevolence, rectitude/justice, sincerity and self-control.9 The horizontal elements in Buddhist and Christian ethic (like compassion, thou shalt not kill/steal/lie) were not explicit. To kill, steal and lie for the benefit of the Top would come easily, if one were ordered to do so. Duty = obedience.10 In the ideal reading of the West, however, these three commandments were compelling in all directions: upward, downward, sideward. And as a consequence the few objectors to Japanese militarism were mainly Buddhists and Christians. This vertical social ethic, when projected on world society, gave Japan three options: to dominate, to be dominated, to isolate: [1] Vertical, on top (Hideyoshi 1592–97, dai-to-a 1895–1945). [2] Vertical, as apparatus of the top (US occupation, AMPO). [3] Isolated, helped by island geography (Tokugawa). The perennial fear of the elite is that Japan should be “looked down upon as an inferior power”.11 There is no fourth option, based on horizontality,12 being similar to the USA in the absence of equality + equity = peace on the agenda. So the Japanese goal in the UN would be a permanent seat on the Security Council. The USA had one already, and much more of the UN. Japan continued [1] after emerging from [3], and ended up with [2], today’s situation, compatible with its vertical ethics. But the USA has to remain on the top as a tenno, not a daimyo country. Should the USA decline, Japan might quit, even quickly. Modernising Japan changed Tokugawa [3] into Meiji [1]. The military strategy was obviously first to secure the whole island chain off East Asia, except for the Philippines. There Japan had made the secret Katsura-Taft agreement (1905),13 recognising US interests in the Philippines in return for the USA recognising 66

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Table 5.1 RyuKyu Islands Taiwan Russia 1879– 1894–1945 1904–05 Annexation Colonisation Sakhalin South

Korea 1910–45 Colonisation

Manchuria 1931–45 Colonisation

China S.E. Asia 1936–45 1941–45 Nanjing dai-to-a Unit 731

Japan’s interests in Korea, just as Russia had to do as a part of the Russo-Japanese settlement. Then came the attacks on mainland East Asia: Russia, Korea, Manchuria, China and finally Southeast Asia, starting with “Indo-China” (including Viêt Nam). And on the USA, on Pearl Harbor (see table 5.1). Enter the United States. To paraphrase Mori, another divine country, centred (in wartime) on the President, like this: God President Apparatus US people Another god-driven country, seeing itself as exceptional, above the laws of common states, “established by divine providence to lead the world”.14 The US President has almost dictatorial powers in times of war, as well as a very strong apparatus. And the deep culture makes the US people follow. In addition, the USA had a history in the region, dating back to Matthew Perry, the US naval officer who “opened” Japan and in 1854 negotiated the Kanagawa Treaty that gave the USA trade rights. A clear act of war, using military force for political-economic ends. Gore Vidal has the interesting hypothesis15 that President Roosevelt provoked Japan into a war with the USA, leaving Japan no other alternative. Motive: to use the attack to join the war against the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis, then win World War II, set up an international regime, and finally rule the world through that regime. Woodrow Wilson had tried this scenario before him, in World War I. But he had failed because the US Senate refused to ratify US entry into the League of Nations. Roosevelt was competing with Wilson. But he died on April 12, 1945—six months short of the birth of the United Nations on October 24. Very important to this connection is the book by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.16 67

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Stinnett is on the same line, but with an enormous amount of documentation the present author is not in a position to evaluate for which reason I am more inclined to lean on Gore Vidal, himself a political animal and his observations as a young man invited to the Roosevelt family’s lunch table. But first some words about theories in connection with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. They are of four kinds, on a descending scale: 1. The USA did it themselves to have a pretext for war. 2. The USA provoked the attack. 3. The USA knew the attack was coming, but did nothing to stop it. 4. The USA used the attack as casus belli, for counter-attack. Although [1] is by no means unknown in history17 much more evidence would be needed to apply it to these two cases, [4] is obvious and hence uninteresting, [3] has been much discussed in connection with Pearl Harbor and also 9/11, [2] is the focus here. According to Stinnett, a high-ranking naval officer born in Nagasaki of US missionary stock, A. H. McCollum, prepared an eight-point provocation plan, and concluded that “if by these means Japan could be led to commit an over act of war, so much the better”.18 1. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore. 2. Make an arrangement with the Netherlands for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies. 3. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of ChiangKai-Shek. 4. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines or Singapore. 5. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient. 6. Keep the main strength of the US fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawai’ian islands. 7. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil. 8. Completely embargo all US trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire. 68

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This is what the USA did, according to Stinnett. The USA provoked and then reaped Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941? That does not make Japan innocent. The USA used Japan for trade, and later maybe as a pretext to enter the war. But Japan let itself fall into the trap and was in the end punished with genocide on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Pearl Harbor was a surgical act of war within the rationality of war.19 Hiroshima/ Nagasaki, however, were acts of divine punishment, God = USA, for Japan’s sins. Possibly like 9/11, for the USA’s perceived economic and military sins against Allah, particularly in Saudi Arabia. With capitulation already at hand it was unnecessary—as pointed out by Secretary of State James Byrnes,20 by many among the top military, by President Truman himself. Stalin was shocked— not because of the brutality, but because it was unnecessary—and promptly set about mobilising his own nuclear physicists. Japan had, as mentioned, committed two major atrocities: the Nanjing massacre, and the vivisection experiments of Unit 731. Neither was an act of warfare as commonly understood, and partially codified in the international law of war. One possible interpretation of the Nanjing massacre is that it was an act meant to leave absolutely no doubt as to who was the master.21 China was to be an outlying province of an empire, with Tokyo as the capital. Hideyoshi had similar visions, with a Japan-dominated Beijing as the new capital. Both Hirohito’s and Hideyoshi’s projects were also reactions against Western colonisation. Unit 731 symbolised the same: with divine mandate Japan is master over life and death. For Japan’s own purposes, including, as described in the Kokutai no hongi: “War is not destruction, overpowering or subjugation—but—bringing out great harmony, peace doing the work of creation by following the Way.”22 When god-drunk nations collide, in the Pacific as in Europe where Hitler had substituted the Nordic Wotan and his pantheon for the Christian God, or made them its equal, extraordinary means are applied for extraordinary, even extra-terrestrial, goals. Japan, Germany, the USA, all used such “extraordinary means”. Today these means are to some extent codified as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. But these labels focus on action, to the exclusion of motivation. Perhaps the worst criminals were not the military but the intellectuals who wrote the justification of their atrocities?23 69

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The United States won in Eastern Asia and Western Europe. The United Kingdom became a shadow of itself, France played an ambiguous role, China was a house divided against itself. The Soviet Union, badly wounded, emerged proudly as victor in Eastern Europe. The UK was about to lose an empire, France in addition a republic, China to have a revolution. Only the USA and the USSR built hegemonies. The USA became the undisputed master of Japan, leaving to the USSR the Far Eastern morsels Southern Sakhalin and the South Kuriles/Northern Territories. What then happened was a fusion of the US and Japan models above, making Japan an apparatus in the US model. The Japanese people had been decimated, with their country in ashes, even radioactive ashes. But things were by and large intact. True, the Japanese apparatus was badly shaken with the army beaten, and emasculated through A924, but the bureaucracy and the corporations could become tools of the US General Headquarters (GHQ) occupation policy. The Emperor was declared non-divine; he was not permitted to assume any guilt, but was retained as a unifying, face-saving symbol. And the Sun Goddess was not heard from until Prime Minister Mori plucked on that string. Name of the new God: America. Name of the new Emperor: MacArthur and his successors in Tokyo: the US ambassadors; often extraordinary non-diplomats. Name of the new apparatus: US-Japan Security Treaty, AMPO. The fusion of the figures for Japan and the USA produced:25 God = America. Emperor = US ambassador. Apparatus = AMPO and LDP. Japanese people. The linchpin in the system would be the link between the highly protected US Embassy in Tokyo, the top civil servants most concerned with the implementation of AMPO, and the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The base of the system would be the majority’s unquestioning acceptance of all things American, obviously superior to the Sun Goddess and the Emperor. A similar system was set up for Germany. But instead of US generals and ambassadors being conveyor belts for the USA = God, the Germans used a succession of chancellors from the by 70

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and large governing Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Most important were Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, understanding that any SPD (Social Democratic Party) rule would be either short-lasting (Willy Brandt), or fueled by CDU ideology (Gerhard Schröder ) in line with US policies. Up until Iraq, 2003. To build such systems takes time. If both Japan and Germany were to appear as democracies, much work would have to be put into ensuring that people voted the conveyor-belt party into power, by financing that party appropriately and abundantly. To a large extent run by the US embassies where key security policies are concerned, the result was and is collusion at the top, secrecy downwards, and confusion below.26 Both Japan and Germany had been defeated in a war; that had happened many times in history. But in their cases more than the army had been defeated. The army had done to the utmost what armies are designed to do. Nor had they been stabbed in the back: people were united behind the army. What was defeated was the entire system. And that means a culture rooted in transcendental forces, and a very authoritarian structure. God had been proven wrong, His/Her Chosen Representative on Earth had been proven wrong, the Apparatus had been proven wrong. Only the two peoples, the Japanese and the Germans, were left behind in the ruins, confused and alone. The courageous thing would have been to jettison the whole God-Chosen Person-Apparatus idea in favour of equality, horizontality, inside the country and relative to the outside, and then create new identities based on togetherness, solidarity, equality as Germany did with the EU. Instead, the option chosen was minimum change with maximum acceptance as states still in search of empire. People needed a New God, and found one of proven strength: America. America told them that faith in America and America alone would be amply rewarded. They would be absolved of their sins after ritualistic cleansing, “denazification”. The rest was left in skillful US hands—hands particularly skilled in empire-building. And they were invited to share the spoils. Germany and Japan had both been disarmed with some special clauses: anti-war for one (A9), anti-nuclear for the other. Both had submitted to a New God that certainly was neither disarmed, nor anti-war, nor anti-nuclear. How would this work, 71

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if at all? Obvious hypothesis: their obedience was destined to be used for future US belligerence. Germany was inducted into NATO, Japan into AMPO. Gradually they were given more and more belligerent roles, Japan somewhat more slowly. The co-winner of World War II, the Soviet Union, imploded under the load of its own contradictions. The Cold War evaporated, and the predictable process of NATO/ AMPO expansion and deepening started, spelling Cold War II. The dark shadows of the past have now come to haunt the present, and throw darkness into the future of Japan-East AsiaUSA. What happened 50, 100, 150 years ago coinhabits the present and colours the future. Is a war like USA/NATO/AMPO/Japan against Russia/China/India possible? Or against North Korea? What are the alternatives, particularly for Japan, the tragic hero of our story? Will Japan simply follow wherever the United States leads? Or will there be a breaking point where Japan turns away, in another direction? Or, could there be two paths, one following the Leader, the other path more peaceful, with Japan trying to walk on both of them? But, how to relate to the victims of the past? There is much to choose from as choice policy of reconciliation: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

The The The The The The The The The The The The

exculpatory nature-structure-culture approach reparation/restitution approach apology/forgiveness approach theological/penitence approach juridical/punishment approach codependent origination/karma approach historical/truth commission approach theatrical/reliving approach joint sorrow/healing approach joint reconstruction approach joint conflict resolution approach ho’o pono pono approach

Or any policy from any other list of reconciliation policies.27 Will that all depend on how the USA wants Japan to behave? Clearly there must be a relation. Anybody wanting peace will have to clear the ground, transform present conflicts and clean 72

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up the past, reconcile.28 And those basically wanting a war they think they can win will leave bones of contention untouched. They will not transform conflicts, but will keep wounds festering, will see to it that nothing is forgiven, let alone forgotten. All such bits and pieces of old issues can be used as raw material, one day transformed into something big—maybe even into a casus belli, a pretext for a war. With good cooperation from the media. Come 9/11. The clouds became even darker.

Japan and Germany under the USA: Some Dissimilarities So much for the similarities between Germany and Japan under one USA. We turn to two dissimilarities rooted in vertical vs horizontal ethics. Hypothesis: Japan’s perspective on state power was, and still is, essentially vertical; Germany’s perspective has become both vertical and horizontal. Domestically this meant that Germans could bracket the rulers of the “bad years” of 1933–45, set them aside as Nazis, celebrate their expulsion from the body politic and block their access to top power positions. Duty, loyalty etc. were projected on a new group with duty, loyalty to “America”. For the Japanese, however, domestic duty and loyalty suffered no discontinuity. War leaders from the “bad years”, 1931– 45 in Japan, even the tenno,29 could become postwar leaders, provided loyalty etc. were transferred to “America”.30 Internationally this means that Germans much more than the Japanese could relate as equals to countries they had dominated, even crushed, picking a horizontal ethic from the reserve shelf. Crucial egalitarian relations were created with neighbours, gradually expanding from the Coal and Steel Community of 1950 via the European Economic Community (1958) and the European Community (1967) to the European Union (1992), in 2004 with 25 members. At the same time a steeply vertical ethic of obedience and duty was employed until Iraq in the relationship to “America”. Not so for Japan, with a very underdeveloped ethic of global cooperation. To deliver obedience upward, to “America”, was no problem. But the obedience demanded upward, to Japan, was 73

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something that no neighbour would supply, neither Korea South and North, nor China to mention the major non-reconciled victims. Taiwan had a more positive image of Japanese rule 1895–1945 because Beijing-Chinese rule before and after was so repressive, but the Taiwanese are not going to exchange what they see as subservience under Beijing for subservience under Tokyo. Residual verticality could apply only to a clutch of small Pacific island states, which then became very popular as objects of Japanese foreign policy.31 As a result Japan acquired a strange status as integrated upward and downward, but isolated sideward. Japan became neoMeiji upward and downward in its relation to the USA, and neo-Tokugawa sideward with the bad relations, or none at all, to Japan’s only and major neighbours—China and Korea. Here there is a link in the sense that the USA, on top, hardly wanted any horizontal networks spun from and around Japan. If so the USA was pushing through an open door, because of Japanese deep culture. Then Cold War history enters. Germany’s neighbours were NATO or neutral to the north, west and south, WTO to the east. Japan’s neighbours were not only mostly Communist but also of the big and/or aggressive variety. The USA supported the European Community as one more bulwark against Communism. But they saw an East Asian Community as Communism, except when limited to South Korea and Taiwan, de facto AMPO members. Even today the US policy looks the same. Any change will probably have to come from inside Japan and relate to the deep culture variables we have used. Such change will be slow,32 but it may already have come further than many assume. We are not talking about any change in the bushido ethic, for that construction is eternal. We are talking about the carriers of the bushido ethic, and they are not eternal but gradually withering away. And with no carriers, no ethic, no culture, no deep culture.

Basic Change in Japan: From Deep Structure to Deep Culture? Japan has undergone very rapid change during the last generation, say, from 1968, along four dimensions.33 First, women are becoming increasingly visible in society. The leadership role of women inside the home was never disputed, 74

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and it may take time before social parity is established. But in State and Capital, in professional and civil society, women are making themselves felt in a way almost inconceivable thirty years ago. Second, youth are becoming increasingly visible in society. They are emerging from their families and increasingly also from schools, universities and companies under the “4 Prisons” slogan: “The family is a prison, the school is a prison, the university is a prison, the company is a prison”. The prisons are coupled serially by society handing over people from one prison to the next. The alternative is escape, picking up part-time jobs, joining a gang, gaining spiritual individuation from the deep Americanisation of Japanese youth. Violence and drugs are in it for some. More significant is experience, bonding, identities. Third, non-intellectuals are more visible in society. University education is downplayed, again in a way unthinkable some thirty years ago. The ranking of the university was often the major rank of a person, like castes in feudal society.34 Confucianism established a clear dominance of men over women, old over young, and intellectuals over others. These three changes in Japan add up to a major anti-Confucian revolution. Anti-Confucianism, we will recall, was a major thread in the loom of the Chinese cultural revolution of 1966–67. Maybe it is now succeeding more in Japan than in its structural/cultural motherland, China. Then, on top of all this, there is an explosive growth in the visibility of civil society structure, both nongovernmental organisations and local authorities, with a corresponding decline in the visibility of state and capital/corporation/company. This is not to say that there is a power shift away from the classical two pillars of society, state and capital, toward the third, civil society. But state and capital have suffered a decline in prestige, no doubt related to the decline in economic growth for Capital, and the inability of State to do much about it. State-Capital ties that worked well under high economic growth may even have become counterproductive when growth is low or absent.35 The exploration in the appendix to this chapter of what Japanese NGOs in general, and youth in particular, could do for peace should be read against that background. Thirty years ago, who cared? Peace, however conceived of, was the monopoly of gaimusho, the foreign office, meaning some old males from two universities in a building in Tokyo. Women: serving tea. Youth: 75

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entrance exams. Lower-ranking universities or none at all: forget about it. LAs: Mind your local business. NGOs: what are they? If we assume the classical carriers of bushido to be older males from the “best” universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, located high up in state and/or capital, then they are now a narrow group on its way out. There is a declining interest in them, and probably also declining respect. A broad spectrum of others carrying other values is on their way in. More horizontal, less vertical; more individualist, less collectivist.36 But they are not yet rooted in the core of power in the inner workings of ministries. Only one thing is certain: this is all going to change. New carriers will appear on the scene. But—carriers of what?

Processing the Past: The Textbooks How have these three countries dealt with history? Fortunately, there is an excellent comparative study, Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States37 that deals with all three of them, with Nanjing/Colonialism, Auschwitz/Holocaust and Hiroshima/Viêt Nam, and how they are reflected in history textbooks.38 As an approach to reconciliation, textbooks are crucial. No. 7 on the reconciliation list given on page 72 is based on Truth, and also Nos 4 and 5, the Confession. More particularly, the more truthful the confession, and the more public, the better it will be as a contribution to Reconciliation. There is willingness not only to say “we did something horrible” and to say it publicly, not only in a confession booth or on a psychoanalyst’s couch. That confession binds future generations through texts that are obligatory as school books. Nobody can plead ignorance. How have the three countries processed recent history? Again, much depends on what is meant by history. There are the many events. There are the periods of history, the ups and downs, expansion and contraction, in-between periods, etc. And the more permanent characteristics of states and nations (see Chapters 3 and 4). Here is a summary of the work on history textbooks: Germany: reports events, characterises periods, but not the permanents. 76

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Japan: reports events, resists naming periods and resists the permanents. United States: does not even report events, prefers effacing memories. In short: the USA’s history textbooks are the worst, Japan a little better, Germany good. The USA has an argument: the victor decides what is history. That explains some of the unwillingness or inability to dwell on problematic aspects of, say, Hiroshima/Nagasaki. But it does not explain why the Viêt Nam war disappears from history textbooks. There were atrocities, but no victory ever vindicated the USA.39 James Loewen reports that “the average teacher grants the Vietnam War 0 to 4.5 minutes in the entire school year”. And this showed up when he quizzed a group of advanced undergraduates in 1989: “The War in Vietnam was fought between——and—–”. A full 22 per cent replied North and South Korea.40 Leaving the USA as a pathological case of denial,41 we focus on Germany and Japan to explain Japan’s inability to come to grips with its past, using Germany as a contrast. It was fairly easy for the Germans to bracket Nazism and simply reject that phase. The Japanese, however, tend to work with “eras” named after the emperor—Meiji, Taisho, Showa, Heisei. Evidently, the difference between the first two was not that important, whereas the third “era” had a number of sub-divisions. But words like “colonialism”, “empire-building”, “expansion”, “subjugation of foreign peoples” or simply “war” are problematic for Japanese authorities. And more basic aspects of Japan, like “vertical/collectivist”, were permanent. It is as if Japan traded admission of events for refusal to name periods. The same applies to the more permanent aspects. Korean scholars point out that the idea of conquering Korea is an old theme in Japanese history. Permanent features are generally controversial. This also applies to Germany. Thus Hitler’s twelve years fighting for space in the middle of Europe is rejected in the textbooks, but not the entire Drang nach Osten.42 Some conclusions from the comparison of Japan-Germany: 1. Japan was dominated by a vertical ethic of duty and obedience, and that vertical ethic prescribed the wars and 77

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

condoned atrocities. To expose and apologise is to deny Japan, including oneself. This would also apply to Germany, but only for the Nazi period. Japan is dominated by a collectivist ethic that makes individual protests very exceptional. To assert views as an individual is to deny belongingness in the Japanese corpus mysticum. This is less so in Germany where the Protestant tradition legitimises, in principle, both individualism and protest. Japan 1931–45 was relatively continuous with Japan before and after. The Emperor did not resist or outlaw the military coup but worked with the army. For Germany it was much easier to bracket the Nazi regime as a discontinuous phase in German history, with such a clear beginning and end as Hitler getting in and out of power. In Japan inter-generational conflict is not an institutionalised tradition. In the Confucian tradition sons/daughters do not question what fathers/mothers do or say or challenge their war roles. This is different from Germany where collective inter-generational conflict, not only individual, has deep roots. 1968 is the symbolic year, but it started before and lasted longer, asking the parents what they did during the war. The new generation felt free to denounce a period that had been defined as abnormal anyway. In Japan conflict in general, and war in particular, are seen as parts of natural processes, the bad residues eventually being washed out by the rivers, into the sea. “War is war”, “war is like that”. This differs from Germany, although “war is a law of nature” is also well known. The German/ Western tendency is to attribute guilt to somebody, and to feel shame. The West channelled the guilt-attribution through the Nürnberg/Tokyo processes, relieving others of shame. This did not work in Germany, however, the evidence being so overwhelming that some shame at being a German developed. Japan, being both victim and perpetrator, squeezed between the two, and probably still uses victimhood to compensate for perpetrator-hood. Germany did the same, but after the inter-generational revolt 20–25 years after 1945 this mechanism no longer worked. Japan had an isolationist tradition focusing on inner pro78

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cesses, stimulated by geography rather than by relations to neighbours. Impossible for Germany, most near neighbours and their neighbours had been invaded and occupied. The problem had to be solved. 8. Normalisation with “Communist” North Korea and China would not be in the US interest if an East Asian Community developed against the USA. The EC/EU was in the US interest as long as it could remain anti-Soviet. Good relations between (West) Germany and Western neighbours were seen as conducive. 9. Japan saw its colonialism as provoked by Western colonialism, and as part of a Western modernisation package. Germany did the same. 10. Japan’s goals can survive unchanged: with no wish to reconcile, hanging on to a polarisation that may, just may, be transformed into war with US leadership expanding and deepening NATO westward and AMPO eastward, meaning US Empire and with Japan as US proconsul in East Asia. A highly unlikely scenario for Germany.

Processing the Past: Compensation and Apology Thus the Japanese inability and unwillingness to take the matter seriously are not difficult to explain. But what do we do about it? There is no reason to believe that the Japanese government will change its position in the near future. The most interesting actors are the Japanese NGOs who work together with NGOs from all countries that suffered one way or the other under Japanese aggression, not only Korea, South and North, and China. In Taiwan, anger over the Beijing sell-out in 1895 and the Nationalist harsh rule after 1945 provided, as mentioned, a contrast that put Japanese colonialism in a better light. And yet relations matter, also to the RyuKyu islands and Russia. How about US participation? If the USA would admit wrongs in the USA-Japan, USA-Korea and USA-Viêt Nam settings, it would be so much easier for Japan to do the same in the JapanKorea, Japan-China and Japan-USA settings. The focus could be on what went wrong in the Asia-Pacific in general, and on how to build better relations. Problems should not be bilateralised, 79

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but multilateralised. A confrontation between two neighbours over “what actually happened” may be too tense; broader settings may facilitate broader views. And not only the surface violence, the deep structure and culture should also be considered. Of the twelve reconciliation processes, the process most suited may be ho’o pono pono, inviting NGO representatives, historians, veterans, victims to roundtable conflict circles with the agenda: 1. Establishing the facts, what happened in the community of nations; 2. Exploring why it happened, with acts of commission and omission; 3. Sharing responsibility, also for acts of omission, apologising; 4. A constructive, future-oriented programme, an East Asian Community (EAC, similar to the European Community) with an umbrella Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/ Pacific (OSCAP, similar to OSCE); 5. Declaring the conflict to be closed, burning the records. Something like this would have to be repeated many times, by high and low, also on public television. The impact could be considerable. See the Epilogue to this book. Turning to reconciliation in general, let us look at a concrete case, the negotiations between Tokyo and Pyongyang on normalisation. This is a broader concept than reconciliation, a term not frequently used in the diplomatic vocabulary. What we have seen is consistent Japanese politics of no reconciliation, with each failure to tell the truth leading to strong protests and to new tensions, not to peace. The following is based on dialogues in Pyongyang with several high DPRK officials43 to get their view on reconciliation, from how North Korea sees the damage and suffering caused by Japanese imperialism to the kind of compensation they seek, and what they mean by “real apology”. Some answers are better known than others. (a) They mention six forms of damage/suffering under the Japanese rule: one million killed and/or tortured (also hibakusha); six million forced into war service, including 200,000 comfort women; economic looting; cultural treasures seized or destroyed; 80

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the zainichi (Koreans in Japan) situation in Japan; and Japanese responsibility for the division of Korea between the USA and the former USSR, treating Korea as a Japanese colony. (b) Compensation, according to DPRK, depends on the type of damage, and is not only in terms of money. Comfort women have to be compensated, but from the Japanese government, not from the Asian Women’s Fund. For the economic looting, compensation in the form of economic infrastructure and social services may be adequate. Cultural treasures have to be handed back, or compensated. The zainichi is a question of human rights in Japan. And they demand wholehearted Japanese support in the struggle for Korean unification. An important principle is that it is the victim who decides the kind of compensation, not the perpetrator. (c) The North Korean conception of “real apology” includes six elements: it has to come from a prime minister in power; has to be in writing, preferably as a joint communiqué; has to contain the word “apology”, not only remorse or regret; must specify the damage and suffering in Korea; has to be “deep”, reflected in school textbooks; and should reflect the broad apology/compensation trends in the world. Murayama was, in 1995, a former PM, nor did he specify Korea (“Asian nations”). A good model is the Kim Dae Jung–Obuchi joint declaration of 1998, but not Japan–China, where there is no apology for the Nanjing massacre or for Unit 731. (d) As to normalisation: compensation/apology is mentioned as a pre-condition. North Koreans feel humiliated by Japanese laissez-passer instead of real visas; they “soften” Japan’s assertion that some Koreans were “abducted” to North Korea, and insist on “missing people”; want missiles discussed within the framework of a nuclear-free zone for Northeast Asia; reject US participation in military exercises from Okinawa bases. And they reject Japanese arguments that money has to be given directly to the individuals concerned and serve people’s needs, not be diverted into palaces or military purposes. Japan, they say is not in a moral position to dictate the use. This DPRK position, with excessive governmentalism and a narrow view of reconciliation, is not unreasonable. But North Korea thinks the real problem is that Japan cannot decide, does not dare be ahead of US policy, and searches for pretexts. Only Japan can prove that this is not true. Kim Dae-Jung and Kim Jong-Il showed one way in the historical June 15, 2000 meeting. 81

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They opened a peace process for the century, and deserved a joint Nobel Peace Prize. NGOs like PeaceBoat could join and work with North Korean NGOs on joint history textbooks. And a PeaceTrain Japan-Asia-Europe would be an excellent place to meet.

But What about A9? Historically, Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution emerges as a negation of the Westphalia “Peace Treaty” of October 24, 1648, putting an end to the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. But that treaty also served as a starting point for a new international system, the state system, with the right of belligerency, provided war was declared as a key point. Given the epidemics, even pandemics, of wars in the state system, and its inability to handle conflict without violence, Westphalia was a treaty legitimising interstate war rather than a peace treaty. It is to be mourned, not celebrated. In A9 we find the direct negation of Westphalia: “The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised”. Politically the article was a meeting ground for a USA bent on etching in steel its victory over the only country that had launched acts of war on US territory since the American War of Independence, and a Japan bent on limiting Japan’s sovereignty so that the horrors of war, including the horror of being defeated, would not again be visited upon the country. All the same, A9 is not a peace article, but a non-war article, making the constitution at best a non-war constitution. There is nothing in A9 demanding that Japan should build peaceful (reciprocal, equitable) relations, enabling Japan and others to handle conflicts nonviolently, with empathy and creativity. There is nothing about reconciling with countries against which Japan has committed atrocities. There is only negative peace, non-war.44 That has an obvious consequence, well known to the Japanese people. The Government can hang on to the no war perspective, define belligerency as declared war, and get acceptance for Self-Defence Forces, as long as no war is declared. And this is what they have done, and what they seem to continue doing and getting away with. In addition, A9 has no answer, like defensive/non-offensive/ non-provocative defence, regarding what to do if Japan is at82

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tacked. That debate is largely unknown in Japan, and the Japanese peace movement more than the government can be blamed. A Daily Yomiuri survey45 shows 5 per cent saying “joining the SDF”, 38 per cent “support the SDF by any means”, 2 per cent “guerrillas”, 16 per cent “resist without arms”, 12 per cent “no resistance” and 26 per cent “don’t know”. In other words 45 per cent for a violent response including with the ambiguous SDF, and 54 per cent no specific response. With more debate about short-range conventional, paramilitary and non-military defence these responses would have been much more compelling. A9 has served as a cushion, a substitute for debate. For a USA bent on controlling Eurasia and even deliberately provoking a Japanese attack, Pearl Harbor confirmed Eurasia as a source of trouble. Roosevelt elicited, and got, as mentioned, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recipe for post-World War security, the “Base Bible”, JCS 570/2, with bases in Western Europe, East Asia and Northern Latin America that later became NATO, AMPO and TIAP. A9 stood in the way of enlisting Japan against socialist Asia. Interpretation, not change, opened for unspecified defensive war, “belligerency” being defined as aggressive war. The parallel to the Military Professional Resources Inc in Alexandria VA is clear: a tidy circumvention of the UN Charter Article 2(4) outlawing war between states with privatised, non-state armies. Revising A9 to include “collective defence”—e.g. with Japan supporting the USA in spying on China from Okinawa, or with Maritime Self-Defense Forces as far away as in the Indian Ocean and SDF in Iraq, defending the USA—no “special referendum or at such election as Diet may specify” (Article 96 in the constitution) is along the same line. Even a constitution cannot protect Japan against the interpretation skills of politicians with agendas so different from original intent.

Is Japan Heading for a War? Three bellogens, conducive to war, are already in place: 1. The politics of non-reconciliation reproduces untransformed conflict between Japan on the one hand, and China and the two Koreas on the other. That conflict seems to be getting more, not less, tense as time passes. 83

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2. A state of polarisation. There is little warmth, and much coldness and distance in these two relationships, particularly relative to North Korea. But [1] and [2] together define the formation within which a war might take place, with North Korea, or more broadly with Eurasia in general. Japan is already there, in the Indian Ocean, in Iraq. 3. A culture of war. This culture is Japanese bushido obedience spirit, grafted onto the US culture of violence as a general approach to conflict resolution. This is acceptable to the Japanese people, who are accustomed to the idea that conflicts are solved according to the wishes of people high up (in Tokyo, and in Washington), and to the idea that residues will be washed out like nature engaging in self-cleansing. What the USA did to Japan was, after a short pacifist interlude, to modernise, even post-modernise, the Japanese war culture. A war could no longer be in the name of Amaterasu-omikami, hakko ichiu, the tenno or such quaint ideas;46 but in the name of democracy, human rights, freedom, civilisation. But bushido remained, only this time with deference to the USA. Three components. What is missing is the match, the blow. This could be a heavy incident, provoked or not, with North Korea. The incident escalates. China enters, as before, on the side of North Korea. And with Japan, because of AMPO, on the side of the USA. Therapy: conflict transformation + peace building + culture of peace.

Appendix: NGOs and Japanese Youth as Peace Workers 1. Japanese NGO/Youth for Peace: Weak Points Some years ago Ambassador Kawasaki Ichiro wrote a critical book about Japanese diplomats (and maybe not only them) and their behaviour abroad, particularly in meetings. He identified a “3S” syndrome, silence, smile, sleep—in any order. Let’s have a look. Silence. Very little or nothing is said. Eloquence is not the strongest side of the Japanese, and this has little or nothing to do with knowledge of foreign languages. Rather, a saying dear to many equally silent Norwegians, speech is silver, silence is golden, would fall on fertile ground in Japan. Words should be few and well chosen; and the moment to pronounce them even better chosen. 84

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Unfortunately for the Japanese, others may not take silence for wisdom, but as indicative of having nothing worth saying. Or the Japanese may not be noticed at all since meetings are about words, and not about photo opportunities to register physical presence. One side remark: when Japanese better trained in silence than in speech nevertheless have to speak they often come out as unnecessarily aggressive, not well versed in a middle ground between high and zero decibel presence. Smile. Smiles may be parts of a non-verbal, very human dialogue of friendliness, love, humour. But smiles may also be worn regardless of the situation, even permanently as if implanted by a surgical operation. The message goes like this: I am generally friendly, I hope the same applies to you; let us leave it at that, and not disturb each other. End of conversation. Sleep. Some Japanese are masters of sleeping in public, perhaps due to training in endless journeys by public transportation. But sleep during an entire meeting may be interpreted by others as lack of interest, particularly when combined with silence and a vague smile. Peace means active presence. Peace involves relating to others, not absence by taking the role of the observer, or exiting through sleep. 3S is likely to be interpreted as a sign of insular mentality, also drawing a nai-gai line between “you people” and “we Japanese”. There is another axis for exploring behaviour in general, and Japanese behaviour in particular, as vertical vs horizontal. Horizontal spells equality, equity, symmetry—all of them very important for peace. We are equal, you and I: our terms of relating to each other are based on “equal exchange”. Whatever is valid for you is also valid for me, and vice versa. This is not only the basis for peace. It is peace, in and by itself. Absence, and/or verticality, does not augur well for peace. Verticality is a form of violence. It comes as two different styles of behaviour for people high up, people low down. Both are antithetical to peace. The big problem, referring to Japanese reality, is that the outcome of a conflict so often is written in advance of their social grammar. The solution coincides with the spoken or unspoken position of those high up. This, of course, in no way precludes a process of reconciliation, informal, horizontalised, down on the tatami mat, in warm, alcoholised informality, at 85

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night. Harmony is re-established. And things can continue exactly the way they were before; no conflict solution. Foreigners are known as “outside people”, gaijin. Verticality does not work with them and horizontality is difficult. The solution may be some kind of vacuous horizontality, but not good enough from a peace perspective. Peace must be based on dialogue between equals, probing the future together. Active presence is needed. Of course Japanese youth can learn that if there is some awareness there is something to learn. The Japanese style is special. And 3S is far from dead, as any foreign professor teaching in Japan can testify.

2. Japanese NGO/Youth for Peace: Strong Points, Ten Roles What follows is not about what youth in general and students in particular ought to study to understand better what is going on in the world. What follows is about what they can do: working for peace against direct violence, and for development against structural violence. Democracies are based on advocacy, and on confrontation if governments act against peace and human interest. Demonstrations and advocacy are important but no substitute for NGO/youth positive action, working, building peace. Positive action presupposes positive motivations, and also positive capabilities. We can identify ten very positive capabilities, and of course not only among Japanese youth: • an increasing sense of individual worth regardless of gender, age or class; • a general switch from governmental to NGO activity; • a general wish to work for international organisations; • particularly for girls a sense of fulfillment in NGO activity; • for many: a desire to work for the UN and related IGOs. And we can identify five very positive capabilities: • many Japanese youth have a high level of functional education; • many Japanese youth are good in foreign languages; • Japanese have capacity for very hard work over long periods; 86

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• Japanese have excellent capacity for teamwork; and • a general spirit of serving and helping, not dominating or managing. This provides us with an excellent starting point. There now follow ten possible peace/conflict worker roles: 1. As organisers of dialogues among parties in conflict, by gently moving such dialogues forward at all levels. The Japanese have a very noiseless way of organising, moving like cats, working efficiently, not attracting or diverting attention by unnecessary talk. The Japanese check that all external factors are optimal—the venue from a functional and aesthetic point of view, the spacing and timing of events. Much fine work is carried out behind the scenes. 2. As dialogue partners with parties in conflict, for deep understanding, nonviolent approaches, creative goals. We now move from organisation to important verbal participation. What is required in this role is to be a good listener rather than a good speaker. To be a sympathetic ear. For that, one condition is obviously not to talk too much: this is very well satisfied by highly reticent Finns, and also by Japanese (but not by Latinos). Some training is needed. Good listening does not come by itself. 3. Helping with reconstruction after violence, particularly rebuilding (including important material services), rehabilitation and reculturation (giving new faith). This is a role ideal for Japanese. Much hard teamwork is needed, deep understanding and empathy, and not much talk. There would be a flow of material goods and financial resources from public or private Japanese sources. NGO/youth could be the human link on the spot, ensuring that the flow really rebuilds areas of destruction. 4. Helping with reconciliation after violence, particularly using engi/karma and Buddhist approaches. This must be verbal, at least in parts. But, for many Japanese, a very important condition is already fulfilled. In those who have been exposed, consciously or not, to some Buddhist thinking, many ideas so dear to the Western mind—like sin and atonement, crime and punishment, with GUILTY written in big letters—will be less prominent. Instead the idea will be that everything is connected, engi, that everybody has responsibility, karma—including Americans, incidentally, for, say, the Pacific War. The Japanese should be 87

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ideal for such a role if they manage to enter horizontally, with soft verbalisation, and reasonably actively. 5. Giving to business some peace and development functions: these include needs-satisfaction, employment, cooperation, sensitivity. Again potentially an ideal Japanese role. The idea of the company as a basis for much more than just making money, like for harmonious, peaceful relations inside the company, and using the processes of the company to further the human development of managers and workers, comes easily to the Japanese. They have only to learn how to apply such excellent ideas abroad, in the social context beyond the company, and always in close dialoguing cooperation with local people, at all levels. 6. Helping other people resist cultural domination the way the Japanese by and large have done, building on their own positive and negative experiences. Even under very heavy exposure to “America”, the Japanese have remained unmistakably Japanese. Some deep sharing of what domination and resistance could be very useful for people in other countries. There has to be a highlevel communication component, as these are problems of inner identities searching for ways of expression. Use Music, Food, Art, and then Talk. 7. Participating in peace education, building on Japanese experiences with militarism, atom bombs, peace museums. Here the Japanese have much to tell. One critical point, however: the tendency to identify pro-peace with being anti-war. The two are not identical. A museum that gives very important information about the horrors of war is not the same as a museum that portrays the how-to, the benefits, the marvels of peace, just as a museum showing how diseases claim their victims is not a museum of health. 8. Participating in UN peacekeeping, particularly police and other civilian agencies, not letting some politicians use UN peacekeeping just to build militarism at home. There may be a problem here: the Japanese have been too polarised. On the one hand are those who want to “normalise” Japan with all “stigmas” removed, with an army subject to no special rules for Japan. This is acceptable up to a certain point, as there are countries that have proved not to be belligerent over centuries and yet not exposed to any such strictures. And on the other hand there are those who want absolutely nothing military at all, pure A9. But the world is not that clear-cut. There are lots of soft, civilian roles 88

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within UN peacekeeping. Japan could opt for those, steering clear of sneaking militarisation and ideological isolation. 9. Participating in conflict transformation, by being well prepared, with good ideas. This too may be a bit problematic. The Japanese know how to read, correctly, the social and world maps to find out who is in charge (the USA) and then use that to know (not only predict) how a conflict is going to end. But this is not very useful. No distinction is made between the legitimate and the illegitimate positions held by the USA. Coalition-building within the Asia-Pacific is a better approach, indispensable for new and more legitimate goals to prevail. Conflict transformation is often about searching for compromise, and here Japanese can be very good. To transcend the conflict may, however, be more problematic for them. Deep empathy with all parties through dialogue calls for verbal expertise. Individual creativity may not be what the Japanese are most famous for, except in teams—and that is the key. Nonviolence may be less problematic. All three are indispensable. Training is necessary. 10. Empowering people to do all this themselves. This is the most important task in all peace/development assistance. Indispensable is a trait that is almost super-human: a genuine longing to make oneself superfluous, redundant. The Japanese are very good at making themselves invisible. They love being both teachers and learners, which is highly compatible with all the components of “Japanism”: Shinto, Confucianism, Buddhism. Except for a few very special individuals, they generally want to return home to Japan, not to be declared indispensable in foreign lands. There is also the idea of a job well done. And the job is not completed unless it can be handed over to the local people.

3. Some Concluding Remarks The general conclusion is positive: Japanese NGOs and Japanese youth can make excellent peace workers. An illustration is the fine Japanese NGO PeaceBoat run entirely by young people. After 23 voyages around the world, and many more local trips, and 14,000 passengers, all of them visiting conflict areas, PeaceBoat has built up reservoirs of deep knowledge that provide a foundation for all the enthusiasm which also is a condition for good work for peace. 89

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Networks have been woven from port to port and deep inland, connecting local NGOs and individuals to Japanese, and to each other, in ways that State and Capital actors can only dream of. This is not only about peace, or to promote peace. It is peace in and by itself, a floating microcosm of Japanese society, excluding nobody, forcefully including nobody, relating to everybody. Thirty years ago such ideas would have taken the shape of a luxury cruise run by those older males firmly anchored high up, and used for government propaganda. And yet it is only one among the numerous peace-, development- or environment-oriented Japanese NGOs. The only danger is that some of them may one day become GNGOs, “governmental non-governmental organizations”. And here there is much to learn from the comparison with Germany. In 1945 they had both been beaten, not only militarily but spiritually. Their projects were in the dustbin of history. Both had accepted a new God: Washington. Both had returned to the capitalism and parliamentarism of the past. But then Germany did four things Japan did not do. Germany reconciled, using the textbook approach, with the countries and nations they had brutalized; Japan never managed to do so. Germany found a place in the European Community (see next chapter) with its former enemies; there is still no East Asian Community. Germany related to the rest of the world within EC/EU foreign policy; Japan is accused of dominance or of serving US interests. And Germany managed to maintain good relations with the USA except for a No in connection with the illegal (against the UN Charter) attack on Iraq March 2003; Japan seems to be hooked on subservience. These items can be considered four pointers toward an alternative Japanese foreign policy.

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6

The European Union Peace Factor, War Factor, Both or Neither?

Twenty-First-Century Threats to Peace, in Europe— and from Europe The European Union has 25 members, and 13 of the 15 members up to May 2004 were former colonial powers, six of these with colonies in the Pacific. There are ACP1 countries all over, also in the Pacific (the “P”). EU membership comprises more than half of the countries of Europe;2 the Council of Europe has 44 and the OSCE has 53 from Europe. That ratio may increase, and there are talks of more than 40 members by, say, 2015. The EU is not synonymous with Europe,3 but approaching, rapidly. So, what of the EU and peace? What can we expect? And how about the European Union as a model for a possible East Asian community, a major part of the Western Rim? What can we learn? The opposite of peace is violence. The two varieties of violence, direct and structural, often operate across the fault-lines in the human construction: gender, generation, race, class (the powerful vs the powerless in its many varieties, political, economic, military and cultural), nation, country. The result is sometimes genocide = massive killing of categories. Which of the six are the most powerful organisers and mobi91

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lisers for the collective violence that is war? Structural violence is possible across all six fault-lines. On top of those pyramids of repression, exploitation and alienation we usually find men, older/middle-aged, white, upper/middle class, Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) by background or conviction; in any country. This gives us the MOWUC, a long-time suspect. The term often used in the USA is “WASP”, standing for “white AngloSaxon Protestant”. That, however, neatly obscures gender and generation. MOWASPs run the USA, MOWUCs run the EU. Both have begun to push some selected women and younger people up front, e.g. as MPs. There are changes—but slowly, and often as tokenism only. Is the EU really a peace community? What about direct violence? There is this notion that we cannot have massive direct violence, war—even genocide—across gender and generation divides: their symbiosis is a necessary condition for society to survive. Wrong. This also applies to class, and history reports massive warfare between classes—the revolutions, the revolts. Old people have been killed, one by one, left behind in the cold, or today through euthanasia. Selective abortion and infanticide, particularly of girls, is a widespread practice. But within the EU these are certainly not major problems for the time being. Race is a problem. Europeans are aging. Younger people are needed to keep the machinery running. They have to come from the outside and they are often non-white. Europeans are colourconscious, untrained in broader spectra, having grown up in allwhite societies. What is different is seen as dangerous. The effect is prejudice (internalised dehumanisation), discrimination (institutionalised marginalisation, exclusion, structural violence), and sometimes direct violence, against individuals, or as gang battles in the streets. Nor can we ignore the massive police violence that acts to lower the violence threshold, and more so the darker the colour. There are various remedies for these problems. First of all, older people who want to continue working should be allowed to do so. This could easily be part time, as jobs are becoming increasingly part time anyhow. It could also be experience-intensive rather than muscle-intensive, as few jobs in the EU today require much physical labour anyhow. Second, alter the racial composition of the police and train them all in nonviolent polic92

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ing. Train people not in tolerance, meaning “passive peaceful coexistence”, but in active togetherness through respect and dialogue. What is different could also be seen as a source of mutual enrichment. What is problematic about race, however, is probably not colour so much as class. Colour evokes “low class” which in turn evokes “dangerous classes”, partly through the subconscious psychodynamics of “one day they will come and do to us what we once did to them”. For that reason race will be explored in connection with class rather than as a separate category. That leaves class, nation and state, as the three mobilising foci for violence and peace. The problem we shall explore is what is in stock for the European Union along these three axes of social organisation, and what may be coming from the European Union. Class defines upper-middle-lower according to power resources. Here a multi-dimensional view is privileged over any liberal/Marxist tendency to focus solely on economic class. “Who exploits whom” is certainly important, but so is “who decides over whom”. Politicians now actually refer to themselves as the “political class”, even “caste”. So is “who kills whom or beats whom”; and “who conditions whom”. Conditioning is what parents do when they “raise children”, or what ministries do when they “authorise” textbooks. Class is a many-splendoured thing, but with more splendour above than below. Nation is a group with a shared culture, like language and/or religion, and a territorial attachment. Almost all the 25 countries of the EU have one dominant nation speaking the dominant language, and the country is named after them. Nobody speaks “Swiss”, but then Switzerland with four equally recognised languages is not an EU member either. But Belgium is, and nobody speaks “Belgian”, nor is there an “Austrian” or a “Cypriot” language. There are at least 30 non-dominant nations in Europe, and each of them, however small, may one day claim a nationstate of its own. If we go farther east, to Russia and the Caucasus, the number of nations increases dramatically. The state is an organisation within a territorially defined country, with an official monopoly on legitimate violence inside the country, and on its relations with the outside. Those individuals who have the right to live inside that territory, by ius sanguinis or by ius solis, are known as “citizens”. The nation is a group, so 93

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“members” would be a more appropriate term. Relative to economic class most are “consumers/labourers”; relative to political class they are “subjects”; relative to military class “objects”; and relative to cultural class “pupils” to be conditioned, given a script to live by. These are all dimensions of class for human beings. Blessed be the system that gives them the human right to struggle for change! So much for the system of individuals inside the EU super-state. How about the system of states outside the EU, with the EU as superpower, no longer just in the making,4 but almost ready made? We find the same fault-lines at this level, among states and nations. The EU belongs to the Upper class/White among states, with 13 of its 15 members before the 2004 expansion being former colonial powers. The non-colonial are Finland and Ireland. Luxembourg was riding piggy-back on Belgium’s genocidal colonialism5 in the Congo, but whoever rides piggy-back often himself becomes a pig. Greek colonialism is a little dated by now, but set the pattern for the Romans and the Roman Empire became the model for the rest. The EU organises the Catholic/Latin and Protestant/Germanic nations among nations. The only exception so far has been Greek Orthodox: Greece and Greek Cypriots. No new member is Orthodox/Slavic from the Orthodox heartland, not counting the Greek cradle. Some Protestant countries are still protesting (Norway, Iceland, the German Swiss). The EU, as mentioned, is a Super Power among regions, vying for power in a world with the Big Six: the USA, the European Union, Japan and Russia, the Indian Union, China, aligned three against three (see Chapter 4). Summary: UW/CLPG/SP, run by MOWUCs? More or less, yes. In table 6.1 we summarise the dimensions in an analytical scheme. At the same time the European Union is an inter-state, interEU, peace system. By and large, it satisfies five conditions explored some three decades ago:6 • symbiosis: there is a very high level of interaction including internal trade among the members, high level of interdependence; • equity: more problematic, but members benefit equally even if “some are more equal than others”; 94

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Table 6.1 Inside the EU as superstate

Outside the EU as superpower

Class/Race

Nation

Superstate

[1] enormous and coordinated power potential—economic-politicalmilitary-cultural

[2] 25 dominant nations in EU; many more to come in Europe?

[3] European Union = Soviet Union?

Super-Class/Race

Civilisation

Regional Superpower

[4] 13/25 former colonial powers in search of new roles: economic political military cultural Festung Europa

[5] Europe divided in three parts: Catholic/Protestant Orthodox Muslim Bipolar World: Christian Non-Christian

[6] World in six parts: USA EU Russia India China Japan: UN

• homology: there is a very high level of “opposite number” cooperation, state similarity facilitating partner identification, governmental as well as non-governmental; • entropy: this equitable interaction = cooperation is found among all three pillars of modern society: governments, TNCs, NGOs—horizontally, vertically, diagonally; • transcendence: there is a solid superstructure, the EU organs, able to counter any deviation (like Austria). The EU satisfies these criteria better than most, and reaps peace inside its own borders. The problem is the relation to the outside.

Inside the EU: Upper, Middle, Lower and Excluded Classes There are at least six views on how to handle economic class. First, do nothing. The market will handle this by itself. There will be a trickle-down effect; jobs will be created and money will accrue to people lower down if people high up taking risks are rewarded. Those who put in more are entitled to take out more; 95

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if people take out nothing, it is because they have put in nothing. What is needed is to increase the average through economic growth. Second, equal opportunity. Even if there is still misery down at the bottom, do not take it out on the children. Let everybody have an equal opportunity to start with—among other things— free, efficient and available education and health services. Then let them show what they are made of. Third, social justice. Individuals will not end up equal. But races, genders and nations are equal in ability. Affirmative action is needed so that they come out equal on the average, counteracting the distorting effects of prejudice and discrimination. Decrease the correlations between ascribed (race, gender, nation) and achieved (class). Fourth, basic needs for the most needy. Even so there may be misery: worse than poverty, so much deprivation that it hurts, with people suffering miserable lives marred by morbidity and mortality, under-fed, under-clad, under-sheltered, under-cared for, undertaught: jobless, hopeless, futureless. Let adequate livelihood in basic needs terms be a human birthright, for a life in human dignity. Fifth, narrow the gap, create in addition to a floor level for the poor a ceiling for the rich. Decrease the dispersion. Sixth, equality, narrow the gap to zero, with everybody on the same salary, for instance, regardless of input—the way it used to be for university professors. No additional “incentives”. Equality. All six are ideologies. There is no “natural”, stable equilibrium. They all have to be maintained by an input of political, cultural, and sometimes military power. The EU stands for neither [1] nor [6], but traditionally, under the ideologies of social democracy, welfare states and social capitalism/market, for a mix of [2], [3], [4] and [5]. However, the Reagan–Thatcher counterrevolution of the 1980s made the pendulum swing back towards [1]. Packages reflecting the other policies were opened up, partly emptied, then repacked. That process is going on all the time. As a result there will be poverty, but probably not much misery, at the bottom of EU society. The important exception would be what seems today to be the most vulnerable group: old, lonely people, particularly women, trying to survive on dwindling pensions. They are of little or no political value to politicians in search of votes, and have low organisational capability. This may deterio96

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rate even further in the USA when/if the economy goes from recession into depression. Elements of [2]–[5] may then be reinstated. There is much solidarity in the EU relative to, for instance, the United States or the Indian Union.7 [2]–[5] are quite robust. But this will take the form of top-down grace from a bureaucracy used to social and Christian democrats, also getting used to Green approaches to the environment. There may be changes when civil society learns better to lobby as effectively as the corporations. One condition for this to happen is to rid massive demonstrations of the “anarchist violence” by nonviolent selfpolicing and communicate more constructively with authorities. Then, the excluded. Here the Roma have an interesting slogan: “neither exclusion, nor forced inclusion”. Asylum-seekers are more problematic, so is the policing of opposition. The Schengen Agreement has given the EU some of the capability for a police state. Circumstances produce motivations,8 and vice versa.

Inside the EU: Dominant and Latent Nations This is Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s list, including non-EU member minorities, from World Guide to Ethnic Minorities and Indigenous Peoples:9 Abkhazians, Azoreans, Alsatians, Aaland Islanders, Basques of Spain and France, Bretons, Corsicans, Cornish, Caucasians (over 30 in North Caucasia), Frisians, Faroe Islanders, Gaelic, Galicians, Inuit, Jurassians, Karelians, Komi, Kurds, Montenegrans, Orkney Islanders, Ossetians North and South, Roma, Ruthenians, Sami, Sardinians, Scots, South Tyrolians, Tatars, Welsh, Walloons. For each one of them the voices of the dominant nation in the capitals are resonating in the ears: “No problems, these are just small groups of activists, mainly student malcontents. The overwhelming majority are totally content, and besides, they get so many benefits from us.” Maybe. But “small groups of activists, mainly students” have a tendency to grow big. The world experience is that people prefer to be governed by their own kind, even if their own kind is unkind. “Rather live with one of us as a dictator than be ruled by a democratically elected majority of those Others” can be heard all over. We know how to handle our own. 97

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In principle minority–majority relations should be one of the strengths of the EU through the subsidiarity principle and the regionalisation, the Europe of about 162 regions. An EU region could be defined by nation even if the member state is unwilling to have a “Pays Basque” in its midst, only “Bas-Pyrenées”—something territorial, napoleonic, emptied of national connotations. On Stavenhagen’s list “Ulsterites” are missing, and yet the EU has helped bring them into being and towards higher levels of identity by financing some of their economic aspirations. The EU may be on a collision course with the “host” country, but it may also help get them off the hook by being more accommodating than the “host”. The dominant nation is also in most cases the democratic majority.

Inside the EU: The Superstate and Its Citizens There is much talk of a democracy deficit in the EU, of Eurocrats becoming a Euro-caste not accountable to anybody. Corruption once flourished, it seems. A famous Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, has gone further, comparing the European Union to the Soviet Union, identified a number of similarities that made him call for dissidents to rise, predicting a Soviet ending to the EU.10 The Commission has the same size as the Politburo,11 the Parliament can be likened to the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers to the Soviet Government. There is dyarchy both in the EU and in the former Soviet Union ruled by the Party machinery and the Republics and lower-level territorial units (Party and Republics). There is an overriding EU and Soviet Union ideology: integration, and the hypothesis that, once achieved, any residual nationalism will wither away (like the state) as the fruits accrue to everybody. Just as the Soviets promised a new human being, sovjetskij chelovek, the EU promises a new human being, homo europeus, a higher, European variety of homo sapiens. European history is rewritten as a solid progress towards the crowning achievement, the Union, marred only by a few aberrations like Napoleon and Hitler.12 The latter wanted a Neuordnung for Europe with Germany as the leading state, the political capital in 98

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Berlin, and the economic capital in Brussels! There is a doctrine of inevitability, like Soviet-style Marxist teaching about socialism and communism. The Soviet Union had a Brezhnev Doctrine that legalised intervention if a country should stray from that inevitability, backtracking against the natural Stufengang of primitive Communism-Slavery-Feudalism-Capitalism-Socialism-Communism, sliding back to Capitalism. Correspondingly, there is a doctrine to legalise intervention against a country like Austria,13 which strayed by entering into a coalition government with Jörg Haider’s party. The EU is not alone in having a democracy deficit, perhaps more due to the compliant nature of the media than to blocked communication channels from voters to executive. But look at the ending of the Soviet Union, which was due to the demoralisation of elites who had failed to handle accumulating and synchronised contradictions, such as: • • • • •

between between between between between

the Soviet Union and the satellite countries; the Russian nation and other nations; town and countryside; socialist bourgeoisie and working class; myth and reality.

Could the same happen to the European Union? All five apply—but the contradictions are less sharp than for the Soviet Union. There are benefits to be reaped from the democracy that exists, even if the European Union is close to sacred, protected by taboos that admit critique only beyond some details (such as “is it obvious that Europe is such a blessing to the world?). The “satellite countries” would be an associated country like Turkey, and the ACP (Lomé) and Barcelona process Mediterranean countries. Why must they toe the line as second-class, even third-class, members, relegated to the outer circles? Their demands might one day become troublesome. “Russia vs others” becomes “central EU nations vs periphery”. Although “La Communauté Européenne pensée par les Français, payée par les Allemands” may be over, these two member states are more equal than the others. And the British cannot both demand inner circle access and special rules.14 99

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City-countryside: the EU is abolishing agriculture, leaving it to the satellite ACP/Mediterranean countries, eliminating the lifestyle of the former and reducing self-sufficiency. For this it may one day be punished. Class: see class. Myth: if the Eurocrats are homo europeus prototypes, then why so many scandals? Likewise for wars: Germany against France is unlikely, but Germany with France already happened in Yugoslavia. A reaction may come.

Outside the EU: The Upper Class in a World of Classes The EU came into being at the time of decolonisation, and the Yaounde–Lomé system (ACP) can be seen as a partial recolonisation with elite equality and enormous people inequality. Admittedly, the EU will be suspected of neo-colonialism whatever it does, and these pages are no exception. But the focus is on the EU structure as an instrument, ideal for that purpose, rather than on a detailed analysis of content and motivations. Suffice it to say that soft (neo-)colonialism happens along all four power dimensions, taking on the usual form: • Economically: exploitation by using non-EU countries as sources of crude production factors (resources, energy, labour, liquidity) and as markets for processed goods and services. • Culturally: alienation by offering European culture and institutions as substitutes for what little is left of their own. • Politically: repressive tolerance by offering Western-style decision-making mechanisms through Western debate/voting democracy, replacing sometimes local, indigenous dialogue/consensus systems. • Militarily: intervention by member state if the other three approaches fail. We can best understand how this is being done by conceiving of the European Union as a European Common Political Market. Basic principle: “I support you when you advance into your old 100

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territories, provided you support me when I do the same with mine.” Compass directions of advances, and the division of labour: • West, USA/Canada: England for the USA, France for Quebec, Ireland as “special relations”, and diaspora.15 • Southwest, Caribbean, Latin America: mainly Spain and Portugal. • South, Maghreb, Africa south of the Sahara: France, Italy, Belgium-Luxembourg. • Southeast, the Balkans: Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece. • East(ern) Europe, Russia: Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark16 and in general 8 of the 10 new members (not Cyprus and Malta). • All directions, and the Pacific: England, Netherlands, France; Germany, Spain, Portugal. Much of this will compete with US influence, see section 7 below. And what member states do may one day become an EU policy and liability, including peacekeeping forces in many countries.

Outside the EU: One in a World of Civilisations In terms of civilisations, the EU covers a very narrow range of the world spectrum. There is not even all of Christianity, the members being Catholic and Protestant countries so far. Islam, the majority religion in 57 countries of the world, is unrepresented in the EU. The veto power nucleus of the UN Security Council also discriminates against Islam. Such exclusion will carry a heavy price now being paid in West and Central Asia. The borderlines so far drawn for the European Union coincide largely with the almost millennium-old fault-lines in Europe. They are the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism from 1054, running close to the dividing line between East and West Rome, the haut and the bas empire of 395; and between Christianity and Islam from 1095, the declaration of war on Islam, known as the Crusades. The ten new members from 2004 changed none of that. In 1991, while the EU was still the EC, it entered into very complex conflicts in and over Yugoslavia with prejudices against 101

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Orthodoxy and Islam in its collective subconscious. The EC/EU came out, predictably, aggressing against both, joining in a war against the Serbs, and denying the Muslims any statehood. A city-state around Sarajevo, letting the Croats join Croatia as they wanted, and letting Srpska enjoy autonomy, even independence as they wanted, would have counter-acted most of the violence.17 The corresponding formula for Croatia would have been autonomy for the Serbs in Krajina-Slavonia, and in Kosovo/a autonomy, even independence, for the Albanians. But no such formulae were found. Instead the EC/EU acted according to age-old scripts, egged on by the two of its members with historical interests in the region, Germany and Austria. Not very promising for the future; they were too script-driven. The European Union is unlikely to accept a declared Islamic country as a member,18 and is afraid of Turkey for that reason. The secularisation brought about by Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s above all hit the Turkish army, not the people. Within the NATO framework, the USA cooperates mainly with the army, yet remains apprehensive lest there should be a “fundamentalist” revolt. On the other hand, the EU may accept Slavic Orthodox countries, like Bulgaria: they are at least Christian. In the world the EU is minoritarian. Christianity covers at most 25 per cent of the world population, white people 22 per cent, the West 16 per cent. It was such a minority that produced the Papal Bull Inter Caetera of May 4, 1493. In that document Pope Alexander VI gave the Spanish kings carte blanche for imperialism, also in the Pacific Hemisphere: “jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands, found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered; we-appoint-you-lords of them with full and free power and jurisdiction of every kind.” The history of most EU countries is written with the blood of the colonised peoples. Events like the UN 2001 conference in Durban on racism and colonialism will come up again and again. The South African foreign minister closed the conference by saying “this issue of compensation is not about money, but about dignity”. Europeans, made even more arrogant by also inhabiting a superpower, may have even more problems delivering that to their former victims. One way out is reciprocity, changing one-way “development assistance” traffic by also asking “what can we learn from them?” 102

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Two answers, related to peace: shir and ho’o pono pono conflict transformation and reconciliation from Somalis and Polynesians. Question: What is that? The question itself shows the need for more two-way traffic.

Outside Europe: One in a World of Regions The Tindemans Plan19 (1994) argued in favour of an EU army at the Union level, not only as coordinated state forces, with: 1. 2. 3. 4.

EU EU EU EU

level level level level

arms production armed forces C3I, with satellites, and intelligence agencies nuclear arms

Reportedly, the plan has been shelved, although information is difficult to obtain. At any rate, as foreseen in the Maastricht Treaty, Article J.4, political power over military power is no longer with the Western Union. Instead it now lies with the European Council/Council of Ministers/Council of Defense Ministers, according to the Amsterdam Treaty, Article J.7. No public referendum is needed. With the high level of belligerent activity throughout the 1990s, intensive planning must have been carried out, at least for the first three points in the Tindemans Plan, particularly given the “humiliation” of having to rely on US intelligence. The EuroCorps, originally French-German, later expanded to include Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg,20 is being superseded by an EU rapid deployment force. One thing is clear: the EU is attaining military identity, if not yet commensurate with its size. Political, economic and cultural power, passport, flag and hymn, parliament and executive, a coming single, not merely a common, currency.21 These are all heavy components in the power profile. There are five other superpowers/regions in the world. The USA ranks high on all power dimensions and is global; the EU is rapidly becoming global but is lagging in military power; Japan is global but only economically, and is currently in a state of latency; Russia is regional and remains a potential on all dimen103

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sions; so does China; so does India. In one sense, the USA, being a hyperpower, is against them all. How does the EU relate to all of this? Within the world region-system the EU is among equals, and has to behave carefully. This is very different from picking on little Austria in the European state-system, or the economic-political-cultural hegemony that the EU can exercise in the world class structure. Among the five mentioned there is one competitor, the USA, and three others to be competitive about. The USA has a grip on Japan that makes it difficult to pry Japan loose. The EU has a tremendous advantage over the USA where Russia is concerned: contiguity, and a possible offer of EU membership or some kind of association, e.g. by trading increasing access of Russian labour to EU jobs,22 over a period of X years, for EU increasing EU access to Russian raw materials over the same period (X = 30?). But the USA can counter this offer with an offer of NATO membership, as it has done all over Eastern Europe, Americanising the Russians before the EU can Europeanise them. However, if Russia should join NATO, then a China-JapanIndia defence treaty might be around the corner, along the white vs coloured axis; and if Russia should join the EU, then an East Asia Community, long overdue, with Japan, the Korean Peninsula, China, possibly also Viêt Nam, might be coming. This means that the EU will have to balance an open Russia policy with an equally open Asia policy, based on MFR, most favoured region, the principle of equal treatment of all. Examples of EU–East Asia cooperation:23 • EU helping East Asia build institutions that might sooner or later lead to an East Asia Community. Nobody has more expertise; • EU entering into an open dialogue on human rights, seeking a both-and for the “individual vs collective rights” dispute; • EU and East Asia cooperating in making ground transportation EU-EA by rail and road safe, efficient and inexpensive, also for youth; • massive cultural exchange and dialogue programmes, peace trains, music, culinary arts, martial arts, literature—not just oil etc.

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And the United Nations? At present four of the six regions (the Islamic nation, reflected in OIC, would be the Seventh Region) have permanent veto-power positions on the UN Security Council—for as long as that system, some kind of inter-state feudalism, remains. Japan and India have announced as foreign policy goals their intentions to occupy such seats. So has Germany, although that would be unfair, giving the EU three veto votes on the Security Council, even worse than the three UN member seats that were accorded to the Soviet Union by adding Ukraine and Byelorussia in 1945. And Islam is neglected. If the EU, like the Soviet Union, has a common foreign and security policy, then the EU will by definition speak with one voice on such matters, and hence there should be one EU seat only on the inner circle of the Security Council. Under current conditions that would liberate one seat, preferably for India rather than Japan, letting population count more than money, unless there is sufficient wisdom to abolish the veto power entirely, and expand the Security Council to reflect the world better, including Muslim representation. Rename it the United Nations Peace Council (UNPC). And give a seat to OIC. Clearly there is a major problem here: will the EU, with one-fifth or even one-quarter of the world’s states as members, develop some of the same arrogance as the USA, and for instance refuse to bow to UN majorities? Go it alone? Will a UN Peace Council, with or without veto, but reflecting better the Big Seven people-money regions, be able to mitigate conflicts among its own members, and then multilaterally, not bilaterally between two alliances? The Europeans wanted to become big. But there is a price for bigness: the bigger you are, the bigger the problems. The sweet taste of being with The Other Big may quickly yield to the sour itching of enormous conflicts, far beyond the First and Second World Wars.

Synergies for Peace, Synergies for War Basically, the problems are not within the EU. The EU will continue as a peace system among states, as the Nordic Union has done, like ASEAN, as other regions could easily do if only they

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would learn from these three. Even a Middle East of six, like the EC in the beginning, with Israel and Palestine of course, and then Syria and Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, could provide the indispensable multilateral setting for the hated Israel—like the one-time equally hated Germany—to become one among others, in a functioning peace system producing security for the members. The problem lies with the right and left wings of the EU political spectrum. The European integration is very much a mainstream, middle-of-the-road position. For the right the EU may be the end of their national dreams (as for Jörg Haider, probably best understood as one of the last Habsburgians). For the left the EU may be the end of their global dreams of One World, under a vastly improved United Nations. The local nationalists and global cosmopolitans—these were the two sources of EU opposition in Norway that proved capable of defeating the State-Capital-Media alliance in two referenda (September 1972 and October 1994). The EU handled the Austrian case very badly: it came close to losing a member, and might have to consider adequate exit clauses as a safety valve when pressure builds up. The EU will probably also handle the problem of class through district redistribution, within a geographical discourse, avoiding that heavily loaded Marxist term, “class”. There will be exclusions, but these will be at the margins. The EU will probably also manage the problem of nation through the politics of regionalisation, provided nations are accepted as regions and not only as “landscapes”. In short, the EU would seem to be highly capable of handling “class”, “nation” and “region”. There is some learning going on in Europe, maybe, as opposed to the USA. The real problems come with the degree of validity in the Soviet Union analogy. Five contradictions have been mentioned. The figure would have been much higher had we used the United States analogy. But the objection is obvious: the US Empire has not (yet) collapsed. There may be increasing unrest from the second- and thirdclass members outside the EU, from the second- and third-class “speeds” (interesting terminology) inside the EU, from the rapidly dwindling “countryside”, from increasingly unemployed workers on the dole, from an aging population, from victims of 106

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the prophecies that failed—like those who still feel victimised by not being accepted as “Europeans”. Let all the contradictions accumulate and demoralisation sets in. Let some class and nation problems, strongly articulated, emerge on top of that, and a repressive EU with emergency powers may call on the USA to learn the skills of intervention and act in well-known ways. From soft power to hard power the way can be very short. But the biggest problems are located in the EU relations to the outside, and in its own old expansionist habits. The legacy of Inter Caetera from 1493 remains. Spain is quickly replacing the USA in Latin America as No. 1 in investment in Peru, No. 2 after the USA in Argentina, and as No. 1 as moral authority (Baltazar Garzón!) in connection with the aftermath of military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, and elsewhere. Germany is enacting Bismarck-Kaiser-Hitler policies,24 but this time more successfully, in the former Yugoslavia. Italy is playing its usual farcical game with great expeditions across the sea, the Adriatic, ending up high and dry outside a harbour. France has had less success in the Maghreb. Basic point: sooner or later there will be opposition. That also applies to White-Western-Christian arrogance. Its time has passed. In Eastern Europe it is possible to build some bridges to Orthodoxy, although there are considerable depths to that schism. The bridges to Islam are even more problematic, especially after 9/11, as shown by the case of Turkey. Then, the Big Six game. It is naïve to believe that there is a road to One World via regionalism. The truth is probably quite to the contrary. Regions become superstates become superpowers, and superpowers with super-mentality tend to fight superwars. The bigger the regions, the bigger the wars. From the “unthinkable” of Germany against France (although that depends on who is thinking; let us see what happens if the German language becomes obligatory at a high level in all French schools), to the highly thinkable, because it has already happened in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, of Germany together with France was a very short step.25 In time, as indeed also in space. Who is the enemy? Seek and you shall find. When the vertical structure, the decision-making machinery, the flag and the hymn, the army are ready to go, finding an enemy is the easiest task. Guided by the Occidental Dualism-Manicheism-Armageddon 107

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syndrome all that is needed are old fault-lines to the Orthodox world (Russia), to the Muslim world (terrorism), to the “Yellow Peril” (China, maybe one day Japan again, and China-Japan together), to the Heathens (Third World)—all of them “out to get us”, fueled by envy, marching like lemmings, climbing the walls and swimming the moats of Festung Europa. In short, the problem may be us, the USA; not in the old sense of the USA, but also as EU. Not on the surface but in the hidden crevices of the collective subconscious. Change that, and the future looks brighter. We can also sense a world of small selfreliant units under the soft global governance of a benign UN. With regional confederations. And the Pacific Hemisphere as one of them, overlapping with others. Conclusion: the EU peace within was a major achievement. Peace without still has to be built. That there is much to learn, negatively, but mainly positively, for East Asia, the Western Rim of the Pacific, is beyond doubt.

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7

Towards a Pax Pacifica An East Asian Community

East Asia: Core, Context and the European Analogy We have to know whereof we talk, and the first concept named is already problematic: “East Asia”. “Asia” covers a vast area, from the Bosporus/Urals, to Japan; from the Arctic, to the Arabic-Indian Ocean and Australia/New Zealand. “East Asia” extends to Japan, but where does it start? If West, Central, South, North and Southeast Asia are well defined, is the rest “East Asia”? Then comes “community”, pointing to associative systems of countries; more than a commonwealth, less than a union. In the present UK system and in the former USSR, “commonwealth” stands for shared history of domination by the same country (England, Russia), and a shared, at least secondary, language. The definition is in terms of shared history/culture and the politics is to stop further disintegration. But the domination by Japan lasted only for 50 years down to as little as 5 years, and Japanese has no chance as a lingua franca. We shall use cultural descriptors to define the core of “East Asia” as the four Mahayana Buddhist–Confucian countries, with a shared Chinese heritage and use of Chinese characters: Japan (divided, with Northern Territories and Okinawa problems); China (divided); Korea (divided); and Viêt Nam (united).

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Others use the Eastern coastline of the Asian continent and include Russia and Viêt Nam. But tsarist/bolshevist/capitalist Russia is European culturally, politically and economically. Viêt Nam has not only a coastline but major parts of their culture in common with the other three.1 “Northeast Asia” can be used to include Russia (and Mongolia); “Southeast Asia” includes Viêt Nam, but excludes China, Korea, Japan and Russia. Northeast+East+Southeast is too diverse. So the focus here is on the core, “East Asia”, using the cultural definition. Then there is the whole Asian, or even Asia/Pacific, context that includes Asia with the Western Rim of the Pacific, the Pacific Islands and sometimes even the Eastern Rim. For practical purposes the membership lists for Economic and Social Commission for Asia/ Pacific (ESCAP) and Asia/Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) might be used. The point here is not the exact extension of that context, but rather the concept, and need, for an umbrella for any East Asian core. The countries with a stake in what happens in East Asia constitute that context, whether they are Asian, like India, or not Asian, like Russia, the United States of America and Canada. A parallel from Europe: the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has 55 members (including the USA and Canada), not all of them regarded as European countries. OSCE functions as a context for the most important core organisation, the 25-member European Union (EU). The deep core of the European Union is Roman Catholic— with a long-standing common culture and a centre of power, the Vatican—and Germanic-Protestant, with considerable economic, political and military power. No major Slavic Orthodox or Turko-Muslim countries are likely to become members in the very near future.2 This leads to tensions, as in Yugoslavia. The OSCE bridges the fault-lines from 1054 to the Slavic-Orthodox, and from 1095 to Turko-Muslim countries, and might absorb some of that tension.3 The European Union does not, so far. Bulgarian membership will not change much of that. The deep core of a future East Asian Community (EAC) is Mahayana Buddhist/Confucian/Chinese, with a diverse Asia/ Pacific context. Like the EU core the EAC has a long history of rivalry and warfare.4 And the long overdue context,5 an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/Pacific (OSCAP), will have to bridge even more fault-lines, to Hinayana Buddhism, 110

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to Hinduism, between Sunni and Shia Islam and to Orthodox and other Christian worlds.6 Having said this, a preferred future for East Asia in the year 2025 can be formulated in reasonably precise terms: First, an East Asian Community (EAC) consisting of China,7 the two Koreas, Viêt Nam, off-shore Japan, RyuKyu/Okinawa, Taiwan; in a process from Free Trade Area via Common Market to Economic Community to Community; with the political organs needed for the process of economic cooperation, and as an umbrella for conflict resolution within and among EAC countries. Second, an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/ Pacific (OSCAP), for EAC and its context, including the USA, Russia, EU, and, of course, Indian and OIC. Benefit to the core: cooperative transformation of conflicts. Benefit to the context: lowering the cost of those conflicts. Not that this formula necessarily works. But there is no doubt that the EU has provided a conflict resolution mechanism for the 6–10–12–15–25 member countries as the Community/Union has grown. Thus, the transition of little Andorra between two EU member countries to the status of an independent country, member of the UN, passed almost unnoticed. Something similar may in the future happen to the Basque Country in France and Spain. Northern Ireland could and can draw upon EU support. But the OSCE has not been able, so far, to absorb tensions across the fault-lines to the Slavic-Orthodox and Turko-Muslim countries. Peace in the core may be bought at the price of tension, even war, in the context. Europe has improved since the two world wars, and one Cold War, in the twentieth century. For anyone wanting an EAC and an OSCAP, aiming at a well-integrated EAC well rooted in an OSCAP context by 2025, there is much to learn, positively and negatively, from Europe, including not to integrate the core more quickly than the context can absorb. There are three levels to consider: the countries, the community, the umbrella. Let us look at them in that order.

The EAC Core, the OSCAP Context and Conflict Transformation Three of the four core countries are divided, meaning that much political energy is spent on integration: two for Japan, with Russia 111

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and in a sense with the USA over Okinawa;8 five for China over Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia; a giant one for Korea. Division becomes an obsession. The focus is on the other part, considered hostile (Korea, China) or an instrument of other powers (Okinawa, Northern Territories for Japan; Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang for China, the Koreas for each other). This saps the region of energy needed to build a cooperative EAC and OSCAP that may solve these problems. There is something to learn from German reunification. East Germany/DDR was treated as a de facto member of the (then) European Community, and DDR was a member of the UN, of major UN organisations and of the Helsinki process.9 The implication is both-and; synchrony, not diachrony; proceeding both with the agendas for national unification and the agendas for core and context integration. There should be sufficient motivation for all tasks. The divided nations in the EAC region came out of the Pacific War 1931–45 and the Chinese 1949 Revolution. To overcome division is to undo the Pacific War. Economic cooperation presupposes a political structure that benefits from highspeed transportation-communication and low transaction costs. The primacy of culture in the definition facilitates communitybuilding. The rest is a question of creative leadership for these triple (country, EAC, OSCAP) processes. Let us look at the conflicts to be transcended, seeing the unification problems as a driving force rather than an impediment for regional integration, and regional integration as one of the mechanisms for transforming divided nation conflicts.

Japan-Russia over the Northern Territories/South Kuriles Diagnosis. This thorny issue derives from history and geography pointing in different directions. The four islands (one is actually a small archipelago) were “discovered” 1634 by the Russians and settled by them. In 1875 Japan got the islands in exchange for Sakhalin. At Yalta Franklin D. Roosevelt promised the four islands to the Soviet Union if they enter the Pacific War, possibly as a substitute for having to promise them Hokkaido. In 1972 the Soviet Union agreed to the return of Habomai and Shikotan, but 112

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the ownership of the bigger and southernmost islands Etorofu and Kunashiri is still contested. And they are also Ainu lands. The division of Korea had a similar background. Both can serve as typical examples of big powers cutting, dividing and joining together according to their inclinations and interests, with little regard for people, culture, history and geography. Prognosis. The present situation has lasted almost 60 years and cannot continue forever. There is no negative prognosis if the status quo continues, no war for instance, but a positive prognosis in terms of greatly improved relations if the issue is solved in a mutually acceptable and sustainable way. Therapy. To find a solution, the place to look is not always to whom came first and settled where and when. The meaning of ownership by whom and to whom might be a better point of departure. The economic and military value of the islands as such to the Soviet Union/Russia seems to be negligible. Quite another matter is the price that might be expected for their return if the islands are used as pawns in a bargain, in return for something: money, goods, and/or services, like massive Japanese investment in the Russian Far East and Siberia. Russian oil also enters the picture. No doubt this approach can be used when real estate changes hands. But the Kurile issue is about more than real estate if instead of military or economic values we focus on cultural value. Japan cannot claim a long-lasting relationship, but can claim that the islands belong “naturally” to Japan because of geographical proximity. Turkey can argue this way about the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean that passed from Turkey to Italy to Greece, and Argentine about the Falkland/Malvinas islands. If Japan is now seen as the chosen land for the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu o-mikami, then the islands take on a higher value. They become priceless because the land is sacred, not because of the potential mineral wealth hidden below the ground, as would be emphasised in a more materialistic culture. Such places should be approached with awe, not with money. The Japanese have come close to breaking that rule acquiring some icon property in the USA, as the Russians have in connection with the Kuriles/ Northern Territories. Hence, if something has infinite value to the other side, and only finite value to you, give it back because it is the right thing to do. Do not bargain. Be generous and you 113

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may reap generosity in return. The less you talk of anything in return, the more amply you may be rewarded. The more you haggle, the less you get. The sacred is not to be approached with profanity. And Japan should give to the Ainus. This could be combined with an intermediary step, joint ownership for the two contested islands for a period of X years, after which they will either revert to Japan or remain a condominium (X to be negotiated). The latter would set a useful precedent for territorial conflicts that cannot be decided by self-determination and does not exclude reciprocal generosity. An OSCAP context may be useful for this process.

Japan–United States over Okinawa Diagnosis. Okinawa is an appendix both to Japan and the USA; invaded, settled and annexed by Japan (1879); invaded and occupied by the USA in 1945, after 1972 as a major base, actually with 38 bases on a tiny speck of land. Thus, Okinawans have two mother countries: itself, the RyuKyu Islands, and Japan, for many of the Japanese settlers and for many “indigenous”. Okinawans have three options: independence, status quo with Japan, or in-between: autonomy. Places like Okinawa, Ulster, Hawai’i, Eiffel in Germany, Tahiti, Sicily, North Dakota, Semipalatinsk and Ul Nor in China have in common periphery location and that they were/are all used as testing and/or stationing/launching area for major strategic weapons; deflecting military attention away from the centre. We may also talk about second- and third-order out-stationing. The USA assigns important strategic roles to island countries far away, like to Japan and England, and they push that role on to periphery places like Okinawa and Ulster.10 In the case of Okinawa that points to joint USA–Japan interests. But there are more reasons for the USA to hang on to Okinawa. First, there is an historical reason of perhaps minor significance: Commodore Perry, of “opening Japan” fame, also came to the RyuKyu Islands and crowned himself king. Second and more significantly: Okinawa is the only part of pre-war Japan where the USA fought a land war (with enormous

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casualties on all three sides, above 200,000 altogether, 14,000 of them Americans). That victory needs a symbol: Okinawa. Thus, Washington and Tokyo have coinciding interests, in using the Okinawa 0.6 per cent of Japanese territory for 75 per cent of the US base territory in Japan, occupying 20 per cent of Okinawan land. At least 10 per cent of that land depended on Okinawan land-owners who have leased their property to the US military and do not want to renew the agreements. Tokyo then becomes the willing helper of Washington in trying to get some kind of consent from Okinawan authorities and/or land-owners. Prognosis. People in periphery base areas are usually bribed for being used, and may one day be sacrificed like Pearl Harbor. That possibility will be hidden by veils of patriotism and appeals to serve the common cause of centre and periphery. Short of that there are conflicts, often involving rape, between the local population and the military personnel. Okinawans have approached this dilemma, fraught with violent potential, with nonviolence. But nonviolence is only a process, and does not spell out a possible political outcome. Therapy. An argument for independence would be to be master in one’s own house in order not be used for the military purposes of others. An argument for autonomy would be that this could possibly be obtained with a special status inside Japan, and with no more than 0.6 per cent of the total base territory. The problem of security for Okinawa is probably best solved through the following four-pronged formula: • Be neutral, non-aligned, like the Aland Islands, not serving as a stationing/launching/training centre for anybody. • Develop a strong, non-military, civilian defense capability, belying Napoleon’s statement to Basil Hall in August 1817.11 • Develop good relations with everybody, make all parties interested in the survival, not the defeat of Okinawa, develop a capacity for peace/conflict work, become a regional Geneva— or even headquarters for an East Asian community. • Be as self-reliant economically/ecologically as possible, with a capacity for satisfying own basic needs also in a crisis. In short: a high level of autonomy, close to independence.

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China and Taiwan–Hong Kong–Tibet–Xinjiang– Inner Mongolia Diagnosis. That there are (at least) five autonomy movements in the world’s most populous and at the same time oldest country (from -221; there are older, but not autonomous countries) is not surprising. Those moves for autonomy are along the periphery, indicative of han China overstretching at some point in history (except for Hong Kong/Macao where others overstretched into a han majority). Except for Taiwan, autonomy moves are built around non-han idioms, faiths and myths; and a sense of territory. Thus, classical conditions for secession, irredentism, and claims for independence, are all present. Prognosis. The obvious prognosis is the continuation of the recent and distant past with the Chinese centre controlling han and non-han peripheries, combining carrot (clientelism, use of privileges to attract local leaders), stick (repression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia), and persuasion, with China as a super-nation accommodating others, with a high level of cultural and maybe economic autonomy, but little or no political and certainly no military autonomy, like the Soviet efforts. The power profile used by Beijing differs among the five cases, and over time. A war over Hong Kong with the UK was avoided. A war over Taiwan with the USA may still be avoided, but also may not. Military brutality in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang may be stepped up, but Chinese military are also brutal in han contexts. The more foreign, “barbarian” powers side with a movement, the more recalcitrant the Chinese. The location of the Tibetan exile government in nuclear India, and the deepening linkage between Taiwan and the US–Japan security system will counteract “reasonable” outcomes. Vicious short and long cycles of minor violence are likely. Therapy. One image of a “reasonable” outcome will be to give up the extremist positions of a Chinese unitary state with the present borders plus Taiwan (the “run-away province”), and secession from that unitary state. In-between are federations and confederations;12 words frequently occurring in this author’s dialogues with the parties. Autonomy in domestic affairs would be guaranteed. In federations there would be joint foreign-securityfinance policies; in confederations these policies would be coor116

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dinated. One scenario might be federation as a first step, then a confederation; advancing together, and separately. The underlying philosophy, worthy of China, would be daoist: “in strength weakness, in weakness strength”. Repression shows the weakness of China; gentler constructions may look weaker but are strong enough to do without. First hurdle: the han mind-set as the undisputed rulers between the Himalayas, the desert, the tundra and the sea. Will the Chinese be convinced that a pattern of “six Chinas” may be in their interest? Second, will those who seek independence find that their goals may be better satisfied in a configuration that offers enormous economies of scale and a cultural common ground, yet limits (in a confederation) military-political independence? Third: will all parties agree that the time has come to solve these old Chinese problems jointly, not separately? Fourth: how to protect han Chinese in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia when there is less direct control from Beijing? Much time is needed. Tibetans may have to admit that lamaism was also brutal, and that China has positive aspects. This is easy for Taiwan, being itself so Chinese; but both would have to give up the idea of being the centre of the other. Bridges would have to be built to Kazakhstan and Mongolia,13 finding confederal equality, with Beijing somewhat more equal than the others. Some element of kowtow?

Korea, North and South Diagnosis. Korea is located in the field of force constituted by four big powers: the USA and Japan on one side, well established in South Korea even if resented by parts of the population, and China and the Soviet Union/Russia on the other, with complex relations with North Korea. Thus, there is a 2+4 formula, or a 2+2 formula if only the USA and China are counted, having military alliances with one or the other. The US/Soviet crime of dividing a people in 1945 is compounded by the crime of denying Korea conflict autonomy in this field of force. A high level of mutual Korean resentment, han, combined with solid Korean missionary complexes makes the situation even more complicated. Prognosis. Standard prognoses include collapse of one or the 117

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other Korea, the takeover of one by the other, or the Korean War 1950–53 (actually 1946–53, from the Cheju “incidents”) repeated with some modifications. Then there is another prognosis that seems to be more valid: status quo. And a more optimistic prognosis: there will be a slow move from small steps of cooperation via an associative relationship, then confederation, then federation, and finally to unification. Usually after 40 years new generations come into power, with new perspectives on even bitter, traumatising conflicts, as in Spain 1936–76 and in Germany 1949– 89. 1950–53 should have implied conflict transformation in Korea 1990–93. It did not in this case, possibly due to Confucian inter-generation loyalty, particularly of Kim Jong-Il to Kim IlSun. 2003+ looks more promising. Therapy. Four premisses might help in this transition: • To regard both Koreas as experiencing crises, neither system is perfect. Maybe both Koreas, not only one, have given in to single-minded economic ideologies leading to too little trade in the North and to too much trade in the South, and that allKorean cooperation, including trade, might be useful to both. But the South overcame dictatorship, the North did not. • To talk less about collapse of the countries, more about the need for some social and political change in both countries. • To talk less about unification of the states and more about cooperation between the countries, thereby unifying the nation. • To talk less about the big/hard military-political issues and more about small/soft economic, social and cultural cooperation. Concrete examples of cooperation: • • • •

All-Korean cooperation in alternative energy production. All-Korean cooperation in ecological agriculture, forestation. All-Korean cooperation in fish farming. All-Korean cooperation opening rail and road transportation in a setting of Asian–European Union cooperation (ASEM) and ESCAP plans. • All-Korean cooperation in converting the demilitarised zone (DMZ) to a zone of peace (that could have had joint World Cup games in 2002, but that golden opportunity was missed). 118

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Perspectives on the cooperation: • Direct links between provinces, cities and NGOs important. • Moves towards, and not away from, mixed economy are useful. • Cooperation with East Asian neighbours (China, Japan, Viêt Nam). In negotiation less use of trading X in return for Y. If X is a good idea, like helping North out of famine, mainly due to excessive precipitation and landslides, then do so unconditionally, finding also other good cooperation themes. Do not set deadlines, do not touch the military, do not insist on a peace treaty, rather small steps and many steps. In short: A confederation-federation-unitary North-South process that can be halted, even reversed at any point as long as there is some increase in the level of cooperation. Both Koreas must conclude that EAC and OSCAP would provide a good setting. Since, hopefully, no highly flawed German-type reunification is envisaged in the near future, much can be done without basic system change. The preferred future argued here, the EAC, has as a condition the most likely scenario for progress in the intra-Korean stalemate: opening of the rail and road connections, starting with free flow of goods. This could be combined with a very rapid Pusan–Kyushu connection (by hovercraft or tunnel) to Japan, quick connections with Okinawa and Taiwan, rail to China and Europe, then to Southeast/South Asia. Once the gap between the two Koreas has been filled we can safely assume that by 2025 there will be an enormous and free flow of services and people. There will be frequent Shinkansen-type connections between Tokyo-Beijing and beyond. Air travel will prevail for people, but for goods rail/road will link continents in ever-widening contexts. The Korean Peninsula holds the key, and holds the rest of Eurasia hostage. This solution for Korea will also link poor mainland East Asia and rich (pen)insular East Asia (Japan-RyuKyu/Okinawa-Taiwan, and South Korea); and link core EAC to context OSCAP. The East Asian region has 1,500 million inhabitants, a shared history which is less, not more problematic than the history of European nations in the EU, with a rapidly increasing part that 119

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is tri-cultural: their own, a Chinese base including Chinese characters, and a Euro/American opening in English, and French for Viêt Nam. More people in the region are fluent in European languages than Euramerica can ever hope to become in Asian languages, creating an inter-regional bicultural superiority unknown in the West. They know so much more about the West than the West about them. They still have some steps to make to become a de facto centre of the world, such as some major increases in living standard, infrastructure and human rights. But that is an easy job compared to the cultural deficits of the West, not because Westerners are stupid, but because their arrogance makes them immune to learning from other civilisations.

The Relation between Conflict Transformation and Integration What we now have to explore, if not exactly demonstrate, would be the proposition that conflict transformation at the national (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) level, and both core and context integration, are positively related by mutual and cumulative causation.14 This is not that obvious. Since conflict transformation is seen as the major driving force for a possible East Asian Community, the case has to be argued. Both EAC and OSCAP are multilateral; in the conflicts we are dealing with there is one superpower (USA) and some major powers (China and Russia), all with a penchant for bilateral relations. The USA will be driven by a double sense of a right to be present whenever anything of importance happens and a duty to be present to make them happen. For China, multilateralising the relations to the five more or less articulated strivings for autonomy, and in addition to do some of this in a multilateral setting like the EAC or the OSCAP, is today almost inconceivable. Yet such processes are taking place in Europe even if England, France and Spain still retain control over “internal” problems.15 Russia is being trained by OSCE to submit to some multilateralisation (not for Chechnya, though) and there could be a transfer of that experience to OSCAP. But the basic problem is whether the context is helpful, or obstructive, with other members mainly promoting their own 120

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interests. Multilaterality makes excessive egocentrism visible, the disadvantage being the fear of setting precedents and the lack of creativity. The ideal would be the organisation working as a Committee of the Whole, trying to help unblock deep contradictions/emotions/violence, making EAC/OSCAP integration close to a sufficient condition for conflict transformation. Is transformation also a sufficient condition for integration? Consider the image of East Asia that emerges if these persistent problems find their temporary solution: As argued above, in connection with Korea: there will be a heavy flow of goods, followed by person traffic, followed by communication between the two Koreas and the poor and the rich parts of East Asia once the RR hurdle has been overcome. This would locate the two Koreas not in the 2+2 context, but in the 2+3 context of the other three members of an East Asian Community. The web of interaction could become dense even if in the beginning North Korea mainly watches trains and trucks come and go, charging a (heavy) fee for (hopefully) innocent passage. Imagine, then, Japan upgrading Okinawa to a higher level of autonomy, attracting conferences, trade and entrepots, linking the two East Asian islands of Taiwan and Japan via the RyuKyu archipelago, getting the basing level down to the average rate for Japan, while guarding the collective memory of the war. Imagine a more relaxed, flexible, looser China generalising what it is learned from Hong Kong to the other four, less bent on control, more on cooperation and friendship. Imagine Japan conceiving of joint sovereignty for a part of the Northern Territories, for some period of time, as a way of deepening cooperative relations with Russia. Imagine the USA invited to EAC meetings as an observer, and to OSCAP meetings as a member, satisfied with voice and vote rather than veto, watching the region mature as EAC/OSCAP gets rooted; and we would have something quite similar to Europe, with the Cold War out of the way, and the Soviet Union, even Russia, loosening up. And hopefully without any Yugoslavia happening. The most similar to that tragedy is Kashmir, but that is far away from EAC. In short, by 2025 an East Asian Common Market should be highly feasible, using 50 years EU experience (from May 9, 1950; by 2025, 75 years) in integrating nations with common culture 121

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(two of three Christianities, two of three key European language families); but, also so far excluding one Christianity and Islam. There is the Achilles heel, as argued. EAC, beware. Building on the cultural base and a common market for goods of very high quality and highly competitive prices, relations might move from an associative system to confederate structures; with a private sector for growth, and an intact public sector for distribution. Crucial for this to happen is of course not only governmental cooperation but something equally important: a vibrant East Asian civil society of NGOs and LAs (local authorities), and a dynamic yet considerate, gentle, corporate sector. They seem all to be coming, in some countries more than in others. Their growth has to be accelerated. The key to that acceleration is democracy, all over. At this point there is also another, major driving force favoring what is here seen as the preferred future. The process often referred to as “globalisation” has the USA as the major driving force, with the US government and US business working hand in hand, with businesses of other countries following, and the governments of other countries abandoning their roles as policymakers. Globalisation makes an incredible variety of goods available to the countless consumers who can afford them, and at the same time destroys numerous producers who cannot compete, and plunges consumers who cannot buy into even deeper misery. Reactions will probably come from LAs building strong local economies for basic needs, and from NGOs organising consumers’ boycotts, supporting the LAs etc. But sooner or later governments will also react, probably together more than separately. The EAC might find nourishment in this fertile soil, like the EU has done. They may imitate the EU rather than NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), not aiming at a yen zone but something similar to the euro, based on all currencies (an Asia?), and like the ecu16 starting as an accounting device. This presupposes financial coordination and a pattern whereby all four members combine complementarity with equity. We have assumed a common cultural base that facilitates mutual understanding, an economic complementarity that will make the steps from free trade area via common market to an economic community relatively easy, and readiness to enter the necessary and sufficient political deals. How about military cooperation? 122

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The idea is, of course, to substitute for AMPO,17 with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) PLA the major military structure in the region, the OSCAP as an organisation for the whole context, engaged in confidence-building measures, and above all in conflict transformation. This presupposes a political will in Japan, probably emerging if a sufficient number of Japanese realise that with the Cold War the main rationale for AMPO is gone, leaving Asian countries to conclude that Japan regards them as enemies, e.g. in the island conflicts. Within EAC/OSCAP those islands in the East Sea might be regionalised, and would benefit them all. And it presupposes political will in the USA. Some people will be unwilling “to let East Asia go”. But some people were also unwilling to “let Europe go”, and yet the post–Cold War development has been in that direction, except for Yugoslavia. It is hard to see harmful implications for the USA in this. To the contrary, mutual liberation will yield to cooperation, liberating the USA from some of its imperial burden.

Conclusion: Some Problems to Watch Problem I: Will the EAC emulate the USA and the EU (Tindemans Plan)18 and be an integrated superpower, stimulating the same in Russia? Answer: The problem would be whether OSCAP functions, solving problems as they appear. EAC borders on Russia and on ASEAN. A militarily integrated EAC with offensive capability would be as provocative to Russia as the EU and NATO become when it borders on Russia in more central areas than Finland, and if the EU realises the Tindemans Plan (integrated armies, integrated arms manufacturing, satellites/agencies, nuclear arms). The strong Russian–Chinese reaction to the double expansion of NATO eastward and AMPO westward already serves as an indicator. Another aspect of this problem is whether the EAC will emulate the EU as a political supermarket in the sense of “I’ll support your advances in direction X if you support me when I advance in direction Y”; X and Y being outside the EAC. Thus, China and Japan may trade small islands in the Pacific instead of the obvious, making (most of) them joint EAC territory. Hopefully, this negative aspect of the EU will not be imitated. 123

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Problem II: How will EAC/Asia-Pacific competition with EU/ Lomé and US/NAFTA be handled? Answer: The best EAC strategy is probably to invite partnership from the very beginning, but this may be difficult if a major test and driving force is the ability to stand up against the pressure from the USA and the EU. Nevertheless, it should be done; and both the USA and the EU would do well leaving the East Asian giant to sort out its own problems—remembering that none of these countries tried to interfere with integration processes in the Americas and Europe in the twentieth century. East Asian countries belong to themselves and to nobody else. Problem III: Will Japan be able/willing to join the other three as an equal partner, or cling to US/AMPO/NATO in an effort to be one notch above, thereby risking both isolation from East Asia, and to be thrown away when no longer serving US interests? Answer: The answer may be located in the last point, and the possibility of a new generation of Japanese leadership. The basic question in Japanese politics is whether the country will cease being a de facto one-party (LDP) state, even with a premier (Mori) who talks about (May 2000) “Japan as a divine country centered on the emperor”? And another premier (Koizumi) following the US Iraq policy to the bitter end (autumn 2004)? Problem IV: Will the USA accept an East Asia handling itself? Answer: There may be an unfortunate mechanism at work here. The USA itself knows better than anybody else how violently it behaved toward the four members, mentioned here, of a possible East Asian Community: Japan (nuclear holocaust), Korea (the killing of civilians from Cheju, April 3, 1946), China (meddling) and Viêt Nam (killing of maybe three million during the war). When somebody has inflicted traumas on someone there is always the (subconscious) idea that “one day they may come back and do the same to us”. Hence, better keep them apart, absorb them into Southeast Asia, or a Northeast Asia with only the Far East part of Russia and APEC integration but never put them together. Have a rich texture of military bases and agreements in the area. Such problems are real and should be taken head on, also by having Truth and Reconciliation commissions in the whole region (see the Epilogue). The USA supported the early stages of Western European integration as a bulwark against Soviet expansion, but has no such 124

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reason to support East Asian integration. As the EC became the EU and the Cold War evaporated so did US support. Problem V: But isn’t Asia as a whole a more brutal region than Europe, and hence less fit for any peaceful integration? Answer: This is a commonly held European belief, and cases like the Japanese Nanjing massacre and Unit 731 medical experiments on prisoners, the wars in Korea and Viêt Nam, the massacre in Indonesia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are mentioned. But the first is not worse than the German massacres on Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, and their medical experiments. The next two are to a large extent Western responsibilities; that may also apply to much of what happened in Indonesia. And, as to Khmer Rouge, let us first be sure we know how many were killed by US bombing, how many by Khmer Rouge (and how many by misery); and who supported and who tried to oppose the Khmer Rouge. Is Asian violence particularly brutal? By that we usually mean sadistic killing, not just execution at a distance. But sadism is also found in Northern Ireland and in the former Yugoslavia, possibly because of uninterrupted traditions of warfare from the Middle Ages when the suffering, not only the death, of the victim was a major goal. Yet, in spite of all of this, EU members are now close enough for major integrative advances. Problem VI: Isn’t Japan very inept at healing old wounds? Answer: Japan has to learn from Germany and particularly from Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik how to handle textbook issues, and from South Korea and Kim Dae-Jung’s “sunshine policy” (inspired by Brandt), which has had remarkable effect in North Korea, but not yet in Japan. North Korea has been traumatised in four ways: by Japanese imperialism, the division of the country, the Korean War, and by the US bases. Japan needs to apologise for the first, US/Russia for the second, all of them for the third, and the bases have to be reduced/withdrawn. Problem VII: How about the Chinese military build-up? Answer: China is changing military doctrine from a low-tech huge army prepared for a ground attack by the Soviet Union, to a more high-tech air force with missiles and navy, as an obvious response to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the NATO/ AMPO expansion. The West often reacts as if it were permanently in the Jean Piaget infantile stage of absolutism, seeing the action of others as something generated autistically by them and 125

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not (also) as their reactio to some Western actio; in other words within the more advanced Piaget stage of reciprocity. This problem can only be solved by the West (and Japan) loosening the pincer movement on “Eurasia” caused by the double expansion. Problem VIII: But do the EAC countries have a vibrant and internationalising civil society as a condition for integration? Answer: No doubt Nordic and Western European NGOs cooperating were important predecessors of the integration in the two areas, and no doubt even the two EAC countries with rapidly growing NGO communities, Japan and South Korea, are not necessarily reaching out to each other but to the USA and EU countries. But that can change rapidly. The biggest NGO conference ever was held in Seoul, in October 1999, with President Kim Dae-Jung declaring the twenty-first century to be the NGO century. He pointed out in his speech that three major, recent and positive events, the agreements to ban anti-personnel landmines (Ottawa), an international criminal court (Rome) and debt relief (Cologne), had one thing in common: NGO cooperation and effective lobbying. He could have added that they also had another thing in common: the USA was against all three. Apart from that, however, we may say that where united NGOs lead, governments tend to follow. We live in a world with the USA and world civil society opposing each other. Problem IX: Are Asian countries sufficiently democratic? Answer: A prominent East Asian, Tommy Koh of Singapore, lists ten values19 with the claim that “Taken together these 10 values form a framework that has enabled societies in East Asia to achieve economic prosperity, progress, harmonious relations between citizens, and law and order”. The values are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

strong families; education; hard work; saving and frugality; a social contract between citizen and state: governments have an obligation to treat their people with fairness and humanity; citizens are expected to be law-abiding; 6. national teamwork; 7. a free press, but “the press must act responsibly”; 8. citizens as stakeholders in the country; 126

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9. a morally wholesome environment in which to bring up children; and 10. not extreme individualism: every individual is a member of a nuclear and extended family, clan, neighbourhood, community, nation and state. There is nothing extreme or arcane in this. The West is suffering from such high levels of dissolution of compelling norms (anomie) and dissolution of social fabric (atomie), with crime, corruption, violence etc., that it might have much to learn from this list. We should notice, though, that Koh uses the word “East Asia”, probably referring to the Confucian/Buddhist part, not the Christian, Islamic or Hindu parts. The West should react responsibly and not interpret “collective” as dictatorship even if at times that accusation may be valid. Instead of preaching to East Asia, a dialogue is called for; including inviting teams of East Asians to the West as advisors on values. Foreign affairs are not democratic in any country and peaceful relations can also be built between non-democratic countries. Moreover, there is no rule saying that the consent by the ruled has to be obtained through debate and voting. There is also the possibility of dialogue and consensus, at least at lower levels of political organisation, like local authorities. This approach may fit East Asian culture and structure better. Problem X: Beyond a focus on differences and similarities between East Asia and Western Europe, how could Asia and Europe cooperate to promote better relations between the continents? Answer: Building on the points above, here are five ideas: 1. Establish viable train connections, both the northern route via Korea-China-Mongolia-Russia and the southern route via Korea-China-Burma-Bangladesh-India-Pakistan-Iran-Turkey. Make fares accessible to students and other young people, have rolling on-train universities. 2. Facilitate massive student exchanges, symmetrically, in both directions, but also along the railways inside Asia and inside Europe, contributing to making the whole Eurasian region a peace region. 3. Engage in dialogues of civilisations, focused on such themes as human rights in I-cultures and in we-cultures, and on 127

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democracy in debating cultures and dialogue cultures.20 The dialogues should be at the NGO, government and expert levels; leading to a dialogue among the dialogues. 4. Stop the NATO-AMPO expansion essentially pushed by the USA, a country belonging to neither of the two continents. 5. Give expert advice to the Asians in general, and the East Asians in particular about the details of core and context integration, sharing the experiences both with the building of the EU and the OSCE. To end with a metaphor: food. Those trains would cross very different culinary traditions in the world, not only the obvious high points of Chinese and French cooking. Maybe one day some synthesis, some dishes at an even higher level will emerge, being served on those rolling symbols of Eurasian togetherness? Using food as one way to peace?

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Epilogue Pax Pacifica in Yokohama Harbor

Ho’o pono pono, setting right, is a Polynesian, and in this form Hawai’ian, approach to conflict transformation and reconciliation. Perpetrators, victims, some who are both, and some who are neither, sit around a table, chaired by a “Wise Person”, and speak their mind. There are five phases as pointed out in the text (see Chapter 5 above): 1. Establishing the facts, what happened in the community of nations. 2. Exploring why it happened, emphasising acts of commission and omission. 3. Sharing responsibility, also for acts of omission, apologising. 4. A constructive, future-oriented program, based on [1], [2], [3]. 5. Declaring the conflict closed, symbolic burning of records. The setting: The huge Queen Elizabeth arrival hall was put at the disposal by the City of Yokohama, a Peace Messenger, for TRANSCEND and PeaceTune—a Japanese NGO that organises exhibitions and concerts for peace. Two days in August 2002, for workshops and ho’o pono pono. The cast: 14 persons (national groups sit next to each other): Wise Person (WP): Johan Galtung, with Fumiko Nishimura interpreting. 129

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Japanese Politician Japanese Zero Bomber Japanese hibakusha, Woman US Politician US Hiroshima Bomber US Hawai’ian Korean Politician Korean Comfort Woman Korean zainichi (Korean resident in Japan) Chinese Politician Chinese Nanjing Victim Chinese Taiwanese (Well—the nationalities were right, but they were people acting the roles). The WP opens the ho’o pono pono with a statement of purpose. The ho’o pono pono then proceeds to phases [2], [3] and [4]. Each participant has a statement in each phase; 1 + 36 all together. The following summarises the statements to get the gist of what happened and could be done anywhere in the Hemisphere. WP: Dear Participants—and Dear Spectators who will refrain from any comment as the ho’o pono pono proceeds. Afterwards the floor is open. We are here today to understand better what happened during the Pacific War 1931–45—with forerunners and aftermath. You have been woven together in nets of causes and consequences with no beginning and no clear end. There will be no fingerpointing, “You are guilty”. Our purpose goes beyond mere understanding, however. We all have our part of the responsibility for the horrors that happened, partly by what we did, and perhaps even more so by what we did not do. Our focus goes beyond explanation. We also want to understand what could have been done that we did not do. We want to see ourselves for what we are: human beings with a limited understanding of the complex totality of the Pacific War, pushed and pulled into action we may have come to regret. We are all together in this, sharing responsibility. We are here to apologise, maybe to ourselves, to each other, to others not present. But we are also here to see what can be done so that the horrors are not repeated. 130

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We are here to close that chapter and open another. May that be one of happy co-existence from one rim of the Pacific to the other. There will be somebody taking note of what is said. But what happens is not between you and a sheet of paper. It is between you and yourself. It is between you and your neighbours around the table. And it is between you all and everybody else in that enormous network of co-arising dependencies as Buddhists would say, engi in Japanese. These interconnections are often divided into three parts: Japan attacking East Asia, particularly China and Korea; Japan attacking Pearl Harbor; the USA attacking Japan, with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No such division exists in reality. The three parts are connected and will be treated that way in this ho’o pono pono. WP: I now turn to you all. We want to explore why it happened, focusing on acts of commission, your own or others’, and on the events of the Pacific War, 1931–45. Japanese Politician, you first, please. Japanese Politician: What else could we have done? The West had encircled us, the USA, the Dutch, the British, Hawai’i, the US Navy all over. We had the same right as they to colonies. They had more than enough. We were a young, energetic nation. Some neighbours cried for liberation from the West. Other neighbours wanted liberation from tired, dying dynasties. We were free. They needed our energy. Then came embargo, threats. Yes, we advanced, west, south, to the north. And we had to protect our back. We had to eliminate Pearl Harbor. Japanese Zero Bomber: Yes, we did it. Early morning Hawai’i time December 7, 1941. We took off from the aircraft carriers, they sped away from Hawai’i to be outside the action radius of US aircraft in hot pursuit. We had come close enough to have enough petrol left. We had a clear task: eliminate the US Pacific fleet that threatened us, but minimise civilian casualties. We did it. For our Emperor. For Japan. Japanese Hibakusha Woman: And we paid dearly for all of that. Our suffering as hibakusha, as Japanese citizens, was unspeakable. It came like lightening from a cloudless sky, early August 6, 1945. We were not warriors. They killed us just to kill us. Many of us died the same instant. Many of us died slowly, some very 131

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slowly, eaten up by the radioactivity. Why, why … ? Because we are Japanese, yellow they call it. And no admission, no guilt. Look at how they write about it, look at their museums, their necklaces, earrings. They celebrate, proudly. US Politician: Yes, we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We did it to save the lives of our GIs who had suffered unspeakable hardship during the Pacific campaign. We decided to end the war. Why? Ever heard of Pearl Harbor? They started it. We ended it. We had to end it somewhere. US Hiroshima Bomber: Yes, we did it. I was told we had a special bomb that would save US lives and end the war. The flight plan was also special. I saw the mushroom cloud. I felt something horrible, something beyond anything else I had heard of. And I was in the centre. US Hawai’ian: You want to know what I felt? When I saw the planes and the bombs falling, the flames, when I heard the explosions? I felt horror, of course. But I also felt something else. The Japanese had hit their Hawai’i, the Hawai’i of the haole, of the white man, not our Hawai’i, our beloved kingdom they had stolen from us 50 years earlier. At the same time, I guess I felt it was wrong what they did. Korean Politician: Japan colonised us, they exploited us, they raped our women. And you know what was the worst thing they did? They reduced us to a colony, to something the victors could just divide and deal with as they wanted. I blame the allies, the later superpowers for that, and particularly the USA because it still has not pulled out. But above all I blame Japan. And the textbooks they write! They never manage to admit, confess, really apologise. When will they ever learn? Korean Comfort Woman: I still cry. The Japanese forced us, raped us, humiliated, degraded us as humans, as women. Some refused, they were killed in front of the others. Yes, some volunteered. I pray, don’t use that to detract from the immense suffering of the rest of us. We lost our lives. Our own men did not want to touch us. Only very recently could we talk about and share our suffering. Korean Zainichi: Japan used us as slaves. We were taken from our homes, from our families, forced to work in ammunition factories, the mines, anything for them and their war. After the war many of us did not go back. We became a big community but regardless of what we do the Japanese never really respect 132

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us. We are lost between the two, not accepted as Japanese, and no longer the Koreans we used to be. Chinese Politician: We were weak, and even more weakened by the civil war. The Japanese made use of this for their imperial designs, advancing as they call it into Manchuria and created their puppet state Manchukuo. And then came the big attack. Why the rape of Nanjing? Because they wanted to spread terror and panic to tell us in no uncertain terms who were the masters. They even experimented on some of us, with vivisection, in their horrible Unit 731. What did they reap? Hatred and deep resistance. Some of it still there. Chinese Nanjing Victim: This was genocide on a city and they do not even say so in their textbooks! They threw the babies up in the air and caught them on the bayonets with the mothers watching, they raped them, killed them, threw them in the ditches, they went on and on for weeks, months. I managed to hide, crept away at night. To tell the story, against all the Japanese lies. Some of the lies are still there. Chinese Taiwanese: Well, I don’t know. Japanese colonialism in Taiwan was wrong. It was bad, but not only bad. You see, we had Mainland China here before the Japanese came and they returned after the Japanese left. They treated us even worse. The Japanese built schools and clinics and roads. To China we were just a possession. Maybe I am too soft on Japan. But it is impossible not to compare. And when I do, Japan comes out as the better coloniser. Moreover, they had already invaded us decades earlier. Maybe they got worse in the meantime? WP: I deeply thank you all for your words, spoken not only by your mouth, but coming from your heart. You have given vivid testimony, all from your angles, proving again the truth of the marvelous Kurosawa movie Rashomon, how the same story has as many facets as it has humans living it, reflecting on it, telling it. I now call on you to reflect even deeper, this time more on what you could have done but did not do, sharing the responsibility, apologising. We do it in the same order. Japanese Politician: It all became a catastrophe. Of course war is war. Wars are like that. We had some points. But we had no right to inflict all that suffering. We should have negotiated more and advanced less or not at all. Nothing justifies all that violence. I apologise deeply—but that cannot undo the suffering. 133

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Japanese Zero Bomber: Now I know more. And I know what came out of it. Of course the USA hit back. And I should have understood more. I just followed orders. And I was so proud of my plane. And of my skills! How stupid, I was a little child with a toy. I apologise. Japanese Hibakusha Woman: We should never have let the government lead us into that horrible war. And we women are half of the society; had we refused to be in it, refused to work in the factories, told our husbands, brothers, sons, fathers to hide, to escape abroad, yes—rather suicide than killing, killing, killing. I apologise. US Politician: Maybe we should have nuked an unpopulated island instead. We did not have to kill that many people. That message would have been clear enough. We made a mistake and lowered even further the bar for what can be done in wars. Of course the Japanese were wrong in attacking Pearl Harbor, but we should not have provoked them and later on be lying about it. We were arrogant and ignorant. We were pursuing world hegemony and still are. We have neither the intellectual, nor the moral capacity to do so, let alone any right. I apologise, not only for those two bombs, but for the whole underlying idea of becoming the world’s master by stepping into other peoples’s wars and empires. US Hiroshima Bomber: An unspeakable crime. I should have refused. My ignorance is no excuse, I should have gotten that information, cost what it may. I should have ditched the plane, whatever, that would only have been our small lives, not the tens of thousands we killed in one instant with one bomb. I apologise from the bottom of my soul. US Hawai’ian: We are also to blame. We Hawai’ians should have struggled more against the US military coup, annexation, and against US militarisation. They used us, almost as a bait attracting the Zero bombers, far enough away from their own lands. Bad of them. But we also let ourselves be used. I apologise for our failure to protest, not only with words, in action, deep action, strong action, without violence. There is much nonviolence in our tradition. After all, aloha is also that Big Togetherness that unites us all, and not only humans but also with nature, and not only live nature, with all nature, everywhere, at all times. I also apologise. We could have done more, much more. Korean Politician: We were fighting, under the leadership of 134

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Kim Il Sung. Many of us died. We were captured, imprisoned, tortured, executed. And yet we should have struggled more against Japanese imperialism. Many of us cooperated with the enemy, we should have won them over to our cause. But—the big BUT: maybe we should have learnt from Gandhi. He was only a couple of countries away. He hated colonialism as much as we did. And yet he fought nonviolently, gained independence with almost no violence, and with better relations to the coloniser. We should have learnt. I apologise. Korean Comfort Woman: There must be somewhere where we could have learnt how to resist Japanese imperialism in all its manifestations. Not only we women, our men too. We thought the Japanese were animals; but there must have been something human in them we could have appealed to. However, nobody ever taught us anything. And the risks of any individual resistance was too high. We knew that such things may happen. Maybe we should have prepared ourselves better. I apologise. Korean Zainichi: We should also have learnt how to resist, not let ourselves be forced. And that also applies today. Maybe we are too eager to get into a Japanese society that will never fully accept us. Maybe we should learn from Gandhi to be more proud of our own culture and even more have our own institutions. Let those who want to join Japan on Japan’s terms have the freedom to do so, and let the rest of us develop our own Korean ways. My apology. But never too late. Chinese Politician: We were too weak and too divided. We certainly should never have given in to the oppressors. We should have resisted them even more. We should have been stronger. And maybe we should have learnt from Gandhi. We always found him a little strange, we should have overcome such feelings and understood that violence only made the Japanese stronger. Nonviolence was the way. My apology. Chinese Nanjing Victim: We were too weak and divided. We should have been stronger in resisting Japanese militarism. When finally they took the city and got started with their genocide it was too late. We have to see such things ahead of time and be prepared. My apology. But I feel there are certain others who should apologise more, much more. Chinese Taiwanese: You must understand that to resist both China and Japan is a tall bill. It is human to resist more the lesser 135

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evil. It is only now, generations later, that the Taiwanese slowly have found ways of liberation not only from the Japanese but also from China, and yet we have reasonably good relations with both. Maybe there is a point here. Less violent approaches work better but also take more time, like Chinese medicine relative to Western medication. I apologise, but like my friend here I feel others must apologise more. WP: I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your search for a deeper understanding. We humans are not only what we do. We are also what we do not do, what we fail to do, what we should have done. I took note of what came up again and again. We should have had more knowledge, more insight, we should have disobeyed orders at times, we should have resisted nonviolently, we should have known how to do it. Let us all take the hands of our neighbours using fully the ho’o pono circle that ties us together. Let us bow our heads, let each one of us reflect on our part of the responsibility for what happened. And even more on what we could have done but did not do. You have apologised individually. This is our collective apology. And let us then turn to the third and last round. The clouds are dark. How can we dispel them and have the sun of peace shine on us all? We know that tidying up the past through a reconciliation that heals the wounds and brings us closure is indispensable. But real peace can only be found in togetherness, like in an East Asian Community, in an EAC similar to the EC, the European Community, today the European Union, with an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/Pacific, an OSCAP, similar to OSCE. The last round, in the same order please. Japanese Politician: I think that for anything to happen we have to do what we so far have failed to do. We have to come to grips with our own past. It was not all our fault. And we have already apologised to the West, to Korea and China, to the East to the USA. But we have to learn from the Germans. An apology is also a relation to ourselves, an inner admission of the wrongs we did, a rejection of the whole period, maybe also of some features deep down in our society and our culture that were there long before the Pacific War of 1931–45, and maybe still are with us. It is a relation to ourselves, that means to us, to our children, to our

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grandchildren. There is no better instrument for reconciliation than decent school textbooks. Long overdue, but not too late. But we also have to look into the future. Yes, a quick glance at the map is enough to know where we are. Let us learn from the Europeans. They accepted Germany into the family and even created a family of Western European countries for that purpose, the European Economic Community, then the European Community, now the European Union. Let us create an East Asian Community, with Korea North and South and maybe that could bring them closer, with China and Taiwan, and maybe that could bring them closer, with our Northern Territories, the South Kuriles one way or the other, and maybe that can bring us closer. It will be more than an economic common market, less than a union. We Japanese have to learn the difficult arts of equality and equity, of treating others like we would like them to treat us. And let us include our friends in Viêt Nam, another ConfucianBuddhist country deeply marked by Chinese culture and history, that has suffered more than most, from us, from the French, from the USA, from China and has beaten us all or staved us off. If they want to join then they are also in it. Obviously, the United States is not a part of our East Asian geography, nor does it have a Confucian-Buddhist culture, nor have they lived next to the Chinese giant and been a part of its history. They will be neither included nor excluded. We have to learn to deal with the USA like the Europeans deal with them. We Japanese want to be equal both to the USA and to China, the Korean Peninsula and Viêt Nam. We have to learn not to submit to the former and not to be arrogant towards the latter. I used to think that A9 in our peace constitution denying us the right to go to war was all we needed. We need A9, but also something more constructive. I sense a new phase in our history coming! Japanese Zero Bomber: I like this. Millions of us Japanese died, for what? For the Emperor? For the Sun Goddess? Nobody believes in that stuff any longer. For what did we sacrifice not only our lives but that of others? For nothing—a whole generation flushed down the drain with the rains of a long winter? It was certainly good we did not win. But we did not get peace either. There should at least be a peace that would give some meaning

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to our suffering. Something should come out of it, something greater than we put into it. I join. Japanese Hibakusha Woman: I agree, there must be a meaning to our unspeakable suffering. Suffering is bad enough. Suffering without any meaning is hell. There has been a message, a light from Hiroshima: No more atom bombs, No more war. We shall stick to that message from here to eternity. But down with the bomb and with the arms in general is not good enough. Let us start with real peace with our neighbours. An East Asian Community should be not only economic. It should be a lasting monument to those whose lives were taken. Our cultures should blossom together. So should East Asian women. Let this be a community where from the very beginning women carry half the heaven as some Chinese say, with the respect for life we women have in us more than most men. US Politician: I listen, I learn. Very new to me, but I like what I hear. And I am thinking, if the Japanese can have a sense of contrition, how about us? Yes, we did unspeakable wrong, and not only Hiroshima-Nagasaki, we firebombed, we killed civilians all over, in Japan as also in Europe. We have much to write into our textbooks, they will become quite bulky if our history has to be written as the history of suffering of others, at our hands, starting when the Pilgrims landed. But I am afraid some of the problem is located deeper down. We are obsessed with something we call our national interest. Not only do we think it is located all over the world, but we and we alone decide where, and when and how to enact it. Maybe our national interest is our own people and lies in creating a beautiful USA? There, at home? And if the Inuits in Alaska, the Hawai’ians, the First Nations, the Hispanics, the African Americans want some other solution who are we to deny them that? Just like the Japanese had to rid themselves of the idea that they had a divine mandate to lord it over all their neighbours we have to rid ourselves of the idea of lording it over the whole world. The world is made as a plaything for us to rule. OK, OK. I get it. But there is work to do. We are at A. We want to get to B. Let’s get the car moving! But let us push and pull together, in the same direction. You will need some kind of Organisation for Security and Cooperation in the Asia/Pacific; maybe we are only 138

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observers in that one. But in a Pacific Hemisphere Forum, let alone the United Nations, we would be fully present with all our country has to offer, and that is a lot. Do not include us in all of this, but do not exclude us either, tighter cooperation in East Asia fine, but with, not against the USA. US Hiroshima Bomber: My body did not suffer. My soul did, my spirit. Not only did I suffer the suffering of the victims; I suffered the suffering of the perpetrator, of having inflicted that unspeakable pain upon others. Ban nuclear weapons, ban all weapons. And for us soldiers: Know what you do! Never take an order if you cannot live with the consequences. War Veterans Against War, that is what we need. And as to that East Asian Community: I know where the capital should be. Not in Hiroshima, Hiroshima already is a memorial in its own right, to human folly and human suffering. It should be in Okinawa where US and Japanese soldiers were killing each other and killing civilians who also killed themselves in massive acts of suicide. Okinawa, or the RyuKyu Islands as they call it, should have a special status anyhow. Let it be the Brussels, and the Geneva of the East Asian Community. And how about Hong Kong as a new seat for the United Nations? US Hawai’ian: Grand visions. Nothing against them, but maybe a little bit too grand for me. We certainly want a Pax Pacifica, inspired by the aloha spirit, from West Pacific to East Pacific. But you great people West and East of us, you seem to forget us islanders in the middle, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians or whatever you liked to call us. I am not saying, “Pacific, that is us”. But many of us are still colonised. Give us our rightful place, our sovereignty back! We are not going to kick out anybody. But it is our land. We humans are part of nature and nature is in us. Kill nature like you people do, West and East, and you kill yourselves. We own that gift together. An individual plot is exactly that, a plot against nature. And the aloha spirit fills us all, making us a “we”, not a Western “I” that you even capitalise. Live in our lands, by the rules of the land. Korean Politician: An East Asian Community is fine, within that one it would be much easier to become a unified nation. That is what matters, we Koreans have the right to be one nation like others, moving freely, with an open border between the two 139

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states. They may later become one state. With that Community we would be equal to our big neighbours China and Japan, maybe we could even mediate between them. With the Vietnamese we would be two bigger and two smaller. Not bad. But I would make a plea for Russia, not present in our ho’o pono. They are not members of the East Asian family. But they certainly would be members of another family, of an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/Pacific, OSCAP, like the Europeans have in their OSCE. And they are members of a United Nations to unite us all. Like the USA and China they will have to give up the veto power and become like the rest of us. And Japan should set higher goals for itself than to become a member of that club. Big Powers are certainly Big, but our history tells us clearly that Great they are not. Korean Comfort Woman: An East Asian Community is fine with me if that can also civilise the Japanese. That is a community of countries, of nations and states. Good. But we shall never get a real community unless it is also a community between men and women. They regarded us, and many men still do, as a plaything. Disrespect is much too mild a word. Unless men learn to respect women, any community made of states and nations, and they like making such things, will be seriously flawed. Korean Zainichi: We would feel at home in an East Asian Community being in a sense both Korean and Japanese, many of us perfectly bilingual and bicultural in general. But the Japanese also have to become more multicultural. Many of them talk acceptable English by now. But how about Korean? They forced us to talk their tongue, even to have Japanese names. Are they willing to talk ours in return for that? Or are they like the Westerners who colonised all over the world, pressed their religion and language on others and only picked up some spices, learning nothing? Well, having lived among them, I’ll tell you something. Japanese are great learners. Once they set their mind to it they will sit down in groups, work like hell, and learn anything, including the languages of their neighbours. Chinese Politician: An East Asian Community would be fine, and I also agree that it should be friendly and equitable to those Western nations, the Russians and the USA, even if we have suffered much from both of them. Of course, it must not become 140

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a tool for Japanese hegemony. The Japanese tend to be bossy and we will not accept that. But we also have to learn something. This old Confucian idea of we being the Kingdom in the Middle surrounded by Barbarians North, East, South and West is not good enough. We, like the people in the USA and the Russians, let alone the Japanese, have to learn that we are all one nation in a family of nations. Not easy for them, Nihon, the Origin of the Sun, not easy for us. Together we can do great things, even miracles. We are about 1,500 million in East Asia, all inspired by a Confucian ethic for hard work and a Buddhist ethic for sharing and community. We have not always practiced that. Time has come, for ourselves, not against anybody, with them all. Our borders can be open, also for capital, goods, labour, both ways incidentally. I sense something great coming. We join. Chinese Nanjing Victim: Well, well, big words, big male mouths. Politicians talk like that. I have heard worse talk though. But I’ll tell you one thing. Our city was brutalised. We want direct cooperation with decent Japanese cities, and I am sure there are Korean cities that want the same. This has to be people to people, not only Big Man to Big Man, thousands of cities, hundreds of non-governmental organisations. Let them meet, come close, exchange experiences and of course not only about the war and other catastrophes, about the beauty of human life, let our cultures blossom. I am yearning for it! Chinese Taiwanese: The East Asian Community sounds fine, with Taiwan as one partner. We have Cross-Straits exchange with China, this could expand and in many directions. You have been talking about where the center should be, a community that big needs a center somewhere but it should not be in the big countries. Maybe with us—we talk both Chinese and English and even if all of us learn to respect the other languages of the EAC, English will play a role. Remember, we have experiences with both China and Japan, and if they both, not only the Japanese, rewrite their textbooks we can live even better with them. WP: Again I take note of the road that we should travel: concentric circles, an East Asian Community, an OSPAC possibly with the whole Pacific Hemisphere, the United Nations for us all. And again I ask you to hold hands, to close our circle, to think pacific, peaceful thoughts and feel them in your heart. But I do 141

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not ask you to bow your heads. I ask you to lift your head, to hold it high, to share a moment of joy celebrating our vision! And let us also hold high the sheet of paper to which we committed the facts of this sad chapter in Pacific history and put it to the match. We shall never forget. But we can close that chapter. And we can open a new one. And the title you all know: Pax Pacifica.

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Forewords 1. www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm. 2. Johan Galtung and Daisaku Ikeda, Choose Peace, London: Pluto Press, 1995, p. 4. 3. www.peace.ca/September11byjohangaltung.htm. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. W. H. Auden, et al., I Believe, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940, p. 367.

Chapter 1 1. The other two are the European Union and the Indian Union. 2. See Johan Galtung, Europe in the Making, New York: Taylor & Francis, 1989, Chapter 2. 3. Comparisons with curative medicine, highly somatic, natural science based and professional-artisanal oriented may be problematic, but comparisons with preventive medicine, more based on volunteerism with regard to life-style (similarly, we may talk about “peace style”), and to healing deeper wounds through spiritual uplift, are less problematic. 4. General Giap (in a meeting with the author as Director of the orbiting university Peace Studies Around the World in Hanoi, January 12, 1990) responded to the question of how he felt when France and the USA capitulated: “Well, the Americans are very good soldiers. They were able to beat the Germans. But, you know, to beat the Vietnamese is a quite different matter.” 5. A badly traumatised actor may react by taking revenge, hitting back at the victimiser; hitting somebody else; turning the aggression inward; or seeking mature healing and closure, with new relations to Self and Other. The latter is rare for “great powers”. Wounded megalomaniacs will tend to feed their paranoia.

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6. What this Hawai’ian word means is not “hello”, “how do you do”, or “goodbye”. It rather connotes oneness, unity, love, compassion. The expression is spiritual, not mainstream touristic. 7. “The term ‘The Pacific Way’ was launched on the international stage by Fiji’s Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, in an address to the United Nations’ General Assembly in 1970.” Ron Crocombe, The Pacific Way: An Emerging Identity, Suva, Fiji: Lotu Pacific Productions, 1976, p. 1. 8. E. Victoria Shook, Ho’oponopono, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1985. 9. “Wake Island May Be New Star Wars Base”, Samoa News, February 2, 1988, where it is pointed out that “Star Wars testing is currently conducted atop the extinct volcano Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui”. 10. This document, presented to President Roosevelt in autumn 1943 as a global study of bases, for an “International Peace Force”, is also known as “The Base Bible”. The bias toward the Pacific Hemisphere is clearly shown. Of the 75 foreign bases proposed, 53 were in the Pacific and 22 in the Atlantic area. See Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky and Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, 1987. 11. See “Die atomare Keule”, Der Spiegel, 9/2000, pp. 158–64. 12. When the referendum was repeated on December 2, 2001, the 35.6 per cent had dwindled to 22 per cent, possibly because the army was seen more as an instrument of international peacekeeping than for national defence. 9/11 2001 probably also had an impact: the world is a dangerous place. 13. Excellent work in this field was done by David Fish in 1988, then a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science of the University of Hawai’i. 14. A comparison might be made to theft in domestic law. “A” steals something, say, a car, from “B”. There may be prescription after some years, but the idea that A acquires legitimate ownership by virtue of having more family members than B using the car, is obscene. The same could be said about settlers’ rights over land use prevailing over historical rights. 15. In the same way the Soviet Union and later Russia, and Yugoslavia and later Serbia, have been evaluated since the spring of 1991. 16. I am indebted to Professor Neubauer, later the head of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, for this last point. 17. For example, see SIS, the Small Island States alliance of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue and Tuvalu, with a combined population of 100,000 controlling 2.75 million square miles of ocean and corresponding airspace. Just think of the transit rights for shipping and airline companies! (The Honolulu Advertiser, January 22, 1992.) 144

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18. For an excellent overview, see Michael Haas, The Pacific Way, New York: Praeger, 1989, p. 14. 19. A promising beginning was made by President Clinton in November 1993, when he offered an apology to Native Hawai’ians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i (Public Law 103–50). The danger is that this will be followed by the US “nation-within-a-nation” concept, like the reservations for the Native Americans. 20. Thus, the stationing of cruise missiles and Pershing II in five West European countries was exactly the argument that repressive political and military Soviet elites needed to maintain their authoritarian grip on society. 21. See “Overthrow centennial may pack 60,000 guests”, the Honolulu Advertiser, January 29, 1992: “Plans also call for promulgation and signing of treaties of cooperation between the Hawaiian people and other nations, a step that some say might land OHA [Office of Hawaiian Affairs] in hot waters with the U.S. State Department.”

Chapter 2 1. The parity, gender, feminist revolution in the USA in the last quarter/third of the twentieth century is probably the major anti-patriarchy revolt in the world, as well as America’s major revolutionary event. 2. The subtitle of Darwin’s The Origin of Species is The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As Richard White points out in his Inventing Australia, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981: “It seemed clear to the educated English gentleman that the spread of his race at the expense of other races, like the dominance of his class over other classes, although it might be abhorrent to sentimental morality, was in fulfillment of a natural and higher law.” And, as Darwin himself puts it: “The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most” (quoted from White, p. 51). The Australian Aborigines certainly “naturally” suffer most. 3. See Peter Larmour’s “The Decolonization of the Pacific Islands”, in Foreign Forces in Pacific Politics, Suva: University of South Pacific, 1985, ch. 1, pp. 1–23. 4. Article 73 uses the euphemism “non-self governing territories” rather than “colonies”. Colonial countries are termed “metropolitan” countries. The Charter placed upon metropolitan powers a sacred trust obligation to bring about self-governance to these non–self governing territories. In 1946, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution No. 66 specifying the USA as the metropolitan country charged with a sacred obligation to assist in the development of self-governance in the following places: American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Alaska, Guam, Panama 145

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Canal Zone, Puerto Rico and Hawai’i. After a plebiscite Hawai’i was integrated, and the Panama Canal Zone reverted to Panama. The five others are still “non-self governing”. 5. On December 15, 1994, as the 184th member state of the United Nations. The history was twisted, to say the least, and only granted (by the USA) when, after ten referenda, the population gave up the nuclear clause that the USA did not want. Not to take “No” for an answer may be a good business tactic but is profoundly undemocratic when applied to referenda. 6. The use of Australia as a repository for convicts was initiated in 1776 for the simple reason that what was to become the United States of America was no longer available. The estimate today is that around 20 per cent of white Australians still have convict blood. 7. Among OECD countries Luxembourg ranks second and Iceland seventh. Switzerland is first on the list of per capita national income. If Liechtenstein is considered separate from Switzerland then that little speck, with a population around 30,000, would have been number one— in the world. All three have different ways of converting smallness into wealth. Much of that could be imitated, but they need dominio in their own house. 8. Many people on the islands point out that the their music, literature—an ancient written language—and cuisine are actually much more interesting than these guardians of tombs, which were erected to honour the deceased. 9. The islands’ writing may be close to yielding its secrets, mainly sexual and hidden from scrutiny by the missionaries and by local fear of telling the missionaries. See “Botschaft aus Fantasia”, Der Spiegel, 44/1999. 10. See Grant McCall, “Rapanui, The Chilean Connection”, in Ron Crocombe and Ahmed Ali, eds, Politics in Polynesia, Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1983, pp. 239–53. 11. Thus, in 1862 “many [about 4,000?] Rapanui were carried off to die as overworked and underfed house servants, farm workers, and, so local tradition has it, guano miners, in a harsh Peruvian exploitation” (McCall, “Rapanui”, p. 240). 12. In 1877 as low as 110; in 2001, around 3,000. 13. However, in 1891 Chile rented the island to a British company and “the indigenous people were forced off the land and into slavery” (Pacific News Bulletin, October 2001, p. 15). For a long period during the twentieth century the Rapa Nui people had to live in Hanga Roa village as a ghetto. Much of the land was converted into a national park— maybe good for protection but not for land use. The airport came in 1965, also built as a reserve for NASA, for the Discovery crafts; mainly used by LAN Chile for two weekly flights between Santiago and Tahiti. Cargo comes by ship from Valparaiso, then tourist ships three or four times a year (anchoring off the harbour). 146

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14. This is also the argument used in Norway against Sami representation in the Norwegian Storting. 15. Since 1977 there has been local government and its head, the president, is elected by the Assemblée Territoriale (in Tahiti with 49 members, around half of them women). 16. Being inducted into French-ness, meaning that traditional institutions have to be replaced by French institutions. I am grateful to Gabi Tetiarahi, Papeete, for coupling civilisatrice with assimilatrice. 17. ACP, the “Lomé system”, linking former colonies, etc. to the European Union.

Chapter 3 1. There was almost no “collateral damage”: only 68 civilians killed, compared to 2,335 military personnel and 18 ships sunk—very different from contemporary warfare. See Walter Lord, Day of Infamy, New York: Holt, 1957. One chapter has a heading that rings a bell in the context of 9/11: “I didn’t even know they were sore at us”. 2. For one example see “Pearl Harbor: An Exchange”, New York Review of Books, May 17, 2001 (between Gore Vidal and Ian Buruma). A classic in the field is, of course, Ienaga Saburo, The Pacific War, 1931– 1945, New York: Random House, 1978. 3. See Johan Galtung and Richard Vincent, Global Glasnost, Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, 1992, 2nd edition, 1994. 4. The second cycle, with the first three phases only, started with the US occupation and once again exposure to US goods and values. Then came the imitation/learning phase, peaking in the 1960s, and the conflict phase in the 1970s–80s with Japan as a formidable economic competitor to the USA. Japan behaved economically quite aggressively in the USA, buying US icons as though they were merely plots of Hollywood and central Manhattan real estate. The range of US economic warfare against Japan to beat the competitor is not yet known but it must have been very broad. There were also Japanese weaknesses to exploit. And the Japanese have so far (late 2004) submitted. 5. Gore Vidal, The Golden Age, Doubleday, 2000. 6. Only five years into Meiji came “the famous 1873 Japanese official debate over whether or not to conquer Korea—[with origins in] the ancient myth, recorded in Nihon Shoki (written in 720) that the legendary Empress Jink had conquered Korea. Late Edo thinkers had thus viewed invasion as part of a ‘recovery of lost territory’—Japanese intellectuals, who were strongly influenced by the ideology of the warrior class, not only celebrated the idea of conquering Korea but also argued that Korea was inferior and despicable”. The Japanese historian Kato Akira, as quoted in Kimjima Kazuhiko, “The Continuing Legacy of Japanese Co147

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lonialism”, in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds, Censoring History, Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2000, p. 207. 7. By drawing much on Chinese culture, Confucianism and Mahayana Buddhism (with a specialty of their own). In addition to Japan this would point to Han-China with Taiwan (with question marks for Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong), the Korean peninsula and Viêt Nam for the Great East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. 8. That is why and how the “American Revolution” was a revolution in name only. Nothing new was invented by the white elites in the 13 eastern seaboard colonies. Invading native territory, pushing them into reservations, killing them and their buffaloes continued. The only new thing was that they did not want to share the spoils with London. The pattern of local democracy for white settlers had already existed there for some time. 9. A latter-day echo of this is the Japanese effort to get a permanent seat on the Security Council, the upper caste of today’s states. The “nuclear club” is still closed to Japan and also made to coincide with the “veto power club” through the idea of “officially recognised nuclear power”, meaning those who are already upper-caste members. A “permanent seat” has a touch of caste. A much wiser policy would be for Japan to urge a revamping of the Security Council, expanding the membership and dropping the veto power. 10. Thus, there could have been a new Taft–Katsura type secret memorandum redefining spheres of interest. Tacitly a system like that had already been operating. Or Roosevelt, an anglophile in addition to a US patriot, could have been less keen on joining World War II. But Japan needed oil to conduct its operations in China and Indo-China, and that oil was available in Indonesia, with easy access through Malaya and Singapore, close to the Philippines. Sooner or later there would have been an incident, subconsciously wanted by both, and at a better place from a Japanese perspective than the tactically brilliant but strategically stupid Pearl Harbor campaign, ideal only for semi-suicidal Japanese macho fundamentalists. 11. There is an important point hidden here. In general people think of themselves as free, unconditioned, and often of others as conditioned. In seeing the thoughts, speech and action of others as conditioned there is an act of dehumanisation, including by the social scientist. What the parties in a conflict do is asymmetric dehumanisation: I am free, you are conditioned. There is also another version: you are free and choose to be Evil-driven, I am also free but I chose a long time ago to be Gooddriven, which made me naive, unprepared for your Evil level. What the peace scientist does is a more symmetric humanisation, with an underlying assumption: you liberate yourself, become free, through increasing consciousness of what is driving, conditioning you. 12. To the extent that “revisionist”, sometimes “nationalist”, “right148

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wing” Japanese historians also focus on what the USA had done in the Pacific theatre (see section 2, “Before”, above), it is impossible not to be in some agreement. To the extent they focus solely on that, the agreement starts dwindling. When they go on to justify the other Pacific War, the RyuKyu-Taiwan-Korea-Manchuria-China-Indochina-Asia/Pacific, the agreement disappears completely.

Chapter 4 1. For a theory of variables see Johan Galtung, “Generalized Methodology for Social Research”, in Methodology and Ideology, Copenhagen: Ejlers, 1977, pp. 231–38. 2. See Johan Galtung and Sohail Inayatullah, eds, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change, Westport, CT & London, 1997: Praeger, 1997. 3. It might be interesting to see to what extent historians use the same criteria as journalists to register events as news to be included their writing. If literary criticism can be used to better understand the how of their writings, then media criticism might shed some light over their selection of what to write about. See “The Structure of Foreign News”, in Johan Galtung and Richard C. Vincent, Global Glasnost, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1992, pp. 49–53. 4. Galtung and Inayatullah, Macrohistory explores 20 such efforts to give meaning to macro-history. 5. Arthur Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. 6. The major work remains Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Empire-Building and Indian-Hating, Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. 7. With the exception of Presidents Bush, father and son, these wars were essentially the products of Democrat administrations. This is compatible with the “global responsibility vs isolationism” labels often used to describe the difference between Democrats and Republicans. 8. By this is meant not only “the United States Space Command, a joint Air Force, Army and Navy command set up by the Pentagon in 1985”: “we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space—these advances will enable lasers to effect very many kills—space dominance, we have it, we like it and we’re going to keep it” (from Karl Grossman and Judith Long, “Waging War in Space”, The Nation, December 27, 1999). Nor is it spying from space (Echelon). We are more concerned with the exploration of space (NASA), for possible later colonisation, braving wilderness-savages-beasts of entirely new types, enacting another American archetype, leaving the (rotten) Old World behind, founding a New World cleansed of the cor149

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rupting elements of the old. The UN General Assembly vote of November 1999 reaffirmed the Outer Space Treaty and its provision that space “shall be for peaceful purposes”; only the USA and Israel abstained. 9. For a chilling account of British colonialism in Ireland, see Rona M. Fields, Northern Ireland Under Siege, London: Transaction Books, 1980. 10. David Fischer’s study Albion’s Seed, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 11. Such figures are to be taken neither seriously, nor too lightly. They indicate perspectives, ways of thinking. 12. That conclusion is based on secondary analysis of the data in William Blum, The Rogue State: An Introduction to the World’s Only Superpower, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000; see Chapter 1 above. 13. The terminology used by the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, for having others fight the war is “proxy war”. 14. After World War II came TIAP, NATO, AMPO (see below); after the Cold War, expansion of NATO and AMPO (again, see below); after the Gulf War, extensive stationing in the Middle East; after the war in Kosovo, the giant base Camp Bondsteel in Urosevac, 20 kms south of Pristina; a major one after the war in Afghanistan; and 14 bases in Iraq. 15. Revista Española del Pacífico, 1996, No 6, has a dossier about the revolution in the Philippines 1896–97. One article is dedicated to “Rizal. Breve esquema biográfico”, to his last and very strong poem before he was executed, and to the efforts of Spanish generals, among them the future dictator Primo de Rivera, to save the honour of Spain and the army. The opening sentence is very frank: “Desde siempre el estado de insumisión en Filipinas fue algo endémico” (“insurrection in the Philippines was always something endemic”). Yet, one century later, there is the same concern with the honour of Spain and the state machinery in connection with something endemic, the Basque insurrection. Of learning there seems to be very little. 16. Of Vidal it has been said that if he were not such a brilliant writer he would have been recognised as one of the leading US historians. His thesis actually goes further. Both Wilson and Roosevelt wanted to join the world wars in order to set up an international regime they could dominate. But US public opinion was against this, so they had to provoke the Germans (World War I) and the Japanese (World War II) into attacking in order to be able to enter. Tragedy: the US Senate did not ratify the League of Nations, and Roosevelt’s date of death (April 12, 1945) came well ahead of the United Nations date of birth (October 24). 17. Here quoted from another “geo-fascist”, open to large-scale violence on anybody’s land to serve own interests, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 38. 18. From Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky and Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific, New York: Penguin, 1986, p. 19, among other sources drawing on E. Converse, United States Plans for a Postwar 150

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Overseas Military Base System 1942–1948, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. 19. Hayes, Zarsky and Bello, American Lake, p. 23. 20. First presented at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, Copenhagen, September 1996, published as “The Eastward NATO Expansion: The Beginning of Cold War II?” COPRI Working Papers, No. 26, 1997; then several other places. 21. China has gone further than that: “Seeking to rally Southeast Asian support, China on Friday sharply intensified pressure on Japan to reject moves to have strengthened military alliance with the United States cover Taiwan. … several /countries/ were privately concerned that it was unnecessarily provocative to China and could become a serious source of instability in the Asia-Pacific region” (International Herald Tribune, August 23–24, 1997). 22. First published as Johan Galtung, “21st Century Conflict Formations: Diagnosis, Prognosis, Therapy”, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol I, No. 3–4, pp. 152–63. 23. By + is meant South Korea/Taiwan. 24. Foreign Affairs, September/October 1997, 75th Anniversary, Vol. 76, No. 5, pp. 50–64. 25. And a reflection of the old geopolitical adage “who controls the world island /Eurasia/ controls the world”. 26. The summit was held in Washington, DC on April 24, 1999. 27. Wieland Wagner, “Die Fahne hoch”, Der Spiegel, 33/1999, pp. 128–29. 28. The wording in Washington Post, October 4, 2000, covers both conflict formations: “India and Russia Agree to Create Strategic Alliance. Relationship Seeks to Combat Terror, Balance U.S. Ties”. The formula they (Putin and Vajpayee) agreed on was “to build a multipolar global structure”. And: “Russia is expected to sell India a large number of tanks and fighter planes, as well as give it a used 40,000–ton aircraft carrier”. 29. Such high numbers cannot be explained by reference to “Muslim terrorism” alone. Newsweek, October 11, 1999, reported from the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Communist Revolution that “Beijing’s first military parade in 15 years featured the debut of the ‘East Wind’ DP-31 solid fuel ICBM, a missile capable of reaching American shores. Just as pointedly, a formation of Russian-made SU-27 fighters roared overhead, evidence of as newly declared ‘strategic partnership’ with Moscow (the two nations began their first-ever joint naval exercises last week)”. The most convincing explanation of the US/NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Beograd on May 7, 1999, killing three Chinese, is probably the one obtained by the Observer, quoted in Japan Times, December 18, 1999: “NATO had been hunting the [Yugoslav military] radio transmitters in Belgrade”, including one at Milosevic’s residence. “When the President’s residence was bombed on April 23 the signals 151

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disappeared for 24 hours—when they came back on the air again, we discovered they came from the embassy compound”. The US/NATO explanation “blamed the attack on a targeting error caused by outdated maps” was countered by a Chinese joke explaining the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington: “they used outdated maps”. 30. Global Projections of Deep-Rooted U.S. Pathologies, Fairfax, VA: ICAR, George Mason University, 1996, 52 pp.

Chapter 5 1. Italy is not even worth mentioning in this context—not because it changed course dramatically during the war but because lack of longterm serious commitment to anything (except to the lack of commitment) may be a part of the Italian deep culture. Overwhelming majorities of the German and Japanese population believed in what their leaders were doing. Some Italians no doubt did. But most were probably watching, maybe seeing the world as basically unchangeable and comical, and aesthetic dimensions as essential. 2. For a general account of the contemporary role of Japan in a broader setting, see Seki Hiroharu, The Asia-Pacific in the Global Transformation, Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, 1986. 3. That US-condoned attacks against thousands of South Korean civilians are becoming publicly known, like the uprising organized on Cheju island (south of South Korea), April 3, 1948, and the No Gun Ri alleged massacre for which joint prayer and reconciliation meetings between the bereaved and US veterans have already been held (Japan Times, November 12, 1999). The Western mainstream discourse for the Korean War (1950– 53) is inter-state, with North Korea attacking South Korea. The alternative discourse is inter-class, with the all-Korean working class, supported by the North, wanting reunification against the will of South Korean elites and the USA. According to the latter interpretation, the prediction would be massive US bombing of working-class quarters in Korea North and South. Potentially with millions killed. Chung, Dae-Hwa, “Hanguk Chonjaeng-ui Chaejomyong (Revaluation of the Korean War: Its Genesis, Process and Conclusion)”, Sahoe Kwahak Nonchong (Social Science Journal), Pusan National University, Vol. 13, No. 21, December 1994, p. 55, arrives at estimates of North Korean losses above 3 million and of South Korean losses above 2 million (in addition one million Chinese and 54,000 Americans); in other words one out of three in North Korea (ten million at the time) and one out of ten in South Korea (20 million at the time). If verifiable, and verified, these estimates make the Korean War truly catastrophic. 152

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4. Robert McNamara’s analysis in In Retrospect, New York: Vintage, 1996. On pp. 321–33 McNamara summarises the errors in eleven points. Many, perhaps most, are relevant not only for the Viêt Nam War but also, for instance, Iraq, like his point 4: “Our misjudgment of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.” 5. “This animal is very vicious; when you attack him he defends himself.” 6. Thus, a mainstream paper like Japan Times is filled with articles such as “Textbook serves Japan Poorly” (April 23, 2001), “A High Price for Textbook Row” (April 30, 2001), weighing the textbooks against the diplomatic complications, “Textbook Row Hits Nerve With Young South Koreans” (May 2, 2001), “Seoul Seeks History Text Changes” (May 9, 2001). 7. According to the Meiji constitution. At this point the Japanese went further than the West, content with seeing their Emperors and Kings as rex gratia dei, by the Grace of God, not by genes. 8. The traditional Japanese order, shi-no-ko-sho, samurai-farmer-artisan-merchant, somewhere between a caste and a class system, had this alliance as a condition for the rapid Japanese development in early Meiji era. 9. From Inazo Notobe, Bushido—The Soul of Japan, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1969. This list of twelve “commandments” is extracted from the book, without any deeper interpretation. For a very different approach to the same theme, see Mishima Yukio, The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1978. 10. That, of course, also applies to Buddhist and Christian countries when the verticality of the state is superimposed. The theory of die zwei Regimente, the rule of God and the rule of Caesar, makes what is forbidden by one permitted, even prescribed, under the other. The bushido ethic would also take that verticality into what in the West would be private, not public (of, by and for the state) life—in the family, at school, at work. 11. Notobe, Bushido, p. 175. 12. The country most similar to Japan is probably another island, Great Britain. Very uncomfortable with horizontal relations, its membership in the European Union is replete with exemptions. Submission to the USA has similarities with Japan, there being no A9 for the UK, which emerged as an ally and victor in 1945. Its role is considerably more active. Like Japan, England has been harassing neighbouring islands, particularly Ireland, but has also used island geography for defence and for withdrawal. 13. Foreign (later Prime) Minister Katsura in Japan, explained to Secretary of State (later President) Taft of the USA that, whereas the Philippines belonged to the USA, Korea was in the Japanese sphere in the interest of peace in East Asia. 153

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14. Colin Powell, in 1994, in Washington, DC, according to International Herald Tribune, August 31, 1995. 15. See his The Golden Age, New York: Doubleday, 2000. 16. Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000, 2001. 17. Hitler had German soldiers in Polish uniform attack on the border to Germany, September 1939, and then opened World War II “in selfdefence”. 18. Ibid, Appendix A, p. 274. 19. Thus, looking at the bushido ethic we recognise not only the elements of honour, loyalty, courage, duty and endurance, but also a clearly collective suicidal element. The German Nazi/Prussian ethic was not that different, being also filled with idea of fighting to the last man. 20. For details, see R. J. Lifton and G. Mitchell, Hiroshima in America, New York: Avon Books, 1995, especially pp. 240ff. Byrnes is quoted as telling the New York Times (August 29, 1945) “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids”—“what he called Russian proof that the Russians knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima”, a reference to Japan’s attempted peace initiative through Moscow. President Truman declared that “the bomb did not win the war”. Top military (General Arnold, General LeMay, General Groves) said the same. But the authors add that there were political advantages in saying so, honouring, not belittling the role of the armed forces. The “Japanese leaders, on the other hand, were seeking to picture their nation as the loser in an essentially unfair fight— defeated by a cosmic force, not by the American military”. 21. I am indebted to Professor Kinhide Mushakoji for discussions of continuities and discontinuities in Japanese history. 22. State Policy, quoted from Bernard Faure, “The Kyoto School and Reverse Orientalism”, in Charles Wei-Hsun Fu and Steven Heine, eds, Japan in Traditional and Post-Modern Perspectives, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995, p. 280. 23. When this point is made about German names, then names like Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg and Heidegger are mentioned; somewhat unfair to that generation. Among the older Luther was probably much more important (in his anti-Semitism) than Wagner and Nietzsche. For the USA, patriotism/jingoism/racism is probably more evenly, and also less deeply, distributed. But how about Japan? I myself would probably argue that the root is more in deep culture (shin-koku, divine country, state shinto) and in deep structure (the Emperor as the head, the people as the arms and legs of Japan as a social organism). Western individualism would try to blame individuals and usually focus on the Kyoto school in general and Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945) and his pupil Nishitani Keiji (1900–91) in particular. Faure, “Kyoto School”, discusses this. That Nishida defended and wanted to clarify Oriental categories like 154

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“absolute nothingness”, “pure experience”, disappearance of the subject/object dichotomy, “mahayana non-duality”, the “form of the formless”, the “voice of the voiceless” is of course not the same as legitimising the cause of Japanese militarism. But it may come close, and Faure is particularly disturbed by Nishitani’s “thundering silence”, expressing “no grief for Asian people who suffered under Japanese rule”. 24. Article 9 in the Japanese Constitution: “The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised”. 25. For the role of Emperor Showa, see Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, New York: Harper, 2000—a book preceded by David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, New York: William Morrow, 1971. That Showa and the imperial household played a major role sounds both true and trite. What would have been the alternative? To resign? To be on the side-line? Would that have been possible for a divine Emperor? For the role of Douglas MacArthur as substitute Emperor and guardian for the Japanese people, see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York: Norton, 1999. When his term was over Asahi Shimbun wrote “it was General MacArthur who taught us the merits of democracy and pacifism”. For a longer-term view see Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, The Yamato Dynasty, New York: Bantam, 2000. A major point is the systematic looting of occupied Asia which, together with the whitewashing of the Emperor, secured the continuity, even super-growth of Japan: “If a robber steals $100 billion and hides the money before he is captured and jailed, and then is released after seven years for good behavior, did he fail or did he succeed?” The US occupation lasted seven years. 26. Matsushita Kazuo, in “Japanese Government and Its Environment Policy: Afterthought of the Kyoto Conference”, Peace Studies Newsletter, June 1999: “In fact, among the most often heard statements within the Japanese Government delegation were, ‘We should not isolate the United States’ and ‘The effectiveness of the Convention and the Protocol will not be guaranteed without the participation of the United States’.” And, nobody ever doubted, but finally it came: “Secret nuke pact. US given free rein to bring weapons into Japan” (Mainichi Daily News, August 31, 2000). “Tokyo allows U.S. forces armed with nuclear weapons to call on their bases in Japan without any prior consultation in a secret pact agreed by the two countries in 1960”. This was actually preceded by, for instance, Washington Post, December 12, 1999: “U.S. Reportedly Hid Nuclear Weapons on 2 Japanese Isles”. The carry-over from the war period, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, was the first to maintain “that their country would neither develop nuclear weapons nor permit them on its territory”. 27. See Johan Galtung, After Violence: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, Resolution, Spanish edition, Gernika, 1999. 28. Like Russia and China faced with the threat of the double NATO/AMPO expansion from 1996 onwards. 155

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29. If the tenno had resigned, rather than cooperated with the military government of, say, General Tojo Hideki, there would have been a basis for a “bracket”. 30. One example would be Kishi Nobusuke, the Japanese Prime Minister after the war and an important minister during the war, as noted by Kato Shuichi in an interview, “Kato Shuichi on Everything” in KYOTO Journal, No. 48, 2001, pp. 43–60. 31. An example from The Saturday Observer, Apia/Samoa, December 8, 2001: “Mr Fujita Honoured. Mr Kimio Fujita has been bestowed the rare honour of Honorary Doctorate by the National University of Samoa”. Mr Fujita was highly instrumental in creating the university, but/and “has also provided advice in the field of international relations to the Minister for Foreign Affairs as well as the Secretary of Foreign Affairs”. 32. And right now the change is in the direction wanted by America-US Embassy-US style apparatus. In a Yomiuri Shimbun poll, October 2001, 44 per cent supported the Self-Defense Forces engagement in UN peacekeeping operations with 26 per cent opposing, a big increase from July 1999 when 26 per cent approved and 42 per cent opposed. In the same poll 66 per cent were in favour of maintaining the Japan–USA security treaty, 10 percentage points up from October 1995. 33. As pointed out in some detail in the book co-authored with Professor Ikuro Anzai of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Nippon wa Kikika (Is Japan in a Crisis?), Kyoto: Kamogawa, 1999, 124 pp. 34. This is a major point in my essay on Japanese education in Reviews of National Policies for Education—Japan: Examiners’ Report and Questions, Paris: OECD, Education Committee, 1970; with Joseph BenDavid, Ronald P. Dore, Edgar Faure and Edwin O. Reischauer. 35. A fascinating research project would be a content analysis of the changes in the visual images of Japanese society as carried by the media, particularly NHK, over these three decades: from a prevalence of old males, all dressed the same way and with impeccable university pedigrees, to all kinds of people, gender-generation-class-pillar wise. Decision-making may remain undemocratic, but the photos at least mirror total society. 36. No doubt exposure to everyday Americans (and Hollywood movies) has been important in bringing about these major changes. The common people of Japan today are not exposed to elite Americans wielding brutal economic and military power, but to ordinary Americans, among the socially most gifted human beings in the world. Horizontality spells equality, and individualism spells freedom. But it can also spell lack of solidarity. Solidarity with the underlings was a basic part of bushido ethic, carried from Tokugawa into such Meiji institutions as lifelong employment. The step from a vertical-collectivist to a horizontalindividualist ethic is indeed a long one. Could “horizontal-collectivist” 156

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transcend that conflict and be an interesting way out of Japan’s spiritual crisis? 37. Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds, Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States, Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2000; particularly Chapter 4 by Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromitsu on “Japanese Education,Nationalism, and Ienaga Saburo’s Textbook Lawsuits”, Chapter 6 by James W. Loewen on “The Vietnam War in High School American History” and Chapter 8 by Kimjima Kazuhiko on “The Continuing Legacy of Japanese Colonialism: The Japan-South Korea Joint Study Group on History Textbooks”. Ienaga Saburo is the hero of these struggles in Japan, see also his autobiography Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey, Boulder, CO & New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 38. Ian Buruma’s, The Wages of Guilt, Memories of War in Germany and Japan, New York: Meridian, 1995, is also very valuable: “journalism” in the best sense of the word. It is far-reaching, but less focused on the concern here, textbooks. 39. Victory eluded the USA, but it was not defeated with a Washington Tribunal organised by Viêt Nam either. Such a tribunal would of course have brought out the similarities between a Nazi leadership firmly believing their own propaganda about a “World Jewish Plot” and the need to crush them first, and Washington elites believing their own propaganda about a “World Communist Plot” and the need to crush them. Today the word is not “communist” but “terrorist”. Tomorrow? 40. One student even wanted partial credit for getting “North” and “South” correct. Hein and Selden, Censoring History, pp. 169ff. 41. Jeff Kingston, in a review of Censoring History (Japan Times, November 15, 2000), makes the point that “unlike Japan and Germany the U.S. has not yet been subject to international pressures that would promote a more thorough reflection on the causes and consequences of the war”. After 9/11 arguments of that type would be taken as proof of siding with “terrorists”. 42. Seen from Eastern Europe, Hitler’s twelve years in power is little compared to the German Emperors: more like one thousand. They tended to march and sail east, only rarely west. Many of those generals and admirals still have their street names in Berlin. There is no Hitlerstrasse, but a major thoroughfare is even called Kaiserstrasse (Emperor Street). Trading a period or two against not having to name the total German exercise since, say, the thirteenth century? Today using the EU expansion as an instrument. 43. This was done in August 2000, in connection with a visit by the Japanese NGO PeaceBoat, with considerable experience in voyages to “trouble spots” and in building NGO networks. 44. The preamble to The Constitution of Japan (promulgated on November 3, 1946, came into effect on May 3, 1947) is rife with outdated, misleading peace theory (comments in parentheses): 157

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We shall secure for ourselves and our posterity the fruits of peaceful cooperation with all nations (like trade surplus?). Never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government (“visited” sounds like coming from the outside, and there is no “our” in front of “government”). This /democracy/ is a universal principle of mankind upon which this Constitution is founded. We reject and revoke all constitutions, laws, ordinances, and rescripts in conflict herewith. (Condition for being member of the club of democracies is rejection and revocation of others? How about rejecting, revoking constitutions etc. with no A9 clause?). We desire to occupy an honoured place in an international society striving for the preservation of peace and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance (status conscious already, where is the peace policy between countries?). We believe … that obedience to laws /of political morality/ is incumbent upon all nations (establishes Japan as obedient to laws from above, but does not mention positive acts like reconciliation). 45. November 4, 1998. 46. Hakko ichiu: the idea of the eight corners of the world (not four, the world is three-dimensional) under one roof—obviously in Japan.

Chapter 6 1. ACP: African, Caribbean, Pacific—the Lomé system linking former colonies etc. to the European Union. 2. The timetable is often changed, as is to be expected for such a giant process towards a world of regions of civilisations rather than a world of states of (dominant) nations. At the Gothenburg EU Summit June 2001, better known for the demonstrations (“Europe’s most violent yet”, according to the Washington Post, June 17, 2001), and later for alleged police falsification of film “evidence”, the expansion process was referred to as “irreversible”, despite the Irish referendum rejecting the Nice Treaty. The idea was to admit as many as twelve East European countries in time for participation in the European Parliament elections 2004: and they succeeded. 3. At present, 53 European countries are members of the OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (the USA and Canada are also members, making a total of 55). 4. In 1972 I wrote a book with that title: The European Community: A Superpower in the Making, London: Allen & Unwin, 1973, since then translated into seven languages. 5. The number of victims of the megalomaniac genocide of King Leopold (and by implication of all Belgians) is estimated at ten million; with no monument, no museum, right in the capital of the European 158

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Union. Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, is a must. A latter-day projection is the 1961 liquidation of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo, organised by the Belgian government (see “Les vrais assassins de Lumumba”, Le Nouvel Observateur, February 17–23, 2000, p. 66). 6. In a report to the Council of Europe on the future of the European system, as conditions of a more lasting peace. 7. Or relative to post-Soviet Russia. Steven Cohen in The Nation, October 2, 2000, writes about the cures that had been prescribed for Russia after the Soviet break-up of 1991: “Their prescriptions, reports and prognoses have turned out to be completely wrong. Nearly a decade later Russia is afflicted by the worst economic depression in modern history, corruption so extensive that capital flight far exceeds all foreign loans and investment, and a demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peace time. The result has been a massive human tragedy. Among other calamities, some 75 percent of Russians now live below or barely above the poverty line; 50–80 percent of school-age children are classified as having a physical or mental defect; and male life expectancy has plunged to less than sixty years.” 8. One prominent set of circumstances is known as 9/11. Schengen, meaning Europol, has for long coordinated the secret services of the member-states, and since July 1, 1999 has been empowered to send agents to member-states—but not beyond. Fighting terrorism is among the tasks. How long will it take before that includes fighting people who happen to be critical of the EU as “intellectual terrorists”, as Wegbereiter, paving the road for terrorists? 9. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, World Guide to Ethnic Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, Tokyo: United Nations University and Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1988. 10. See the interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, “Establish a Human Rights Movement, a Grassroots Movement!—the EU will Collapse like the Soviet Union”, Current Concerns, August 2000. 11. The Politburo, says Bukovsky, had “15 unelected individuals. And the EU? It is ruled by a dozen unelected commissioners appointed by the national governments. It is the same structure” (ibid). Today (2004) there are 30 unelected commissioners. 12. For this type of historiography, see Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, L’Europe: Histoire de ses peuples, Paris: Hachette, 1998. Disproportionately much of the book is, as one might surmise, dedicated to France. European history is a history of progress, via Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler to the crowning achievement, Schumann-Monnet. Colonialism is discussed in terms of discovery. About the Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, Duroselle has this to say: “la repression qu’il conduisit demeurera tristement celebre” (the represssion he carried out remains sadly famous). Very true, even if understated, but nothing about what 159

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that tells us about Europe. The yin-yang character of Europe, as of everything, is captured by the “virgin riding on a bull”. Torquemada the bull burnt many young women. Who is the stronger part of Europe, the virgin or the bull—and where is the EU in that picture? 13. Bukovsky thinks it is because Austria, together with Spain, was alone in having a non-socialist government. Behind the sanctions was also the Socialist International? The major Austrian paper Der Standard summarises the conclusions in the Paris media: “Man könne es drehen und wenden wie man wolle, das Sanktionsende sei eine ‘Niederlage’ für die EU und ein ‘Fiasko’ für die französische EU-Ratspräsidentschaft” (You can turn it upside down as much as you want, the way the sanctions ended was a defeat for the EU and a fiasco for France and for the French Presidency of the European Council.) (September 14, 2000). And IHT says the same, same day: “The European Union’s action in ending its diplomatic quarantine of Austria—without making any measurable change on the Austrian political scene—is a particularly conspicuous failure for France and President Jacques Chirac, the most ardent champion of sanctions against Vienna”. 14. There are many inner circles: the French-German axis, the EC original carriage of six, the twelve, the 15 up to May 2004—or by criteria of how far they want to go: those who accept the euro as a single, not only a common currency, those who accept as a goal a European federation, meaning a USE. Germany belongs to all these inner circles, and is also the only one, incidentally, that has never had a referendum on EU issues. Germany in general, with Joschka Fischer in particular, plays the role of Vordenker (“the one who thinks ahead”) for the entire EU with its two-chamber European parliament models. One interpretation: with Germany as a central power in the EU and EU as a super-state in the world, a new version of Deutschland über alles gets a new meaning, on top, but constrained by the rest. All the better, many Germans will probably say (see Der Spiegel, 19,20/2001: the political magazine where opinion polls constantly vote Joschka Fischer as Germany’s by far most popular politician). For the referendum in France in 1992 the government had prepared a pamphlet for all French households, propagating the idea of France not only á la tête de l’Europe, but also au coeur de l’Europe. Brain + Heart = Power. First-class membership, indeed. 15. England is seeking confirmation of special relationship, being the chosen country of the country chosen by God; France has its equally theological francophonie with the Quebécois; and the Irish have St Patrick mysticism with their diaspora (as well as support for the IRA and other, often contradictory, causes). 16. The market factor is obvious, so is the new Denmark–Sweden bridge. These are old invasion routes, also trodden by France. Germany did so twice in the same quarter century, was punished by losing major 160

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territory in the East, to Poland (Schlesien, Pommern, East Prussia also to Russia), to Czechoslovakia (Sudeten). EU membership of these two countries becomes an obvious strategy for ensuring unlimited access without moving a single soldier. First priority, particularly for Poland. 17. The explanation often heard is that Yugoslav unity was sacrificed to obtain a unified foreign policy for the EU (EC in December 1991). There may be something to this, but it sounds a little too rational. A more likely common denominator is the anti-Serbian deep attitude, except for France. True, France went along, possibly because of pressure from the armed forces. In both cases the same lie was circulated, there is no alternative—when nobody less than the UN Secretary General, Pérez de Cuéllar, had a good plan for the first crisis, and the OSCE when unimpeded had functioned quite well for the second. 18. Even as a state in Europe; possibly the main British argument against a Slavic-Muslim city-state around Sarajevo, loosening up the BiH quagmire of a country where a Serbian-Croat majority of 55 per cent does not want to live. 19. Penned by Léo Tindemans, a former Belgian prime minister and foreign minister. 20. Eurocorps gives the EU a military presence: “NATO announced Friday that it would give day-to-day command of its Kosovo peacekeeping force for six months starting in April [2000] to the Eurocorps, an embryonic army drawn from five nations in the European Union”. IHT, January 29–30, 2000. 21. A euro that could be used everywhere in addition to national currencies must have been a tempting intermediary step, to some. However that is, the transition of the euro from virtual to real currency by January 1, 2002 made the EU more real as a superpower and enhanced the economic and political value of both. 22. That kind of moratorium has already become a German bargaining position in connection with the expansion of the Union. 23. Presented by the author informally to EU “sherpas” preparing an EU–East Asia high-level meeting in 1999, at their request. 24. See Matthias Küntzel, Der Weg in den Krieg, Berlin: Elefanten Verlag, 2000. 25. German shots were fired in anger/fear in Kosovo, shaming the German dictum after World War II—“never more will a war come from German soil”.

Chapter 7 1. Singapore may also be considered from a cultural point of view, but is usually included in Southeast, not East, Asia. 2. With the possible exception of Bulgaria. The problem is also what kind of inner tensions that might lead to in the country itself. 161

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3. However, the exclusion of Yugoslavia under the “consensus minus 1” principle, though understandable, made bridge-building almost meaningless. 4. As an example take the five “big powers” in the European Union: France, Germany, England, Italy, Spain and their ten bilateral relations. France has had deep, long-lasting wars with all four; Germany with England, England with Spain, and Italy also with Spain. The whole continent is littered with memorials to battles and warring kings. 5. For an early formulation (actually from 1968), see Johan Galtung: “Regional Security Commissions: A Proposal”, Chapter 6 in Johan Galtung and Sverre Lodgaard, eds, Co-operation in Europe, Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1970; pp. 73–83, particularly pp. 77–80. The proposal (p. 77) is “a United Nations’ system of regional security commissions, standing in the same relation to the Security Council of the UN (UN Charter, Chapter 8, Articles 52, 53 and 54) as the regional economic commissions (ECE in Geneva for Europe, ECLA in Santiago de Chile for Latin America, ECA in Addis Ababa for Africa and ECAFE/ESCAP in Bangkok for Asia) have to ECOSOC, the Economic and Social Council. Thus, we are suggesting an SCE, SCLA, SCA and SCAFE” (p. 77, SCAFE would today have been SCAP, “Asia-Pacific”). 6. Given that diversity, the interpretation of bridge-building as improved transportation/communication with RR (rail/road) connections linking the countries and linking Asia to the European part of the Eurasian continent is obvious. Yet the major step in that direction, the Trans-Siberian railway, is already almost a century old. 7. “China” is used here to cover both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China. This will be explored in more detail below. 8. Of course, Russia is still in possession of the Northern Territories whereas Okinawa was restored to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. But problems are still abundant in the Japan-Okinawa-USA triangle. 9. The process, with preparation, lasted from 1972 till 1975. The Final Communique institutionalised the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the precursor of the OSCE, providing one more context for the two Germanies to meet. 10. Used as a staging area for the invasion of occupied France in 1944. 11. Basil Hall, an English seafarer, visited the RyuKyus and was so impressed when he found no army and no arms that he reported this to Napoleon in August 1817 in St Helena on his way back to England. Napoleon, in disbelief, is reported to have asked, “But how can they fight if they do not have arms?” To him the fighting was axiomatic, in need of no empirical verification. There is also the alternative view that the RyuKyu people had been very smart and hidden their arms from Hall’s eyes.

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12. The difference that matters in this context is that in federations finance, foreign, and security policies are shared, in confederations not. 13. A useful instrument would be the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, one substitute for a more far-reaching but also more unwieldy OSCAP. China and Kazakhstan are members (with Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), Mongolia not. 14. In Appendix 2 of Gunnar Myrdal’s classic, An American Dilemma, New York: Harper & Row, 1944. 15. More particularly, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales for England; Basque, Corsica, Brittany, Alsace and in a sense Occitanie for France; Basque, Catalonia, Galicia, the Canaries for Spain. The Basque provinces are both in Spain and France, thereby internationalising the problem, and the Irish diaspora is very strong in the USA, also internationalising the problem. In addition, humanity is concerned, out of compassion with nations striving for recognition and out of self-interest: what precedents are being set? 16. Ecu = European currency unit, the predecessor to the euro, converted into euros at the rate of 1:1 on January 1, 1999. 17. AMPO is an acronym derived from the Japanese terms for the Japan–USA Security Treaty. 18. See Chapter 6. 19. Tommy Koh, “10 values that help East Asia’s Progress/Prosperity”, Straits Times, December 14, 1995. 20. See Johan Galtung, Die Zukunft der Menschenrechte, Frankfurt: CAMPUS/EXPO, 2000, pp. 58ff and pp. 101ff.

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Index

Adenauer, Konrad, 71 Afghanistan, 61 agriculture, 100 alternative medicine, 10 AMPO treaty, 55–59, 70, 72, 123, 124 apologies: for atrocities of the Pacific War, 136–37; by Japanese, 79–82 Article 9 of Japanese constitution, 82–83 Asia, 109; democratic framework in, 126–27. See also East Asia Australia, decolonisation of, 21 bellogens, 83–84 bilingualism, 11 Brezhnev Doctrine, 99 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 58–59 Buddhist ethic, 141 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 98 bushido ethics, 74, 76, 84 businesses, establishment of, 17, 53 Byrnes, James, 69 change: flow of, 11–12; and history, 46 Chile, and Rapa Nui, 23–26 China: conflict resolution over autonomy movements, 116–17; and struggle for Eurasia, 61; views of the Pacific War, 133; and world hegemony, 55–59; world status of, 2 Christianity, and the European Union, 101–2 civilisations, and the European Union, 101–3 civil society, 97; Japan, 75–76; and peaceful integration, 126 class systems, 91; and the European

Union, 93, 94, 95–97, 106–7; and power structure, 93; upper class outside the European Union, 100–101 Cold War, 3, 55–59, 74 collective defence, 83 collectivist ethic, 78 colonialism, 7–8, 79; by Chile, 23–26; and economics, 26, 28; by French, 25–29; by Japan, 132, 133; overview, 15–16; and ownership of peoples and lands, 16–17; Rapa Nui, 23–26; reasons for occurrence in Pacific Hemisphere, 22–23; in Tahiti, 25–29; views of, 21, 26 colonisation, as a process, 18–20 commonwealth, 109 community, 109. See also East Asian Community (EAC) compensation, by Japanese, 79–82 competition, 10 conflict: inter-generational, 78; in Rapa Nui, 24–25 conflict resolution, 84, 89; China and Taiwan–Hong Kong–Tibet– Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia, 116–17; and the EAC, 111–12; East Asia, 111; European Union, 111; forum concerning, 129–42; Japan-Russia and the Northern Territories, 112– 14; Japan–United States over Okinawa, 114–15; Korea, 117–20; and the OSCAP, 111–12; relationship with core and context integration, 120–23 Confucian ethic, 141 Confucianism, 75

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Index cultural power, 16 culture: and colonialism, 26; colonisation of, 17–18; East Asia, 109–10; in European Union, 100; and integration of nations, 121–22; and occurrence of Pearl Harbor, 37–38; United States, 67; and violence, 12 A Daily Yomiuri, 83 daoist, 117 decolonisation, 7–8, 15, 18–19; from mother countries, 20; and Rapa Nui, 24–25; stages of, 16 democracy, 22; Asian countries, 126– 27; in European Union, 99 denazification, 71 Der Spiegel, 60 DEW (directed energy weapon), 7 dialogue, 5; used to prevent future violence, 10–11; peace forum, 129–42 directed energy weapon (DEW), 7 direct violence: across fault-lines, 91, 92; of the future, 6–7; of the past, 3–5; of the present, 5–6 disease, 3 dominant nations, in European Union, 97–98 DPRK, and reconciliation with Japan, 80–82 EAC. See East Asian Community (EAC) East Asia, 121; and conflict in Korea, 119–20; cooperation with European Union, 104; core and context of, 109–11; cultural descriptors, 109–10; parallels in Europe, 110–11; relationship with Europe, 127; relationship with United States, 124–25 East Asian Common Market, 121 East Asian Community (EAC), 110–11, 120; and conflict in Korea, 119; and conflict resolution, 111–12; creation of, 137–42; and future considerations for peace with integration, 123–28 Easter Island. See Rapa Nui economic class, 94; European Union, 95–97

economic power, 16, 100 economic relations: East Asia, 111; and trends, permanents, and theories of the Pacific War, 33–34 economics, and colonialism, 26, 28 entropy, 95 equity, 3, 94–95 Eurasia, and September 11, 2001, 61 Europe: core and context parallels with East Asia, 110–11; relationship with East Asia, 127–28; twenty-firstcentury threats to peace in, 91–95; and violence, 91–94 European Union, 64; civilisations outside of, 101–3; class system in, 94, 95–97, 100–101, 106–7; compared to Soviet Union, 98–99; and conflict resolution, 111; cooperation with East Asia, 104; deep core of, 110; emulated by EAC, 123; and its citizens, 98–100; membership in, 91; and military power, 103–5; minority-majority relations, 98; nations in, 93, 94, 97–98; peace system of, 94–95, 105–8; poverty in, 96–97; regions outside of, 103–5; states in, 93–94; as superpower, 3; and the United States, 103–5; and the upper class, 100–101 events: history as, 45–46; and process of history, 76; and trends, permanents, and theories of the Pacific War, 33–38 expansionism: Japanese vs. American, 35–36; by United States, 35–36, 48 foreigners, 86 forums, 11, 129–42 France: and colonialism, 21; and Tahiti, 25–29 free association, 20 French Polynesia. See Tahiti Fukuyama, Francis, 53 the future, as key to present, 5 gender, and violence, 92 generations, and violence, 92 genocide, 91, 133, 134; and Pearl Harbor, 69 geography, as a permanent, 48–49

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Index Islamic fundamentalism, 61 isolationist tradition, 78–79

geopolitics, France, 26 Germany: atrocities committed by, 63; compared to Japan, 77–79; post– Pearl Harbor, 40–41, 70–72; processing of recent past through textbooks, 76–79; reunification of, 112; social ethics post–Pearl Harbor, 73–74 Gandhi, 7, 18–19 global cooperation, 73 globalisation, 122 global primacy, 58 global reach period, 34, 48 Great Britain: atrocities committed by, 64; as coloniser, 20–21; and post– Pearl Harbor system, 70–72 Greek Orthodox, 94 Grossman, Zoltan, 47

Japan, 121; Article 9 of Constitution, 82–83; atrocities committed by, 63; changes during last generation, 74– 76; colonialism, 132, 133; compared to Germany, 77–79; compensation and apology for aggression by, 79– 82; conflict in Korea, 117–20; conflict resolution over Northern Territories, 112–14; conflict resolution with United States over Okinawa, 114–15; events leading to Pearl Harbor, 32–33; expansionism of, 35–36; NGOs and Japanese youth as peace workers, 84–90; politics, 124; post–Pearl Harbor system, 38–43, 70–72, 73–74; present conditions for war in, 83–84; and provocation plan for the Pacific War, 68–69; reconciliation by, 64; relationship to United States and NATO, 59–60; security of, 116; social ethics, 73–74; textbook issues, 76–79, 125; and theories of peace, 38–43; trends, permanents and theories of the Pacific War, 33–38; vertical social ethic, 65–66; views of the Pacific War, 131–42; and world hegemony, 55–59; world status of, 2 JCS 570/2, 55

Hawai´i, 8; views of the Pacific War, 132–42 healing resources, 5 health care, 10 Higher Purpose, 36, 38 history: as events, periods, and permanents, 45–46; perspective on United States history, 47–55; processing of through textbooks, 76–79 homology, 95 Hong Kong, conflict resolution over autonomy movements, 116–17 ho´o pono pono, 129–42 horizontal ethics: and peace process, 85–86; post–Pearl Harbor period, 73–74 Huntington, Samuel, 53 independence, 7–8, 8, 12; from mother countries, 20; in Rapa Nui, 24–25; as stage of decolonisation, 16 India: and struggle for Eurasia, 61; and world hegemony, 55–59 integration: future considerations for, 123–28; relationship with conflict resolution, 120–23 inter-generational conflict, 78 invulnerability, 50–51 Islam, 107; and the European Union, 101–2

Kanaky, 21, 22–23, 27, 28 Khmer Rouge, 125 Kim Dae-Jung, 81, 125, 126 Kim Il-Sung, 135 Koh, Tommy, 126 Kohl, Helmut, 71 Korea, 77, 121; and conflict resolution, 117–20; views of the Pacific War, 132–42 language, 93 latent nations, in European Union, 97–98 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 70 local authorities, 122 Loewen, James, 77 Long War, 1914–45, 3

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Index non-intellectuals, role in Japan, 75 non-provocative, defensive defence (NPD), 6–7 non-reconciliation politics, 83 non-self-governing territories, 25 normalisation, 79; compensation/ apology as pre-condition of, 81; between Tokyo and Pyongyang, 80 Northern Territories, 121; conflict resolution concerning, 112–14 North Korea, 84, 117–20, 125; and reconciliation with Japan, 80–82 NPD. See non-provocative, defensive defence (NPD) nuclear testing, 26–27 nuclear weapons, 50–51

Mackinder, Halford John, 54–55 Manifest Destiny, 58; implementation of, 52–54 Manifest Destiny 2, 34 McCollum, A. H., 68–69 militarism, 40 military bases, 53, 55, 83, 61 military class, 94 military interventions: Japan, 66–67; by United States, 4, 47, 48t4.1 military power, 4, 16, 60; China, 125– 26; and colonialism, 26–27, 28; and the European Union, 100, 103–5; and non-provocative, defensive defence, 6–7; and offensive military doctrine, 50; as precedent to cultural, economic, and political conquest, 51–54; and theories of peace post–Pearl Harbor, 39–40; United States, 4 Military Professional Resources Inc., Alexandria, Virginia, 83 minority-majority relations, European Union, 98 mission civilisatrice, 21, 26 Mongolia, conflict resolution over autonomy movements, 116–17 moral accounting, 64–65 mother country, 16, 19, 20 MOWASPs, 72 MOWUCs, 92 multilateralism, 80, 120–21 Muslims, 56; and Islam, 101–2, 107; and struggle for Eurasia, 61 NAFTA, 122, 124 Nanjing massacre, 69, 125, 133, 134, 141 narratives, 46 nations, in European Union, 93, 94, 97–98 NATO, 72; expansion of, 55–57; as instrument of United States, 59–60; and world hegemony, 55–59 natural processes, 78 neo-colonialism, 100–101 New Zealand, 11; decolonisation of, 21 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 122; and compensation and apology for Japanese aggression, 79–80, 82; forum for peace, 129–42; and Japanese youth as peace workers, 84–90

Occident, 16–17 offensive military doctrine, and United States settlers, 50 offensive weapon systems, 5–6 Okinawa, 121; conflict resolution with Japan and United States, 114–15 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/Pacific (OSCAP), 111, 120; and conflict resolution, 111–12; and future considerations for peace with integration, 123–28; and Korea conflict, 119 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 110 OSCAP. See Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Asia/Pacific (OSCAP) OSCE. See Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) ownership, 16, 17 Pacific Basin, 4 Pacific Hemisphere: direct violence involving, 3–7; division grouping of, 1–3; structural violence involving, 7–11; typology and overview, 2t1.1 Pacific Hemisphere Forum (PHF), 11 Pacific Islands: population, 2; ten uses of, 21–22 Pacific News Bulletin, 21, 25 Pacific War of 1931–45, 3–4, 32–33, 39; peace forum concerning, 130–42;

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Index trends, permanents, and theories of the war, 33–38; Vidal’s views of, 67 parentocracy, 15 the past, as key to future, 5 patriarchy, 15 peace: and 3S syndrome, 85; and direct violence, 3–7; forms of, 13t1.3; forums concerning, 129–42; future considerations for, 123–28; and offensive weapons systems, 6; service for, 7; and structural violence, 7–11; synergies for, 105–8; system of in European Union, 94– 95; theories of post–Pearl Harbor, 38–43; twenty-first-century threats to, 91–95; and vertical vs. horizontal behavior, 85–86 PeaceBoat, 24, 82, 89 Peace Corps, 7 peace workers, youth in Japan, 84–90 Pearl Harbor, 68, 131; events leading to war, 32–33; and post–Pearl Harbor system, 70–72; and provocation plan for, 68–69; and theories of peace, 38–43; trends, permanents, and theories of the war, 33–38 Pearl Harbor Day, 31 periods: history as, 45–46; and processing of history, 76; in United States history, 47 permanents: history as, 45–46; and theories of the Pacific War, 33–38 perpetrators, 78 Perry, Matthew, 67 PHF. See Pacific Hemisphere Forum (PHF) polarisation, 84 political class, 93, 94 political power, 16; and the European Union, 100, 106; Germany, 71; Japan, 124 politics, and colonialism, 27, 28 population, Pacific Hemisphere, 2 poverty, European Union, 96–97 power, types of, 16 prejudice, and violence, 92 prisons, 75 race, and violence, 92

Rapa Nui, 23–26 Rapid Deployment Forces (RDF), 5 Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution, 96 reciprocity, 102 reconciliation: by Japan, 64; and Japanese aggression, 80–81; policy approaches to, 72–73 regionalism, 107 regions: outside the European Union, 103–5; and war, 107 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 34, 55, 67, 68, 83, 112 Russia: conflict resolution over Northern Territories, 112–14; post– Pearl Harbor system, 72; and struggle for Eurasia, 61; and world hegemony, 55–59; world status of, 2 RyuKyu Islands, 114, 121 satellite countries, 99 Schengen Agreement, 97 Schlesinger, Arthur, 47 SDF. See Self-Defence Forces, (SDFs) secularisation, 102 secularism, 52–53 Security Council, permanent seat on, 66 Self-Defence Forces, (SDFs), 82–83 self-determination, 22 self-reliance, 9–10 September 11, 2001, 51, 52; and Eurasia, 61; theories about United States role in, 68 slavery, 15, 50 sleep, 85 smiles, 85 South Korea, 117–20 South Kuriles, 112–14 sovereignty, as stage of decolonisation, 16 Soviet Union, compared to European Union, 98–99 Spain, 107 states, in European Union, 93–94 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, 97–98 Stinnett, Robert B., 67–69 structural violence, 7–11; across faultlines, 91–92; of the future, 10–11; of the past, 7–9; of the present, 9–10 superpowers, 103–5 sustainable development, 9–10

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Index symbiosis, 3, 94 Tahiti, 25–29 Taiwan, 121; conflict resolution over autonomy movements, 116–17 terrorism, United States war against, 41 textbooks, and processing of recent history, 76–79, 125 third-worldisation, 9–10 “3S” syndrome, 84–86 Tibet, conflict resolution over autonomy movements, 116–17 Tindemans Plan, 103 trade relations, 9–10 transcendence, 95 trauma, and violence, 4–5 Turkey, 102 Unit 731, 69, 125 unitary states, 35, 36 United Nations: Charter, 20; and Rapa Nui, 24–25; Security Council and the European Union, 105; Security Council seats, 66 United States: and Asia-Pacific relations, 79–80; atrocities committed by, 64; conflict in Korea, 117–20; conflict resolution over Okinawa, 114–15; decolonisation of, 21; direct violence involving, 3–7; and the European Union, 103–5; events leading to Pearl Harbor, 32–33; expansionism of, 35–36; and globalisation, 122; implementation of Manifest Destiny, 52–54; moral accounting of, 64–65; as mother country, 20; and NAFTA, 122, 124; and NATO/AMPO policy, 55–59, 61–62; and NPD, 6–7; and offensive military doctrine, 50; perspective on history of, 47–55; post–Pearl Harbor, 38–43, 70–72, 73–74; processing of recent past through textbooks, 76– 79; provocation plan for the Pacific War, 68–69; relationship to NATO and Japan, 59–60; relationship with East Asia, 124–25; relationship with Germany, 73–74; relationship with Japan, 73–74, 114–15; security of,

116; social ethic, 67; structural violence involving, 3–7; theories concerning Pearl Harbor and 9/11, 68; and theories of peace post–Pearl Harbor, 38–43; trends, permanents, and theories of the Pacific War, 33– 38; views of the Pacific War, 132–42; war against terrorism, 41; and Westphalia peace treaty, 82; and world hegemony, 55–59; world status of, 2 universal period, 48 values, 126–27 vertical ethics, 77–78; and peace process, 85–86; post–Pearl Harbor period, 73–74 vertical social ethic, Japan, 65–66 victims, 78 Vidal, Gore, 34, 54, 67, 68 Viet Nam War, 77 violence: cultural, 12; direct, 3–7, 91, 92; in Europe, 91–94; forms of, 13t1.2; and peaceful integration, 125; and race, 92–93; reduction of, 3; structural, 7–11, 91–92; and trauma, 4–5; varieties of, 91–92; verticality as form of, 85 vivisection experiments, 69, 125 vulnerability, 51 war: and Article 9 of Japanese Constitution, 82–83; capability and motivation to conduct, 36–37; condition for in Japan, 83–84; culture of, 84; regions and, 107; synergies for, 105–8; women’s views of, 134, 135 Westphalia “Peace Treaty,” 82 women, role in Japan, 74–76 World War II. See Pacific War of 1931–45 Xinjiang, conflict resolution over autonomy movements, 116–17 youth, role in Japan, 75–76; as peace workers, 84–90

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