Overview

Why do some former enemy countries establish durable amity while others remain mired in animosity? From this question, Professor Yinan He started her theoretical study on post-conflict interstate reconciliation and the outcome of her study was published as The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (2009).

Today’s 2nd CVE Roundtable invites Prof. Yinan He to hear and share her distinguished viewpoint on “deep” reconciliation which is very important but unexplored especially in international theory.

Overall today’s Roundtable is conducted in two parts. First, Prof. He briefly introduced and summarized her argument about reconciliation and national mythmaking mechanism for about 30 minutes. And then a discussion including comments and questions on her presentation will be followed in a very comfortable and free atmosphere.

Presentation

Prof. Yinan He’s main argument is that harmonization of national memories can significantly facilitate genuine reconciliation, while divergence resulting from national mythmaking tends to harm long-term prospects for reconciliation.

Focusing on the two empirical cases, postwar Sino-Japanese relations and West German-Polish relation, she appeals the strength of her point of view comparing to a realist theory.

Prior to elaborate her own idea, she defines genuine reconciliation as the concept of Deep Interstate Reconciliation (DIR), where countries share the understanding that war is unthinkable and hold generally warm feelings toward each other. She thinks that DIR needs to be cemented not only by shared short-run material interests but also by sustainable mutual understanding and trust.

Aforementioned historical ideas are not the only force affecting post-conflict interstate relationships and we can also find out a realist theory that some degree of compatibility between two countries’ security interests facilitates reconciliation. However, favorable structural environment alone proves insufficient to overcome the shadow of the past without serious efforts to bridge the memory gap. This is evident in the lack of DIR in Sino-Japanese relations during the 1970s-80s when the two countries faced a common Soviet threat. Moreover, the trend of German-Polish historical settlement from the 1970s, though benefiting from détente, was largely a function of the shifting tides in domestic politics and memory discourse. And this trend persisted in the 1980s when Cold War tension resumed, again due to internal drives than structural impact. Finally, since the 1990s German-Polish relationship has been approaching DIR in a multipolar Europe that has no clear structural fault line.

However, according to the mythmaking theory, post-conflict interstate reconciliation is more properly explained. Specifically, after World War II, Sino-Japanese and West German-Polish relations were both antagonized by the Cold War structure, and pernicious myths prevailed in national collective memory. Even though in the 1970s, China and Japan brushed aside historical legacy for immediate diplomatic normalization, the progress of reconciliation was impeded from the 1980s by elite mythmaking practices that stressed historical animosities. In contrast, from the 1970s West Germany and Poland de-mythified war history and narrowed their memory gap through restitution measures and textbook cooperation, paving the way for deep reconciliation.

Furthermore, the mythmaking theory is useful not only to understand the origins of interstate reconciliation but also to study several outstanding puzzles in contemporary East Asian and Central Eastern European international relations. In other words, it is conducive to ascertain the underlying causes of the so-called history problem in Sino-Japanese relations: Why did China and Japan quarrel over history not immediately after the war but only from the early 1980s, when the majority of their populations had no direct experience of the war? Moreover, we can infer why the Germans are far more forthright regarding their war responsibility than the Japanese even though during WWII, Germany and Japan both committed horrendous atrocities against neighboring countries.

In a nut shell, historical ideas are not epiphenomenal; shared material interests do not automatically produce memory harmonization, nor does a trend towards the latter require the former. The best way to reach reconciliation will be construction of a shared honest history between nations and the promotion of domestic political liberation...(Continued)

Presenter

Yinan He (Assistant Professor John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations Seton Hall University, NJ)

Participants

Jun-Hyeok Kwak (Korea University)

Tze M. Loo (University of Richmond)

Rwei-Ren Wu (Academia Sinica)