EAI Fellows Program Working Paper Series No. 4
 

Abstract

East Asian countries have been engaged in disputes over history.  While their historical contentions have caused suspicions and frictions among them, I argue that they have also served as a medium of dialogue that helps establish a common understanding about the individual countries’ contemporary reality and future direction.  Historical contentions contribute to such a dialogue if and only if regional actors recognize each other as legitimate participants in a dialogue about the salient past and when they contend over the past within a common framework of meaning, can contentions over history contribute to the creation of a regional public sphere.  The regional public sphere is a discursive area where regional actors exchange their understandings of the past and their desires for the future, out of which emerge a new focal point for regional issues and a shared understanding of their own and others’ identities.  East Asia, through historical contentions in the 1980s and 1990s, produced an embryonic form of a regional public sphere but now stands at a fork between strengthening the regional public sphere and fracturing it into a contentious public sphere. 

Author

J.J. Suh is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University. He teaches International Relations theory, International Security, international institutions, Asian security, and U.S. foreign and security policies. His research interests include military alliances, regionalization, US security policy, weapons of mass destruction, Asian security and Korea.

This paper was submitted to "EAI Fellows Program on Peace, Governance, and Development in East Asia" supported by the Henry Luce Foundation based in New York. All papers are available only through the online database.

Asian countries wrangle over history. China, Japan and Korea are locked in disputes over Japan’s history textbook. Japanese prime minister’s apology about Japan’s past has been a sore issue for China and Korea for over half a century. A Chinese study of a local history (東北工程) suddenly became a concern for Koreans in 2004, degenerating into a source of tension between the two countries that were otherwise fast becoming close friends. A territorial dispute over a tiny island claimed by Japan and Korea or by Japan and China routinely escalate to a “history war” as the pair of governments turn to their respective versions of history as the source of the authenticity that prove their claims. These historical contentions are not mere academic disagreements. They have led to emotional street demonstrations, exchanges of accusatory government statements, and even recalling of ambassadors. They have had chilling effects on otherwise booming and mutually beneficial economic relationships. They often overshadow, and even forestall, summit meetings. Historical contentions are central to international relations in East Asia.

The central location of historical contentions in the region’s international relations raises a number of questions. Why are the East Asian countries so concerned about the past of their neighbors as to make it an international political issue? Will these historical contentions condemn the region to a fractured and conflictual arena of diatribes where they remain a source of suspicions, contentions and possibly conflicts in the future? Do historical disputes hold the potential to contribute to the emergence of a regional public sphere in which East Asian countries engage each other in dialogues about their identities, desires, and worries? These are some of the questions I address in this project. In other words, I am not so concerned with questions of historical accuracy: What are historical facts, and who, if any, got them right? Rather I am more interested to analyze the phenomenon of historical contentions itself as a way to think about the possibilities and difficulties in creating and maintaining a stable, and even peaceful, regional order. The central task of the paper is to understand the ways in which disputes over history widen the emotional fissure between the East Asian countries or lay a discursive foundation for a community.

Current scholarship is divided about the impact that history has on East Asia. Some point to recent uproars about Japan’s history textbook in Korea and China as just one of the many lingering sources of deep-seated historical animosity that have the potential to disrupt the stability and peace in the region. But others turn to such historical legacies as Confucius world order as evidence that the region’s current peace has deep historical roots and thus is likely to continue into the future. In this project I develop a third perspective of history: an institutionalist argument that a history represents an institutionalization of memory that reflects a political pact made by state actors at a particular time. My argument has two parts. First, the history, once institutionalized, constitutes a common social reality as well as a focal point, both of which help the three countries carry out “normal” (in a Kuhnian sense) diplomacy. Second, the history, if its institutionalized form creates a dissonance with the reality on the ground, serves as a medium of communicative actions, through which the countries in Northeast Asia attempt to establish a set of new parameters of the diplomatic game. The two arguments suggest that “history wars” reflect, as the first group of pessimistic scholars suggests, fault lines among China, Japan and Korea but they contribute, as the second group suggests, to maintaining the stability and peace in the region. Seen from the institutionalist perspective, historical contentions look war-like but act like diplomacy. In order to flesh out the argument and test the hypotheses derived from the argument, this article focuses on the controversy over Japanese history textbooks, leaving other cases of historical contentions for future research. This article is organized as follows. The first part critically reviews the existing conventional views of the historical contentions, and argues that they fail to account for the pattern of the historical contentions because they are based on a common and problematic understanding of history as a set of objective facts. It suggests that the pattern is better accounted for if the historical contentions are conceptualized as discursive diplomacy. The second part of the article develops the concept of regional public sphere and examines the conditions under which historical contentions can contribute to the emergence of a regional public sphere. In the final section of a prognosis of the current status and possible future directions, the article concludes that while the historical contentions have in the past contributed to the creation of a public sphere of regional dialogue, they now run the risk of degenerating into nationalist or parallel public spheres...(Continued)