Japan And Enlarged Europe

Japan and the European Union are two «civilian powers» that have dramatically extended and diversified their role on the world stage and that have launched together an Action Plan dealing with peace and stability, economic, environmental, commercial and financial governance, and cultural exchanges and cooperation. Their bilateral cooperation has been intensified as well as their cross contribution to the G8 and multilateral organisations like the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation. In parallel, their respective domestic and international positions have changed. The EU has integrated ten new members, adopted a Constitution and developed a security and defence policy. Japan has widened its international and security role and reorganised most of its economic policies. Therefore, Japan and the enlarged European Union are actors and partners in the process of global governance. This book addresses the cooperation between Japan and the enlarged European Union for a more secure world, sustainable development and global governance. It gathers contributions from European and Japanese experts who have established a permanent network on this topic and meet every year for seminars in Brussels under the aegis of the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) and its Belgian member organisation Study Group on European Policies (SEP-GEPE), with the support of the Japan Foundation. The book is a joint Japanese-European contribution to the Year of Japan-European Union People-to-People Exchanges declared in 2005.

This is an account of the growth and uses of Western learning in Japan from 1720 to 1830. These are the dates of the beginning of official interest in Western learning and of the expulsion of Siebold from the country, the first stage of a crisis that could be resolved only by the opening of the country of the West. The century and more included by the two dates was a most important period in Japanese history, when intellectuals, rebelling at the isolation of their country, desperately sought knowledge from abroad. The amazing energy and enthusiasm of men like Honda Toshiaki made possible the spectacular changes in Japan, which are all too often credited to the arrival of Commodore Perry. The author chose Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) as his central figure. A page from any one of Honda's writings suffices to show that with him one has entered a new age, that of modern Japan. One finds in his books a new spirit, restless, curious and receptive. There is in him the wonder at new discoveries, the delight in widening horizons. Honda took a kind of pleasure even in revealing that Japan, after all, was only a small island in a large world. To the Japanese who had thought of Chinese civilization as being immemorial antiquity, he declared that Egypt's was thousands of years older and far superior. The world, he discovered, was full of wonderful things, and he insisted that Japan take advantage of them. Honda looked at Japan as he thought a Westerner might, and saw things that had to be changed, terrible drains on the country's moral and physical strength. Within him sprang the conviction that Japan must become one of the great nations of the world.

Japanese investment in Europe has been growing by leaps and bounds and this book charts the course of this phenomenon, looking both at the Japanese experience of Europe and the European experience of the Japanese, and social, cultural and economic consequences of this encounter. The Japanese and Europe provides a contemporary snap-shot, based upon a wealth of interviews and fully-illustrated by photographs, maps and diagrams.

Presenting the history of relations between the European Union and Japan, this book explains the origins and significance of the momentous 2018 Economic Partnership Agreement and its parallel Strategic Partnership Agreement. Set within the historical context of the 1991 Hague Declaration and Action Plan of 2001, this book analyses the impact of recent background changes to the liberal trading order, the proliferation of free trade agreements, and uncertainty about role of the United States in the world on relations between Japan and the EU. Adopting a path-dependent approach, it illustrates how these agreements were reached as a result of growing patterns of cooperative behaviour between the EU and Japan, and the imprint of shared past experiences in areas from trade to security. In so doing, this book also raises important questions about the future of multilateral cooperation, exploring the potential for bilateral agreements to undermine the possibility of finding international solutions to increasingly international problems. EU–Japan Relations and the Crisis of Multilateralism will appeal to students and scholars of European and Japanese politics and international relations, as well as policymakers internationally with an interest in these significant agreements.

This book explains the increasing importance of value politics in Europe and Japan, shedding light on various arenas: social values; parties, elections and politics; public action, private sector and law; identity politics and religion; media and public spheres. It analyses how, against different but commensurable backgrounds, the rise of value politics alters (or not) the political game, for which purposes and with which effects. Applying both qualitative and quantitative methods from a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the comparison is organized by joining skills from experts of Japan and Europe and by systematizing a common analytical framework for the two cases. As such, it presents a revealing and unique analysis of the changing relationship between values and political behaviour in the two polities. Beyond the comparison, it also documents the opportunities and challenges underlying the interactions between Europe, Japan and the rest of the world; and the competition/combination between different versions of modernity. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of European studies and politics, Asian politics/studies, Japanese studies/politics and more broadly to comparative politics, sociology, cultural/media studies, and economics.

The EU and Japan have one of the most important trade relationships in the world. Fittingly, this book presents a detailed analysis of their bilateral regulatory environment and negotiation processes. Moreover, the two polities have also co-operated extensively in bilateral and multilateral contexts on a range of global governance issues. Nevertheless, the relationship is widely acknowledged to have significant untapped potential. Deploying the concept of civilian power, the book takes a fresh, honest and provocative look at this important relationship, in a post-Fukushima, post-sovereign debt crisis world. First the book analyses the place of EU-Japan relations within the worldviews of the Japanese and European bodies politic. Subsequently, three thematic sections evaluate their cooperation on such issues as trade, energy security, environmental politics, development, human rights, post-conflict reconstruction, health and biosecurity. The eminent scholars of the EU-Japan relationship gathered in this book offer informed, empirically rich and policy-relevant insights into the present and future prospects for the relationship.