Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Internationalisation of Japan

1979; University of British Columbia; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2757063

1715-3379

Ronald Dore,

Japanese History and Culture

O EVER HALF A CENTURY of his work with the Institute of Pacific Relations and Pacific Affairs, half a century of endeavours to expand the quotient of rationality in Asian international relations-Bill Holland has shown the true editor's and research promoter's encyclopaedic catholicity of interests. But one theme has always caught his attention, as I was reminded the last time we met by his enthusiastic commendation of Christopher Thorne's Allies of a Kind: the interplay, in the determination of national policies, between interest, ideology and national self-consciousness. For the last of the IPR conferences, at Lucknow in 1950-before he got caught up in the protracted struggle for the survival of the IPR against one of the more bizarrely pathological manifestations of that interplay-he planned and edited a series of papers on nationalism in the Pacific. Perhaps, if he were to plan a conference today for a revived IPR, he would pick the theme of internationalism in Asia. Fifty years ago, when the IPR held its first conferences in Honolulu, and even a quarter-century later at the Lucknow conference just mentioned, the focus of attention was at first on the consolidation of the nation-state and later its definitive triumph over the nineteenth-century version of Empire-the spectacular decline of Western power in the Far East.' One can see the Vietnam war as the last residual stage of that process, or one can see it as the beginning of a new round of struggle between the nation-state and a new twentieth-century version of Empire-a struggle made inevitable, as dependency theorists would argue, by the inequalities of power within an integrated capitalist system (with now still the U.S., but in ten years' time Japan as the major metropolitan protagonist in Asia), or, as one might more broadly extrapolate from Chinese criticisms of Russian social imperialism, by inequalities of power within any integrated economic system, capitalist or socialist.