Abstract
Matteo Dian’s book Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy presents an interesting theoretical approach to the study of collective memory and foreign policy in which different traditions that embrace divergent beliefs about the past engage in domestic contestation with the aim of defining the country’s collective memory narrative. Such narratives, argues Dian, influence foreign policy. One of the book’s main strengths is that it clearly demonstrates how the ways in which the past is remembered has had important consequences for how state leaders have understood the roles of their countries within the world order.
In post-war Japan, the collective memory of Japanese people as victims during the war was interpreted by many Japanese as a reason for embracing pacifism. Dian argues that Japanese leaders mobilised such sentiments to motivate Japan’s limited military role during the Cold War. Despite fierce contestation, post-war governments managed to navigate between the two main traditions – the conservative and progressive ones – incorporating elements from both as they defined Japan’s role in the world and legitimised foreign policy.
However, the death of the Showa emperor and the end of the Cold War in 1989, the book argues, created a dilemma; the new situation made the dominant post-war narrative untenable. In the space that opened, progressives began to debate the Showa emperor’s war responsibility and emphasised the need to include Japanese victimisation of neighbouring countries in collective memory. The narrative that they promoted pointed to the importance of reconciliation and improved relations with Asian nations. Conservatives who wished to make Japan a ‘normal’ country with war potential instead of holding on to what they considered outdated pacifist ideals, by contrast, sought to narrate the past in a ‘normal’ and less self-critical way that stressed the wartime generation’s heroic sacrifice. During the 1990s, the progressive agenda was quite successful, but was gradually overtaken by the conservatives who have promoted their beliefs about the past and weakened previously existing constraints on defence policy. These changes notwithstanding, Japanese collective memory remains contested.
In the Chinese case, Dian identifies what he calls the national salvation and Confucian traditions. During the Mao era, the national salvation tradition was drawn on as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) stressed class struggle and magnified its role as a heroic revolutionary which saved the nation from imperialists and capitalists. Against the background of such a way of remembering the past, the CCP also presented itself as a contemporary revolutionary leader that should aid oppressed peoples in an anti-imperialist international struggle. Following Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping downplayed class struggle and revolutionary heroism as he launched economic reforms.
Dian suggests that the Tiananmen Square protests and the end of the Cold War constituted a dilemma for Chinese collective memory by highlighting increased inequality. In response to this ideological crisis, the CCP increasingly portrayed itself as patriotic, and stressed past victimhood and national humiliation. The narrative about past national humiliation, the book argues, has nurtured a Hobbesian understanding of the international order where ‘backward nations are beaten by the powerful’ (p. 196), and other great powers are viewed as wanting to constrain China’s rise. The implication is that the CCP needs to save China from new humiliations. The Confucian tradition, strongly criticised and suppressed by Mao, has been rehabilitated with the introduction of Confucian concepts such as harmony and hierarchy, which can be used to understand how the international and domestic realms should be ordered.
The book’s focus on domestic contestation, too often glossed over in existing research on collective memory and international politics, is one of its main strengths. At the same time, the strong focus on the domestic construction of collective memory and its influence on foreign policy in the Japanese and Chinese cases arguably comes at the expense of highlighting the international dimension of contestation over collective memory. Several recent studies have highlighted the interaction between Japanese and Chinese collective memory narratives (Gustafsson, 2016), and how political actors seek to influence the other state’s narratives (Gustafsson, 2014). Since collective memory construction is not only a domestic affair, future research should seek to develop approaches that incorporate both domestic and international contestation.
Another strength of the book is that the concluding discussions at the end of each chapter connect back to and astutely contrast findings with the assumptions found in other theories about collective memory in international politics introduced in the first chapter. For those interested in the role of collective memory in international politics this is an important book.