No abstract

No abstract

Diplomatic spats over history between two of the United States' allies, Japan and the Republic of Korea, continue to simmer under the post-1945 liberal international order. The antagonism between the former colonizer and its colony has become a detriment not only for US security interests in the region, but also a challenge to the US claims to stand for human rights, as the issue of military sexual slavery has become tethered to the global human rights discourse by Korean American diaspora activists. Yet, when the US attempts to mediate between the two, it is rebuffed by its two allies because the US often acts as a neutral third party, rather than the major actor responsible for the making of post-1945 order in east Asia and the current impasse over history. This article asks how the entangled relation between order and justice in the making of the hub-and-spokes system in east Asia, mainly engineered by the United States, casts a long shadow over how to deal with history in Japan. This matters because questions of moral possibility in world politics always suppose a sovereign agentic state, and for Japan this creates a gap between the ideal moral state and the reality of being a semi-sovereign state. Thus, the persistence of Japan's ‘history problem’ must be understood not solely in terms of whether the empirical facts are accepted or not, but also in the sense of how being a sovereign matters when it comes to moral possibility in global politics.

Historicism has shaped global politics by projecting multiple images of development. Specifically, it has served to legitimise Western forms of hegemony by naturalising the schema of 'First in the West, then in the Rest, ' thereby damning non-Western Others to the 'waiting room' of history (Chakrabarty 2000). In this light, decolonising international relations must likewise complement efforts to decolonise the stagist views of historicism implicit in civilisational history. However, this focus on stagism neglects the ways in which historicism has also been employed to assert non-Western agencies in the name of culture, and to legitimise colonialism, as it was in the case of Japan. The case of Japan thus raises the question of whether limiting the critique of historicism to that of being a stagist civilisational discourse is sufficient or not. This article argues that there are not just one but two problems with historicism in international relations: first, that the stagist view of history legitimises the civilising mission; and second, that the romantic turn to culture as a means of resisting Eurocentric history may actually underwrite a colonialist discourse as well. If this is correct, the debate on historicism must not only engage with the concept of civilisation, but also with the concept of culture as a site through which sovereignty is projected.

No abstract