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The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, by Peter J. Katzenstein, editor
9. Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan
Thomas U. Berger
For nearly half a century Germany and Japan have pursued remarkably consistent national security policies that deemphasize military instruments as a means of achieving national objectives. They have continued to adhere to these policies despite dramatic changes in their security environments and steady growth in their relative power. Since the 1950s many outside analysts have predicted that these two nations will inevitably assume a larger defense and national security role. Yet, contrary to these predictions, not only have Germany and Japan failed to assume a more independent defense posture, but they have also been slow to assume a larger security role within the context of multilateral institutions, such as the un, nato, or the more limited bilateral context of the U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty.
This behavior is anomalous from the perspective of neorealism and neoliberalism, which see state behavior as being driven by the rational responses of state actors to pressures emanating from their international environments. While these two schools differ in the way they specify international structure, both perspectives would predict greater German and Japanese responsiveness to the changes in the international system than has in fact occurred. Instead of increasing their political-military power, as neorealist perspectives suggest they would, Germany and Japan have done precisely the opposite. Although it may be argued that the two nations have developed formidable military establishments, their ability to act independently of their allies has been sharply circumscribed by the types of weapon systems that they have acquired, by the kinds of missions that their forces train for, and by various institutional limitations placed on their armed forces. Despite demands periodically placed upon them by the United States and other allies, Germany and Japan have resisted pressures to expand their global military roles. This aversion to acting more independently might at first seem to be consistent with the predictions of neoliberalism. But Germany's and Japan's timidity in assuming greater military responsibilities within the framework of international institutions opens them up to the charge of free riding and threatens to undermine the very security regimes upon which they have come to depend.
This essay will argue that an adequate explanation of German and Japanese antimilitarism requires us to look beyond international structures and examine the domestic cultural-institutional context in which defense policy is made. The central thesis is that Germany and Japan, as a result of their historical experiences and the way in which those experiences were interpreted by domestic political actors, have developed beliefs and values that make them peculiarly reluctant to resort to the use of military force. During the immediate postwar period of 1945 to 1960, these beliefs and values became institutionalized in the German and Japanese political systems in various ways, both formal and informal, and are now integral parts of their countries' post-1945 national identities. Together they constitute unique political-military cultures that lead Germany and Japan to choose certain responses to their respective international environments, responses that might differ from those of other states in identical situations. Although the end of the Cold War has fundamentally transformed the two nations' security environments, their approaches to national security have changed only minimally. While some further evolution is likely, the pace of change is glacial and the direction in which they are likely to evolve cannot be deduced from objective, external factors alone. Rapid changes in Germany's and Japan's cultures of antimilitarism are likely only if they are challenged by a major external shock--for instance, a direct military attack on German or Japanese population centers or a collapse of their alliances with the United States and the West combined with the emergence of new security threats.
The argument will be structured as follows: After examining the short comings of purely structural approaches to explaining German and Japanese antimilitarism, I shall briefly explicate my use of the concept of political-military culture. I shall then examine first the development of these two cultures in the immediate postwar period and subsequently during the Cold War. Finally, I will examine the persistence of these two cultures of antimilitarism since 1989.
The purpose of this exercise is not to "disprove" structural approaches to analyzing state behavior. Unlike much of the literature on strategic culture, this essay will underline how noncultural factors can, under certain circumstances, shape the evolution of culture. At the same time, however, cultural forces have a significant impact on how states respond to the structural conditions (the distribution of economic and military power, the density of international institutions) under which they operate. While the relationship between culture and structure may be dialectical, without factoring in cultural and ideological variables we cannot achieve an adequate understanding of foreign outcomes or even make the most guarded predictions about future state behavior.
Deficiencies of Structural Accounts
The development of postwar German and Japanese national security policies, particularly since the end of the Cold War, poses a number of thorny problems for both neorealist and neoliberal theories of state behavior. The two nations' profound reluctance to assume larger military roles, either independently or in a multilateral setting, raises questions about the domestic origins of state preferences and their perceptions of the international system that cannot be answered by perspectives that focus solely on a state's position in the international system.
Realism offers a convincing explanation of the origins of German and Japanese defense and national security policies in the post-1945 period and provides important insights on the structural forces that helped shape German and Japanese security policy during the Cold War. Defeated in World War II and occupied by the United States, Germany and Japan found that their policy makers had little room to maneuver during the early postwar years. Since the two nations were dependent on the United States for both their security and their prosperity, the costs of not joining the Western alliance system would have been prohibitive and would have posed unacceptable risks from the perspective of the leaders of the time.
Differences in the two nations' geopolitical positions also help explain why they adopted very different approaches to their alliances. Faced with a formidable Soviet military threat on its borders and fearful that the United States might abandon Western Europe, Germany sought to extract from its allies as clear a commitment to its security as it could. In return for such guarantees, German leaders were willing to pay a considerable price in national autonomy. In contrast, Japan, as an island nation relatively insulated from immediate military threat, was primarily concerned that too close an alliance with the United States might entangle it in bloody regional conflicts like Korea and Vietnam. Consequently Japan preferred to maintain a high degree of military autonomy within the context of its purely bilateral security arrangement with the United States. 1 Finally, a realist analysis of German and Japanese foreign policies would emphasize the two nations' security relationship with the United States to explain their relatively low military expenditures during the Cold War. In effect, the United States provided them with a free ride on security, allowing them to concentrate their national energies on increasing their economic strength. From the perspective of 1990, this strategy seems to have proved itself a brilliant success, as Germany and Japan emerged from the Cold War with arguably the world's strongest economies, while the United States and the Soviet Union appeared exhausted after forty years of political-military competition.
The shortcomings of a purely realist analysis, however, become more apparent when we try to examine the foreign policies of the two countries after they reemerged as major powers in the 1960s and 1970s. Contrary to so-called aggressive variants of neorealism, which see states as power maximizers, Germany and Japan did not seek to develop military capabilities commensurate with their burgeoning economic power. 2 On the contrary, they were profoundly ambivalent about any increase in military power, even when the opportunity was thrust upon them--for example, during the debate over the creation of a multilateral nuclear force (mlf) as part of nato in the 1960s. 3 Likewise, many Japanese leaders in the fifties and sixties, including Prime Ministers Kishi Nobusuke and Sato Eisaku, supported American requests for Japan's assumption of a greater regional role in containing Communism and would gladly have increased Japanese military capabilities, but they were sharply constrained by domestic political pressures.
Even from a more moderate realist point of view that sees states as security optimizers that balance against potential threats rather than as power maximizers, it would have appeared perfectly rational for Germany and Japan to have sought to acquire greater independent military capabilities, including, if not their own nuclear force de frappe, at least joint control over allied nuclear forces stationed in their own territory. 4 German and U.S. interests had diverged sharply over such issues as Berlin and detente, while in Asia new security threats, including a highly ideological, nuclear-armed People's Republic of China, had emerged in Asia. Moreover, with the Soviet acquisition of the capability to reach targets in the United States, the doctrine of extended deterrence had become highly problematic. 5
That such a force de frappe was a real possibility from the perspective of the time is reflected by U.S. willingness to supply Germany with theater nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and American fears in the 1960s that without something like mlf Germany was very likely to develop its own nuclear forces. 6 Similarly, in the late 1960s Japanese policy makers privately reviewed the possibility of developing a nuclear capability, while in public a fierce debate broke out over whether Japan should shift to an "autonomous defense" (jishuboei) stance. 7 Ultimately, German and Japan ese decision makers chose not to acquire such capabilities for a variety of reasons, including fears of triggering regional arms races. Yet there were good, realist reasons for them to have gone in the other direction as well. Tipping the balance in both cases--but especially in Japan--were the domestic political costs that would have been associated with taking such measures.
Realist difficulties in accounting for German and Japanese behavior have increased since the end of the Cold War. The end of the East-West confrontation has considerably enlarged the two nations' room for maneuver and heightened their relative stature in the international system. Nonetheless, neither Germany nor Japan has sought to take advantage of the new opportunities by increasing military capabilities. On the contrary, both nations have reduced their armed forces in the wake of the Cold War--significantly so in the German case--and have deliberately eschewed new military responsibilities even when they were thrust upon them, as during the Gulf war.
At the start of the Gulf crisis, German and Japanese leaders and security policy experts believed that it was vital that their forces participate directly in the allied war effort in the Gulf. They feared that in the event of heavy U.S. casualties, Germany and Japan would run the risk of triggering an isolationist backlash in the United States, undermining the international security order on which both countries have come to depend. In other words, the rational free rider would have found the dispatch of a small number of forces of the Gulf--if not on the scale of Britain or France, then at least on a par with Italy or Belgium--a worthwhile investment to ensure that the free ride would continue. The force of domestic antimilitary sentiments, however, ruled out taking even minimal military measures. 8
In certain respects, recent German and Japanese behavior poses less of a problem for neoliberals, who maintain that a variety of international structural changes are diminishing the pressures toward military competition--notably the spread of liberal democracy, growing economic interdependence, the proliferation of international institutions, and social and technological developments that greatly increase the costs of war while reducing the benefits. Neoliberal scholars such as Richard Rosecrance, John Goodman, and Jeffrey Anderson have viewed German and Japanese national security policies as a confirmation of their positions. Even some former traditional realists, such as Edward Luttwak, see in Germany and Japan evidence that the world is moving from an era of geopolitics to a new age of geoeconomics. German and Japanese antimilitarism, from this perspective, is not an aberration of the international norm but rather a harbinger of things to come; in the future, adherents of this view argue, other nations are likely to behave more like Germany and Japan in security matters. 9
In contrast to the realist perspective, however, neoliberals have difficulty accounting for the origins of German and Japanese antimilitarism, important elements of which had clearly developed before causal factors stressed by liberals had an opportunity to have much of an effect. Moreover, neoliberals find it difficult to explain the depth of German and Japanese antimilitarism compared to that of other countries that find themselves in similar structural positions. War is unpopular in liberal democracies the world over, and there are many other advanced industrial societies similarly embedded in the global network of international institutions and dependent on access to foreign markets and resources. Yet no other nations display as intense a sense of antimilitarism as do Germany and Japan.
Here again, the Gulf war provides us with the best recent example. German and Japanese interests in the Gulf war were certainly no less than those of other American allies; in fact, given the dependence of these countries on the United States for security, their interests were arguably much greater. Yet not only were the Germans and Japanese far less active than the British and French--who, one could plausibly maintain, as members of the Security Council have reputations as great military powers to uphold--but they seemed timid compared to even the Italians, Dutch, and Belgians, all of whom dispatched to the Gulf precisely the kind of symbolic military forces that pragmatists in the German and Japanese defense and foreign ministries were urging their governments to send.
Finally, neither the neorealist nor the neoliberal perspective addresses the issue of national identity and the way in which the definition of national identity in turn shapes the national interest. The importance of national identity is particularly apparent in the case of Germany during the Cold War because of its peculiar status as a divided nation. For nearly half a century, German policy makers on both the Left and the Right pursued the dream of national reunification, even though the economic and diplomatic costs of pursuing relations with Eastern Europe were considerable and international realities made their quest seem increasingly quixotic. Nonetheless, even in the 1970s and 1980s, after the Germans reconciled themselves with their fate as a divided nation, the dream of national unity lived on, and no German politician could afford to abandon a definition of national identity that committed the nation to pursuing that dream. That identity, and the definition of national interest that it produced, cannot be understood using systemic approaches that simply treat states as unitary, independent actors. 10
National identity, however, is a static variable. For while German national identity survived the nation's half-century-long partition, it underwent at the same time a profound transformation. Whereas in the pre-1945 era German statesmen and intellectuals had emphasized Germany's unique path of development, Der deutsche Sonderweg between East and West, during the 1950s and 1960s Germany redefined itself as part of a larger, nascent European community of nations bound together by common values and interests. This commitment to integration with the rest of Western Europe fundamentally altered the way in which national interest was calculated. As a result, once reunification was achieved, Germany further reduced its national sovereignty by accelerating the European integration process through the treaty of Maastricht. To achieve this objective, Germany agreed to sacrifice the German mark and support the creation of a European central bank, even though it thereby relinquished a major source of power and influence in a way that neither neorealism nor neoliberalism can easily account for.
In short, both neorealism and neoliberalism identify important systemic factors that sharply constrained German and Japanese policy makers during the early Cold War period and provided incentives for pursuing more moderate policies thereafter. By themselves, however, international structures are underdetermining. While pressures from the international system may influence state actors like Germany and Japan, the signals that it sends are ambiguous, even contradictory, and a multiplicity of plausible solutions is available. Under such circumstances states are likely to be guided in their decision making by their own internal sets of preferences and beliefs about the international system. 11 To argue that simply because German and Japanese policy proved successful in the end meant that this was the only rational course of action open to those nations is to commit the same sort of post hoc fallacy that cultural explanations are often accused of. What is needed at this point is a model of how these beliefs and values may have come into existence and why they continue to persist across generational boundaries.
The Concept of Political-Military Culture
Common to all theories of culture is the notion that human behavior is guided by socially shared and transmitted ideas and beliefs. 12 Cultures as such comprise beliefs about the way the world is--including at the most basic level beliefs that define the individual's and the group's identities--and ideas about the way the world ought to be. 13 Political culture refers to those cultural beliefs and values that shape a given society's orientations toward politics. 14 Political-military culture in turn refers to the subset of the larger political culture that influences how members of a given society view national security, the military as an institution, and the use of force in international relations.
Although influenced by the real world, cultures (including political-military cultures) are not merely subjective reflections of objective reality. Two individuals or groups with different cultural backgrounds are likely to behave differently even when confronted with identical situations. For example, if French or American policy makers found themselves in geostrategic positions similar to Japan's or Germany's, they might be expected to behave in a very different way than their German and Japanese counterparts do because they come from cultural backgrounds with very different norms and values regarding the military and the use of force.
Cultures--and by extension political-military cultures--are not static entities hovering above society, directing behavior while they themselves remain immune to social, economic, and political forces. They are transmitted through the often imperfect mechanisms of primary and secondary socialization and are under constant pressure from both external developments and internal contradictions. 15 Cognitive beliefs about the world are constantly tested by actual events. While failures and surprises can be reinterpreted so that they do not contradict existing norms and beliefs, they also create pressures that can lead to a reevaluation and modification of the culture. In extreme cases, if a culture totally fails to meet the expectations of its members, large-scale defections to other cultural systems are likely to result. 16 The collapse of Communism may serve as a case in point.
Such adaptation, however, is neither quick nor easy. Simple, instrumental beliefs can be discarded easily. More-abstract or emotionally laden beliefs and values that make up the core of a culture (such as a preference for democracy or belief in monotheism) are more resistant to change. 17 Ordinarily such change takes place slowly and incrementally. Occasionally more rapid change in core beliefs and values occurs, but only after they have been thoroughly discredited and the society is under great strain. Individuals and groups are then forced to reexamine their old beliefs and seek new ways of making sense of the world and new solutions to the problems confronting them. Such rapid and fundamental change tends to be accompanied by psychological distress and is broadly similar to Thomas Kuhn's description of paradigm shifts in the natural sciences. 18
The reexamination of the core beliefs and values of a particular nation is a complicated affair. At any one time there exists a multiplicity of political actors--motivated by their own distinctive experiences and interests--who seek to establish their understandings as binding for the rest of the society. In pluralistic political systems, however, usually no one group is able to impose its views on the rest. In order to pursue their agenda, political actors are compelled to enter into debates and negotiations with other groups, making compromises and concessions along the way. These compromises, however, have to be legitimated, both internally within the group and externally in the rest of society. Such legitimations often involve a reinterpretation of past events, current conditions, and future goals. In this way, politics is a question not only of who gets what but of who persuades whom in an ongoing negotiation of reality.
At first such compromises are precarious. Political actors are keenly aware of their arbitrary and artificial nature, and many may hope to reverse the agreed-upon compromises at the earliest possible opportunity. Once agreed upon, however, these negotiated realities are typically institutionalized in the political system and cannot be easily changed even if there is a shift in the balance of power among the different political actors. Decision-making rules, such as the requirement of a two-thirds majority to revise a constitution, may create high barriers to the reversal of agreed-upon policies, while the credibility of leaders may be damaged by a constant shifting of positions. Moreover, over time the legitimations offered on behalf of these compromises--particularly if they are perceived as successful--are reified and become what Emile Durkheim called "social facts." 19 Subsequent generations of decision makers come to take for granted these legitimations and the beliefs and values on which they are based. What may have been an ad hoc response to historical necessities at one time becomes hallowed social truth at another. These legitimations thus become part of the political culture of the nation and can have a lasting impact on state behavior long after the circumstances that gave birth to them have passed.
The study of the political-military culture of an entire nation requires a detailed, multilayered research strategy, involving three central empirical tasks. First, it is necessary to investigate the original set of historical experiences that define how a given society views the military, national security, and the use of force, paying careful attention to the interpretation of these events among different groups in the society. Second, one needs to examine the political process through which actual security policy was made and how particular decisions were subsequently legitimated. In this context it is important to define the essential features of both the political-military culture and the security policy associated with it at a particular point in time. Third, it is necessary to examine the evolution of both the political-military culture and defense policies over time, monitoring how they evolved in response to historical events.
Such a longitudinal analysis allows us to escape the trap of deriving culture from behavior, which leads to the kind of tautological, ad hoc reasoning of which cultural analysis is often accused. 20 While in practice it is nearly impossible to separate culture from behavior, for analytical purposes it is possible to disaggregate policy behavior and the meanings that political actors and the general public attach to those policies, as reflected in public opinion polls, parliamentary debates, books and articles written by opinion leaders, newspaper editorials, and so forth. This procedure allows us to judge the degree of consistency between behavior and expressed beliefs and values over time. If culture (in this case, political-military culture) changes without any corresponding shift in behavior, there are grounds to question the posited relationship between the two. Likewise, if behavior changes without any change in the expressed beliefs and values that have been associated with earlier policies, then again we have reason to doubt that the two factors influence one another. In other words, expressed cultural beliefs and values should develop in tandem with behavior--in this case defense and national security policy. When there is a disjuncture between the two, an appropriate degree of tension should be observable in the political system.
According to the model of cultural change explicated above, under normal circumstances culture should change only incrementally in response to ordinary historical events such as shifts in the balance of power or the formation of international institutions. When major new policy initiatives violating existing norms and values are proposed, resistance in the form of demonstrations, political confrontations, and changes in government should be observable. If major changes occur without generating such resistance, then the presumed relationship between political-military culture and defense policy can be considered to have been falsified.
In this sense, political-military culture often acts as a source of inertia in policy making, at least in the short run. At the same time, how nations choose to behave can have significant, system-level effects in the long run as well, especially if they are important actors like Germany and Japan. For example, isolationism in the United States before 1941 significantly delayed the American entry into World War II, creating a window of opportunity in which the Axis powers could have achieved military victory. While from a structural realist point of view the only significant difference would have been that Western Europe would have been organized under the aegis of a Nazi German rather than a democratic American hegemon, the character of the international system would have been profoundly different. 21
The Origins of the New Political-Military Cultures
To a remarkable degree, the political-military cultures of Germany and Japan continue to be shaped and guided by the ideological and political battles of the late forties and fifties. During this critical formative period the foundations of the postwar German and Japanese approaches to security were put in place. The creation of the new German and Japanese defense establishments was not merely a technocratic exercise in obtaining maximum security at minimal price, nor were they merely the products of a pluralistic bargaining process between interest groups concerned with maximizing their share of societal resources. Rather, the German and Japanese defense debates of the 1950s revolved around much more fundamental questions of national identity, the definition of the national inter est and of the kind of political, economic, and social systems that the two nations should adopt. In the course of these debates, basic decisions regarding defense and national security became inextricably intertwined with the new national identities of postwar Germany and Japan.
Perhaps the most important fact to be noted in any analysis of postwar German and Japanese thinking about defense and national security is the degree to which it represented a radical departure from the dominant historical patterns. Prewar Germany and Japan had been quintessential militarist societies. 22 The armed forces had played a pivotal role in the formation of the modern German and Japanese states, and their status as great military powers was central to their national self-understandings. In Germany, it was the Prussian army that had fulfilled the nineteenth-century nationalist dream of unifying the German nation. In Japan, governments since the Meiji restoration of 1868 legitimated their rule by depicting themselves as the defenders of the nation and the sacred Imperial institution from predatory Western powers. As a result, the German and Japanese military establishments wielded tremendous political influence and enjoyed high social prestige in the prewar period. 23
The disastrous defeat in World War II dealt a lethal blow, both materially and spiritually, to these highly militaristic political-military cultures. Both nations suffered enormous physical losses. More than six million Germans and three million Japanese perished between 1939 and 1945. By the time the fighting ended, their cities had been reduced to rubble, their economies had collapsed, and their populations were saved from starvation only by the massive infusion of Western aid. Perhaps more important than the material losses were the psychological ones. The German and Japanese armies had failed to fulfill the missions that had been their principle sources of legitimacy. In Germany, instead of unifying all German-speakers, the war ended in national partition and dismemberment. In Japan, the military was blamed for having recklessly dragged the country into a disastrous war that ended in the first occupation of Japan in recorded history and left the emperor at the mercy of foreign conquerors.
In the wake of these disasters the popular mood was one of disillusionment with nationalist ambitions and a rejection of the prewar military ethos. These sentiments by themselves, however, were insufficient to effect a lasting transformation of German and Japanese political-military cultures. In the past, other countries--including post-World War I Germany--had suffered defeats of comparable magnitude and exhibited similarly powerful moods of war weariness without developing lasting antimilitary cultures. Alongside the natural pacifism of two defeated peoples there also lurked feelings of fear and resentment of the victorious Allied powers. There remained as well a host of issues--including most important questions of territory--that potentially could have become catalysts for new aggressively irredentist movements.
The dimensions of the defeat, however, did create windows of opportunity after 1945 during which general societal attitudes toward the military and the use of force became unusually malleable. Two sets of actors--the American occupation authorities and the new German and Japanese democratic elites--played key roles in reinforcing and institutionalizing the antimilitary sentiments that appeared in the wake of the war.
For the American occupation authorities, demilitarization was both a physical and a psychological project. Not only did the occupation forces demobilize and dismantle the vast German and Japanese war machines, but they also worked hard to impress upon the German and Japanese people that theirs had been a moral as well as a military defeat. The political and military leaders of the wartime regimes were put on trial for war crimes; books and passages in school texts deemed to be militaristic were expunged from the curriculum; and the German and Japanese populations were bombarded with antimilitary propaganda that was almost as fierce as the wartime propaganda that preceded it. 24
At least as critical to the ultimate demilitarization of Germany and Japan were the efforts of their own political elites, on both the Left and the Right. The left-wing labor unions and socialist/social-democratic movements, the traditional enemies of the military in the prewar period, were naturally opposed to seeing their old political rivals reestablished. The main centrist and right-of-center political formations, organized under the Christian Democrats led by Konrad Adenauer in Germany and the Liber als under Yoshida Shigeru in Japan, were deeply suspicious of the armed forces and blamed them for the failure of party democracy in the 1930s. Although less critical of the military than the Left, men like Adenauer and Yoshida were determined to prevent the armed forces from playing the kind of political role that they had before 1945. Even archconservatives, such as later defense minister Franz Josef Strauss, declared themselves vehemently opposed to the military and militarism. 25
When the basic institutions of the postwar German and Japanese democratic systems were put into place in the late 1940s, the dominant political forces were committed to the eradication of the old military ethos. At the same time, democratization took place in an international environment in which pressures for German and Japanese rearmament remained muted and the international community was primarily concerned with preventing the reemergence of a German or Japanese military threat. German and Japanese leaders emphasized the degree to which the new political systems differed from the old and antimilitarist values were institutionally anchored in the new democratic political systems. The most prominent of these new institutions were to be found in the new constitutions of the two countries; Japan's article 9, which forbade the maintenance of military forces or war-fighting material, and article 87a of the German Basic Law, which prohibits waging wars of aggression.
The emergence of the Cold War, and especially the outbreak of the Korean War, soon compelled Germany and Japan to reconsider their antimilitary postures. Under pressure from the United States and worried by the threat of Communism, German and Japanese leaders felt they had no choice but to reverse, at least partially, the antimilitary policies that had been implemented over the past five years.
This change in direction, however, clashed with the powerful popular mood of antimilitarism, and throughout the 1950s West German and Japanese politics were dominated by fierce domestic struggles over the defense issue. In both nations this debate was in good measure also a debate over the future of the German and Japanese economic and social systems. The Left--backed by the trade unions and large segments of the intelligentsia--feared that joining the American-led alliance would lock them into the Western capitalist system and hamper their efforts to achieve more far-reaching, socialist reform in their respective societies. The Right--supported by business interests and traditionally conservative sectors of society such as the church and agriculture--hoped for precisely the opposite.
Ultimately pro-Western, right-of-center coalitions won the day in both countries, aided by improving economic conditions and the considerable benefits afforded by U.S. patronage. 26 Their left-wing rivals, hampered by inept Soviet diplomacy, were unable to translate popular sympathy for neutrality into victories at the ballot box. More-conservative forces, which favored large-scale, unrestricted rearmament and a more independent policy stance, enjoyed little popular support. Even in Japan, where conservative, prodefense leaders like Hatoyama Ichiro and Kishi Nobosuke came into power, the far Right's influence on policy and the popular debate on defense remained relatively marginal.
Although the supporters of alliance and rearmament achieved their chief objectives, they were compelled to make a number of important concessions in order to reassure the public and the opposition forces--as well as neighboring countries--that there would be no reversion to militarism. Consequently, rearmament took place on a limited scale and at a relatively cautious pace. The new German Bundeswehr and Japanese Self Defense Forces (sdf) were placed under strict regimes of civilian control, and great care was taken to underline their purely defensive nature. Both countries forswore the acquisition of certain categories of weapons systems--most notably weapons of mass destruction--and both the Federal Republic and Japan passed legislation prohibiting the dispatch of their forces beyond their own territory, or--in the German case--outside of the area covered by nato. 27
During this formative period, when German and Japanese attitudes toward their military were in flux and their room for maneuvering decidedly limited, geopolitical forces had a powerful influence on the development of the two countries' defense policies. In particular, contrasting Ger man fears of abandonment and Japanese fears of entanglement led to very different, almost inverse patterns of alliance relations. Faced with a clear and present danger in the Soviet Union, Germany chose to integrate itself as tightly as possible with its allies through an impressive array of overlapping multilateral institutions, including nato, the European Community, and the West European Union. In contrast, Japan, confronted with a much lower level of external threat and fearful that it might be dragged into destructive regional conflicts like Korea and Vietnam, declined various American proposals for regional security arrangements and remained relatively isolated from its neighbors.
Yet even in this period, domestic political and historical factors played an important role in certain aspects of the two nations' defense policies, most notably in the area of civil-military relations. In the modern era both nations have had their share of problems with maintaining control over the armed forces. The German Reichswehr under General Kurt von Schleicher played a key role in bringing Adolf Hitler to power, while the Japanese militarists had progressively taken control of the Japanese government through a decade-long series of coups, assassinations, and engineered military emergencies. This historical background served to greatly sharpen the dilemma of how to reconcile democratic institutions with the military establishment. Although Germany and Japan faced problems that were structurally almost identical, they adopted virtually the opposite strategies for maintaining control over their armed forces.
In the German case memories were still fresh of how the Reichswehr--a small, highly professional force of military men with political views far to the right of those of German society as a whole--had been instrumental in the demise of the Weimar Republic. From the point of view of many German political and military leaders, the key issue was how to integrate the new armed forces into society and ensure that they not become a collecting point for extreme Right views. The solution that they found relied principally on two mechanisms: the reintroduction of universal military service and the institutionalization of the doctrine of innere Fuhrung (internal leadership), designed to infuse the armed forces with a democratic ethos and to protect the civil rights of recruits. 28
In Japan, on the other hand, the Imperial Army had been a mass-based organization with powerful social and political foundations. The militarists had used its informal network of contacts to bolster the extensive formal privileges granted to the armed forces under the Meiji constitution. As a result, it was not altogether surprising that the last thing that Japan's postwar political leaders wanted to do was to create a military establishment that was thoroughly integrated into society. While some efforts were made to indoctrinate the military with a democratic ethos, the basic postwar Japanese strategy for controlling the military was to isolate it politically and socially. The armed forces were placed under a tight system of both internal and external bureaucratic controls, and their uniformed personnel were carefully monitored by the civilian overseers in charge of the Japanese Defense Agency. The agency itself occupied a very subordinate position within the Japanese bureaucratic hierarchy, and many of its key departments, including finance and procurements, were effectively under the control of other ministries, The idea of military conscription, although favored by some military men, never even reached the political agenda in Japan. 29
The highly polarized character of the Japanese political system in the 1950s and 1960s further reinforced the isolation of the armed forces. The presence of extremely conservative figures in the ruling coalition (Prime Minister Kishi had been munitions minister under General Tojo Hideki and was a signatory of the declaration of war on the United States) and the readiness of much of the Japanese Left to accept Soviet propaganda at face value created an ideological gulf between the government and the opposition that was far wider than in West Germany. Cooperation between government and opposition was almost unknown. 30 Without even a minimal consensus on defense, and faced with deep public antipathy toward the armed forces, the Japanese government was compelled to place the armed forces under an evolving system of legislative constraints in order to reassure the public (and indeed, many members of the government itself) that the military establishment was not becoming too powerful to control.
In the Federal Republic, despite the bitter polemical battles between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, the opposition was willing to cooperate with the government on key defense legislation in order to help shape national policy. 31 As a result, the Bundeswehr enjoyed far greater political legitimacy than did the Self Defense Forces, and the German military, while far from popular and much criticized, was not regarded with nearly the same degree of suspicion.
During the 1950s German and Japanese security policy makers were unusually sensitive to the various forces--both domestic and international--present in the policy-making environment. In the course of the policy-making process, however, new institutional structures were created that insulated defense policy from the domestic and international pressures. Some of these structures were legal in nature, such as the restrictions placed on the German and Japanese armed forces by their interpretations of the constitutions. Others were more bureaucratic-organizational, such as the office of the Wehrbeauftragte (a special independent commissioner charged with overseeing innere Fuhrung in the Bundeswehr). Once installed, these formal institutions could not easily be discarded, and therefore they locked the further evolution of policy into fixed paths of development. 32
Other structures were ideological in character, including the beliefs and values used to legitimate the new national security policies and institutions. Central to these legitimations were new definitions of the German and Japanese national identities. In West Germany, Adenauer and other proponents of the Western alliance argued that for a hundred years democracy in Germany had been crippled by the cross-pressures generated by its geographical and cultural location between East and West. This ambivalence, they maintained, had spawned the aggressive hypernationalism of the prewar period that had proved so destructive. To contain the demons of nationalism, Adenauer and others argued, Germany had to bind itself into a network of transatlantic and Western European institutions. Economic and military alignment with the West was thus not merely a strategy for maximizing the national interest; it was a decision to resolve a centuries-old identity crisis and to anchor the nation firmly in Western civilization and thus support the values of liberal democracy. 33
In a similar way Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru provided his countrymen with a vision of Japan as a "merchant nation" (shonin kokka), a country that concentrated on economic development while eschewing the pursuit of military power. With this slogan Yoshida subverted the Left's own vision of Japan as a "peace nation," a nation dedicated to the pacifist ideals of the Japanese constitution, by linking antimilitarism to the decidedly nonleftist desire for commercial gain. Also unlike the Left, Yoshida and other centrists looked to the capitalist West rather than the socialist East for the model of development that Japan should emulate. They argued that alliance with the United States was the price that Japan had to pay for entering the global community of prosperous modern powers. The military side of the relationship, as opposed to the commercial one, was carefully deemphasized. 34
Potentially, these legitimations could have been used to support very different policies. There is nothing about the notion of Germany as a part of the West that intrinsically required it to indoctrinate its armed forces with democratic values (no other member of nato has a comparable policy). Nor does Japan's collective identity as a merchant nation a priori bar it from dispatching forces overseas. Innere Fuhrung and the highly restrictive ban on the overseas dispatch of forces were the products of the constellations of political forces dominant in Germany and Japan in the 1950s. Likewise, Germany's decision to integrate itself into the West, and Japan's determination to stay aloof from regional security affairs were logical responses to the particular external pressures that the two countries experienced. Once made, however, these decisions were tied to the new national identities by the German and Japanese governments, which had to justify their policies to their highly critical public. In this way policies were invested with a symbolic value that linked them to the core values of the new German political-military culture and made them quite resistant to change.
Over the course of the next thirty years, these cultures and patterns of behavior would be frequently challenged. Domestically, there existed powerful rival visions of national identity and policy agendas that were promoted by parties on both the Left and the Right. Internationally, the evolving East-West relationship and shifts in the balance of power were to generate pressures for change as well. Nonetheless, a basic set of beliefs and values, along with associated patterns of defense behavior, can be identified as existing around 1960 and can be summarized briefly as follows.
In the following sections we will trace the subsequent evolution of German and Japanese defense and national security policies and the debates surrounding them. In the process we will analyze the extent to which Germany and Japan deviated from the norms, values, and patterns of behavior established during the critical early years after the war.
Public opinion surveys from the sixties and seventies reveal a marked increase in West German and Japanese popular support for the institutional pillars of the new approaches to defense and national security, including their alliances with the United States, political and economic integration with the West, and the new armed forces. Whereas in 1960 a substantial minority of the population in Japan (32 percent) supported neutrality over alignment with the United States (44 percent), by 1978 backing for the West had increased to 49 percent, while support for neutrality declined to 25 percent. 35 In West Germany popular support for the military alliance with the United States rose as well, albeit not quite as dramatically as in Japan. In 1961, for example, 42 percent were still for neutrality, against 40 percent for alliance with the West, by 1975 proalliance attitudes had risen to 48 percent versus 38 percent. 36 Support for integra tion with Western Europe increased similarly during this period. Although in 1965 a large majority of West Germans (69 percent) still said that given a choice they would prefer reunification over integration with Europe, by 1973 the balance had shifted dramatically, with 65 percent preferring European integration over German reunification. 37
In both countries external factors may have contributed to this shift in attitudes. The end of the Vietnam War and detente reduced Japanese fears of entanglement, and Ostpolitik removed some of the chief obstacles to a solution--albeit a far from satisfactory one--for the problem of national partition. While these external events may have facilitated the consolidation process, once the consensus was in place, further changes did not lead to a reversal. Even after the Cold War reintensified in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, support for the basic security institutions remained high in both countries. 38
Support for nonmilitary means of ensuring national security also grew steadily. In Germany after 1973 public support for Ostpolitik continued to increase even as superpower relations deteriorated. In 1973, 49 percent of those surveyed felt that Ostpolitik had been worthwhile, and 29 percent did not. By January 1980, the level of support had increased to 51 percent versus 28 percent, and the vast majority of West Germans supported the further promotion of detente--74 percent versus 17 percent. 39 Although there was far less emphasis on dialogue with the Soviet Union or other potential enemies in Japan, there was evidence of strong popular preferences for relying on nonmilitary instruments for national security. A 1972 Yomiuri newspaper survey revealed that only 6 percent of the respondents thought military power was a very effective means of defending the nation, while 32 percent thought it was somewhat effective and 14 percent thought it was totally ineffective. In contrast, 32 percent thought that economic instruments (foreign aid, trade, and so forth) were very effective ways of maintaining national security, and 43 percent thought that they were somewhat effective. Respondents rated diplomatic negotiations, maintaining a high standard of living and international exchanges all as more effective than military power as ways of ensuring national security. 40
Expressions of elite opinion as well gravitated toward greater support of the existing approach to defense and national security, especially in Japan. Whereas in the 1950s Japanese intellectuals and the media overwhelmingly backed the Left's proposals for unarmed neutrality, during the 1960s and 1970s increasing numbers of intellectuals came out in favor of the government's policy of alignment with the West and maintenance of a minimal defense establishment. At the forefront of this movement was a new generation of scholars such as Kosaka Masataka and Nagai Yonosuke, who provided new, more sophisticated rationales for Japan's postwar approach to national security and were increasingly enlisted by the Japanese government to serve on panels to study defense and foreign policy issues. 41 During the early 1980s this trend accelerated, as reflected by Yomiuri's shift to a prodefense editorial line and the increased willingness of Japanese companies to produce weapons. At the same time, the public defense debate went from being a battle between the pacifist Left and the proalliance Center to a struggle between centrists and a resurgent, nationalist anti-American Right that favored a major military buildup and a more independent approach to foreign policy. 42
Whereas in Japan the shift in the overall spectrum of political opinion among elites was toward the Right and Center, in West Germany elite opinion shifted in the opposite direction, toward the Left. In the late 1960s support for detente grew dramatically in the face of stubborn resistance by the cdu (Christian Democratic Union) government to closer ties with Eastern Europe. The student movement and the issue of coming to terms with the atrocities of the Nazi era added a powerful emotional dimension to the new policy of Ostpolitik announced by Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1969, making the new diplomatic policy as much a matter of strengthening democracy and atoning for the past as of pursuing German national interests. These moves reinforced and further institutionalized the antimilitary character of West German political-military culture. Consequently, massive demonstrations broke out in Germany when in the late 1970s and 1980s nato governments, including German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, sought to counter growing Soviet military strength by deploying a new generation of theater nuclear forces. 43
The positions of political parties mirrored shifts in popular and elite attitudes. In West Germany during the late 1950s the Social Democrats (spd) shifted decisively toward accepting nato and integration with the West. 44 Even in the late 1980s, after the spd partially reversed itself on national security in response to the emergence of the far left-wing Green Party and a new, more radical generation within the party, the Social Democrats refrained from calling for withdrawal from nato. Indeed, whereas in the 1950s the spd had bitterly opposed nato and integration with Western Europe, in the 1980s it came out in favor of greater European integration in the hope that a united Europe could provide a counterweight to the United States and preserve detente. 45 For its part, the cdu came to accept Ostpolitik and detente in the 1980s, conducting its own mini-detente with the German Democratic Republic even at the height of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation of the early to mid-1980s. 46 Despite the enormous controversy surrounding defense issues in West Germany during the 1980s, on a deeper level consensus on national security actually grew.
On the whole, shifts in Japan tended to be less dramatic than in West Germany. Nonetheless, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s the Socialist opposition to the government's national security policies became less virulent than it had been in the 1950s. An important factor in this trend was the Socialists' efforts to court the so-called middle-of-the-road parties (the Democratic Socialist Party and the Clean Government Party), which were more supportive of the Self Defense Forces and the alliance with the United States and which were prepared to compromise with the government in order to pass new defense legislation. 47 Although there remained right-wingers in the ldp (Liberal Democratic Party) who wanted to see Japan become a "normal nation" by assuming a larger and more independent military role, they were held in check by the party's centrist mainstream. 48
As in Germany, the defense debate of the 1980s revealed that the growing consensus was no longer confined to a shift toward the center in the distribution among the different subcultures; a deeper transformation was taking place in the contents of the beliefs that they proposed. Whereas in the past, Japanese rightists had hoped to use the defense issue to spark a new debate on national identity and Japan's global mission, during the 1980s right-wing ideologues like Ishihara Shintaro and Eto Jun increasingly chose to focus on trade issues instead in order to inflame nationalist passions. 49 In effect, the Right accepted the centrist position that Japan's strength lay in its role as a merchant nation.
Behind this shift in the terms of the political debate was a broader intellectual transformation of the ways in which Japan's new national identity was related to its past. Borrowing ideas from the popular analysis of Japanese culture known as nihonjinron (the theory of Japanese-ness), more and more influential Japanese came to accept the argument that because Japan had never been subjected to successive waves of foreign invasion as had Europe and mainland Asia, conflict had always tended to be of a more limited nature than elsewhere in the world. This historical insularity is alleged to have made the Japanese people inherently inept at power politics, while at the same time strengthening their inclination toward harmony and cooperation. 50 The conclusions that centrists--and, increasingly, right- wing figures as well--draw from this analysis jibes well with Japan's overall strategy as a "merchant nation"--namely, to recognize its relative weakness as a military power, rely on "warrior nations" like the United States to come to its aid, and concentrate its energies on the areas in which it enjoys a comparative advantage: trade, technology, and economic growth.
In sum, there is little doubt that the political-military cultures of Germany and Japan shifted in significant ways during the course of the Cold War in response to international events and domestic political developments. These shifts, however, on the whole led to a greater consensus in favor of the antimilitary policies that had been established in the 1950s. Efforts to move in the opposite direction triggered considerable domestic political turmoil. In West Germany the development of Ostpolitik was accompanied by intense infighting within the cdu and the coming to power of the spd. Likewise, the decision to deploy new intermediate-range nuclear weapons in the early 1980s triggered mass demonstrations and another change in government. In a similar fashion, the Japanese student movement and the debates over the return of Okinawa (then still occupied by the United States) fueled intense political controversy in Japan. Various conservative defense initiatives, such as Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo's efforts in 1978 to pass new legislation enabling the Self Defense Forces to respond to a military emergency, generated so much political resistance that they had to be greatly modified or abandoned. 51
The end of the Cold War has sparked new controversy over national security in Germany and Japan, and there are clear signs that popular and elite attitudes toward defense are continuing to evolve. The main focal point of the new defense debate of the 1990s is whether and in what form Germany and Japan should participate in international peacekeeping missions. During the Gulf war German and Japanese public opinion, despite negative views of Saddam Hussein, showed overwhelming opposition to direct involvement in the war. 52 German and Japanese elite views were similarly divided over how to respond to the crisis, with the Left generally opposed to involvement, the Right supporting a limited show of force, and the Center waffling somewhere in between. 53 Since the Gulf war public opinion has slowly coalesced in favor of some degree of limited military participation in international affairs, accompanied by perhaps the most intensive debate of national security issues in these two countries since the 1950s. Public opinion polls show cautious popular approval of the limited forays into peacekeeping in Cambodia and Somalia. Media treatment of these operations has been largely favorable. The trend toward increased consensus received a boost in Japan when Socialist Matsuyma Tomiichi became prime minister in coalition with the conservative Liberal Democrats and announced that his party would partially reverse its long-standing policy of opposition to the Self Defense Forces and the alliance with the United States. 54 In Germany the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the government, decreeing that the Bundeswehr could indeed participate in military operations, including combat missions, outside of the nato area, providing it received parliamentary approval and these operations were conducted in a multilateral framework. 55
These developments, while significant, do not represent fundamental deviations from the political-military cultures of the Cold War. Despite its enhanced position of power in the center of Europe, and despite various, often serious disagreements with its European allies over such issues as Bosnia, the Uruguay round, or the expansion of nato into central Europe, Germany remains committed to deepening its integration with the West and pursuing a policy of reassurance vis-á-vis its neighbors to the East. Japan for its part, prefers to overlook simmering regional threats in North Korea and China and continues to insist that it will make only nonmilitary contributions to the international order. While there is slow evolution--as there has been during much of the Cold War--there is no fundamental shift in direction, either toward greater defense autonomy or toward the assumption of a leadership role on security issues in a multilateral context.
Accompanying the changes in German and Japanese political-military cultures there were also shifts in their national security policies, as one would expect if there is a causal relationship between the two. Moreover, when those shifts ran against the established antimilitary cultures, they were accompanied--as predicted earlier--by intense domestic political debate and controversy. For analytical purposes it is useful to distinguish three different aspects of national security policy: alliance politics, force structure and mission, and civil-military relations.
German and Japanese alliance policies changed in two major ways during the Cold War: U.S.-Japanese military ties were intensified in the late 1970s and 1980s, and West Germany tried to achieve closer relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, beginning in the late 1960s. In West Germany the primary impulse for Ostpolitik came from a deep-rooted desire to hammer out a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union that would decrease the threat of war and increase contact with the East German population. Such geostrategic considerations and nationalist aspirations alone need not have led to a far-reaching series of agreements on trade and security. 56 The Republic of South Korea, for instance, has endured national partition and the threat of war for an even longer period than West Germany did, without engaging in a comparable diplomatic campaign. In addition, the student movement of the late 1960s and the desire to atone for Germany's crimes during the Nazi period made a moral imperative out of a diplomatic initiative and lent the Ostpolitik policies of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr a dynamic that went well beyond the satisfaction of immediate German national interests.
After immensely difficult negotiations and fierce parliamentary battles (the Brandt government survived a no-confidence measure by a mere two votes), in 1971 the West German government signed a series of agreements with its Eastern neighbors, including the Soviet Union and the East German regime. These agreements covered a wide range of issues, the most important of which were increased economic and diplomatic ties, the status of Berlin, and humanitarian contacts between the two German states. 57 Thereafter, the West German government continued to pursue closer ties with the East, becoming the primary sponsor of the csce (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), which led to the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975. 58 Even during the bitterest period of U.S.-Soviet confrontation in the early 1980s, the Federal Republic continued to pursue relations with the East despite widespread American and Western apprehensions that Germany was heading down the path toward neutralism. 59
In the case of Japan, the initial impetus toward greater military cooperation with the United States came in the mid-1970s, as American power in the Pacific appeared to decline after Vietnam while that of the Soviet Union increased. These developments led to a stormy debate within the ldp over whether Japan should assume a more active, independent stance on defense even while retaining its security links with the United States, a position known as jishuboei. 60 After much deliberation and internal squabbling, the ruling party leaders and bureaucrats, alarmed by the nationalist rhetoric of the jishuboei camp and signs of growing anxiety abroad, chose to strengthen Japan's alliance with the United States instead. Over the next few years, the government laid the groundwork for closer cooperation between the two nations' armed forces, culminating in the 1978 Guidelines on U.S.-Japanese Defense Cooperation. Thereafter contacts between the Self Defense Forces and the U.S. military increased sharply. Japanese naval forces were dispatched abroad on training missions, and American and Japanese military planners began formal discussions on how they might react to a military crisis in the Far East. These trends accelerated further in the early 1980s, especially under the conservative Nakasone administration, which opened the door for joint weapons research and development and increased Japan's commitment to containing the Soviet Union. 61
In short, the changes in German and Japanese elite and public attitudes toward defense mirrored actual shifts in policy. In West Germany the Left's objective of establishing at least a limited security partnership with Eastern Europe was realized, while in Japan the Right's long-sought-after goal of strengthening the armed forces through closer ties to the United States was finally achieved. These were important shifts in policy that had been encouraged--though not dictated--by changes in the international environment, but whose implementation was delayed for years until the requisite domestic political support could be mustered. In West Germany the cdu was able to resist the trend toward detente for nearly a decade. In Japan it took more than five years after the end of the Vietnam War before an internal consensus in favor of closer ties to the United States could be formed.
These changes in policy did not imply, however, that the basic German and Japanese alliance strategies had been abandoned. Both countries remained dependent on the United States for military security, and efforts either to establish an independent defense posture (as called for by Nakasone and the advocates of jishuboei) or to abandon nato (as demanded by the Greens and the left wing of the spd) had been emphatically denied. Germany remained tightly integrated into the nato command structure and continued to seek to reach its foreign policy objectives primarily through multilateral institutions. Germany also continued to be one of the prime proponents of deepening the European Community--if anything, German unification even accelerated this trend--while at the same time integrating itself even more thoroughly into new nato institutions such as the Nuclear Planning Group. 62
Japan, on the other hand, maintained relatively looser ties with the United States. Even after 1978 there was no joint command structure, only a coordinating office to be set up in the event of an emergency. Despite Nakasone's sometimes belligerent rhetoric (he once described Japan as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" ready to repel Soviet aggression), it remained uncertain whether Japanese forces would assist the United States except in the event of a direct Soviet attack.
Since the end of the Cold War there has been some shift toward increased regionalism in both countries, but the basic patterns of behavior remain consistent with the core values established in the 1950s. In Europe, in keeping with its traditional strategy of integrating itself, Germany has deepened both its European and its Atlantic multilateral military commitment, turning the French-German brigade into a corps and promoting the creation of multinational forces inside nato to which the alliance's most combat-ready forces will be allocated. 63 Germany has also been the chief promoter of expanding the alliance eastward while offering the Soviet Union various forms of reassurance that such moves are not directed against it, but rather are designed to gradually pull the entire region into a peaceful, multinational security order.
Japan, like Germany, remains wedded to its close military relationship with the United States. At the same time, it also has begun to foster a security dialogue with neighboring countries in East Asia. Nonetheless, Japan's efforts in this direction remain tentative. Although with the end of the Cold War the strategic positions that Germany and Japan now occupy have become quite similar with respect to the risks of entanglement versus the dangers of abandonment, the Japanese political-military culture still has not adjusted to its changed external environment. The fear of entanglement continues to loom large in Japanese politics. Perhaps more important, whereas German leaders are able to justify their policies through reference to Germany's membership in a larger community of Western values, similar arguments with respect to the commonalities between Japan and the United States or Japan and the rest of Asia fail to have similar domestic resonance.
During the Cold War, West Germany's and Japan's decisions to continue to rely on the United States for external security implied that, at least to a limited extent, they had to follow the U.S. lead on security issues. As the United States redoubled its efforts to contain growing Soviet military strength in the late 1970s and 1980s, Germany and Japan were compelled to follow suit, expanding and modernizing their armed forces and adopting military missions and force postures that in certain respects appeared to signal a departure from their earlier policies. To many West German critics, the deployment of a new generation of intermediate nuclear forces (inf) and the Kohl government's willingness to support President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (sdi) signified German acceptance of new, highly belligerent nuclear doctrines. 64 Fears that German foreign policy was being remilitarized were further reinforced by the Bundeswehr's adoption of the American doctrine of Follow-on Forward Attack (fofa), which foresaw deep strikes into Eastern Europe in order to disrupt a Soviet assault.
Likewise, in Japan, Prime Minister Suzuki Zentaro's pledge to defend his nation's sea lanes of communication for up to a thousand nautical miles from the Japanese mainland appeared to mark a dramatic expansion of the sdf's traditional territorial defense role. Similarly, the overturning of the one-percent-of-gnp limit on defense spending was interpreted by many as a sign that the Japanese government was moving beyond its minimalist approach to spending and preparing to embark on a major arms buildup. 65
Yet on closer inspection, many of these apparent departures prove far less significant that they were made out to be. The primary purpose of deploying the inf missiles was not to develop the ability to launch a decapitating first strike but rather to reinforce the credibility of the American nuclear guarantee in an era of increasing Soviet power. 66 Moreover, consistent with the pattern of behavior that had already been established in the 1950s, Germany continued to seek accommodation even as it strengthened deterrence by linking the inf deployments to new arms control initiatives. 67
Similarly, Kohl's endorsement of sdi was motivated more by the desire to demonstrate solidarity with the United States than to help establish mil itary dominance over the Soviet Union. Within the German government even prodefense conservatives, such as Manfred Wšrner, were uneasy about sdi, fearing that if it were realized it might prove destabilizing. Consequently, Chancellor Kohl made his support of sdi even as a research program contingent on further progress in the area of arms control. 68 German support for American plans for a conventional defense of Europe was similarly lukewarm, and for the most part Germany paid only lip service to these new doctrines and did not actually implement them. The concrete impact of these policies on actual German force structures and defense planning was on the whole rather minimal. 69
The Japanese commitment to defending its sea lanes was also a highly political statement with little concrete military impact. The Japanese Self Defense Forces had long planned to patrol Japan's sea lanes of communication in order to assure the continued flow of oil and other vital raw materials. Yet the Maritime Self Defense Forces had little hope of accomplishing this mission on their own, and Suzuki's announcement did little to change that state of affairs. Indeed, it seems that the policy owed more to domestic political intrigues than to geostrategic exigencies. There is considerable evidence that Suzuki never intended to expand Japan's military obligations in the first place but enemies inside the government had tricked him into making the statement in order to embarrass him. 70 Other defense initiatives also increased Japan's dependence on the United States. In the event of a Soviet attack, Japanese defense planners envisioned, Japanese forces would serve as the conventional "shield," protecting the American forces, which would act as a military "spear," launching attacks on Soviet forces in the Far East. Consequently there was a heavy emphasis on acquiring basically defensive weapons systems, such as improved antisubmarine warfare capabilities and air defense systems. Little effort was made to acquire greater force projection capabilities, and Japan eschewed obtaining weapons systems that might be construed as being offensive in character, such as aerial refueling capacity or helicopter carriers. Japanese forces also continued to adhere to a territorial defense role. During the first Gulf crisis, in 1987, many Japanese foreign policy experts thought that it would be in Japan's interests to dispatch at least minesweepers to the region to demonstrate support for the United States and to nudge public opinion toward acceptance of a broader role for the sdf. Once again, however, pressures from within the ruling party vetoed such a move. 71
West German defense spending patterns from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s reflected this relatively low level of interest in expanding military capabilities. While the defense budgets of both countries continued to grow and their capabilities increased as a result of force modernization, defense spending as a percentage of gnp grew only marginally in Japan and actually declined in Germany. And this at a time when East-West tensions were at their highest since the Cuban missile crisis and conservative, prodefense governments were in office in both countries.
With the decline of the Soviet threat after the Cold War, both Germany and Japan have significantly reduced their armed forces and their defense budgets. This is particularly true of Germany, which has reduced its army to 370,000 and greatly slowed the pace of force modernization. 72 Since Japanese forces started from a much lower baseline, pressures for force reduction have not been as great. Nonetheless, there, too, defense spending has decreased, reaching its lowest level of increase--0.7 percent--in more than thirty years.
Both armed forces continue to modernize, albeit slowly. The only sig nificant change has been in the definition of their mission, which since the Gulf war has been expanded to include participation in peacekeeping operations. The sdf and the Bundeswehr are undergoing some reorganization in preparation for carrying out such missions, The pace of these changes, however, remains very slow, the great majority of German and Japanese forces remain earmarked for territorial defense, and neither nation has made any deliberate effort to increase its power projection capabilities. 73
Civil-Military Relations
Even greater immobility may be observed in the area of civil-military relations. This is not to say that there was a complete absence of debate on this topic. On the contrary, throughout the Cold War civil-military relations remained one of the most sensitive issues on the political agenda. Nonetheless, the pressures for change were the weakest in this area of policy, and the domestic political resistance to change was the strongest.
In West Germany the chief point of contestation was over the political symbolism and how the Bundeswehr should portray its predecessors--the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht--in the construction of an institutional persona that its members could use as a role model. Conservative politicians and officers periodically sought to strengthen unit cohesion through the cultivation of a sense of military tradition. In a number of respects, these traditions--especially their emphasis on discipline, obedience, and a martial ethos oriented toward killing--clashed with the principles of innere Fuhrung. 74
During the 1980s the Kohl government, concerned that German society needed a healthy sense of patriotism in order to counter the neutralist tendencies of the peace movement, raised similar issues concerning the place of the armed forces in Germany identity on the national level through a series of symbolic gestures. The most controversial of these was Kohl's 1986 visit with President Ronald Reagan to the Bittburg military cemetery, where former members of Hitler's Waffen ss, among other, ss are buried. The Kohl administration continued to attach great importance to this kind of political symbolism even after the Cold War ended, as reflected by the reinterment of the Prussian Soldier King, Friedrich II, in 1993 and the participation of German troops in the July 14, 1994, parade of the Eurocorps down the Champs d'Elysees. 75
Innere Fuhrung, although challenged, proved too deeply rooted to be discarded, and efforts to re-create a martial ethos within the Bundeswehr were unsuccessful. Although compromises were worked out on such peripheral issues as the names of ships or barracks, the doctrine of democratizing internal military life was retained. Likewise, even after the end of the Cold War made the military rationale for the maintenance of a mass army less credible, support for the retention of military conscription crossed party lines and was legitimated as an important means of integrating the armed forces into society. 76
In Japan the debate centered on retaining airtight control over the activities of military men and the ways in which the government portrayed the martial aspects of Japan's past. 77 The continued modernization of the Japanese military and its assumption of somewhat broader military roles inevitably led to modification of the many legislative safeguards that had been placed on the armed forces. So, for example, in 1986 the one-percent-of-gnp limit on defense spending was abrogated. Every time a safeguard has been dropped, however, it has been replaced by new constraints. In the case of the one-percent barrier, a five-year rolling budget was introduced that made sure expansion took place at a controlled pace. Other measures were implemented as well, increasing the ability of politicians and nonmilitary bureaucrats to intervene in the military budget process. 78
As in Germany, conservative leaders in Japan believed that the nation lacked a proper sense of patriotism. As a result, throughout the Cold War there were repeated efforts to rekindle a sense of national consciousness. And as in Germany, these concerns motivated conservative leaders to make a number of symbolic gestures designed to reconcile postwar Japanese society with the armed forces; the most famous such overture was Nakasone's 1986 visit to the Yasukuni shrine dedicated to the Japanese war dead. Unlike the situation in Germany, however, these efforts have had more far-reaching, concrete policy implications revolving primarily around the issue of how to treat the war in Japanese textbooks. 79 In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Japanese government succeeded in revising Japanese textbooks, including making a discussion of Japan's right to self-defense part of the curriculum and adding Admiral Togo Heihachiro, a hero of the Russo-Japanese war, to the list of historical role models for Japanese children. 80
As in Germany, however, these symbolic gestures were highly controversial and have never been fully institutionalized. Nakasone's trip to the Yasukuni shrine attracted widespread criticism, as did other measures that appeared to link the military with religious or nationalist themes. Moreover, at the same time that Japanese textbooks began to deal more openly with military issues, the Japanese government began to allow more discussion of Japanese wartime atrocities in school texts. Parallel to these efforts was a diplomatic campaign, spearheaded by the new Japanese emperor, to apologize to other Asian nations for Japan's past misconduct in the region. 81
In short, the core features of the German and Japanese approaches to maintaining control over the armed forces--tight bureaucratic controls in the Japanese case and integration of the armed forces into society in the German case--remained intact into the 1990s. While in both countries conservative governments sought to cast the armed forces in a more positive light, their efforts to do so met with limited success and were offset by countervailing pressures to acknowledge the terrible crimes to which Bundeswehr's and sdf's predecessors had been party. More than fifty years after the end of World War II the past continues to cast a large, inescapable shadow over the official discourse on the relationship between the armed forces and society.
As the foregoing analysis of German and Japanese security policy has demonstrated, cultural norms and values have evolved in tandem with shifts in behavior, precisely as our model predicts. Over the past fifty years, external events such as the end of the East-West conflict, the Gulf war, or shifts in the balance of power have periodically triggered domestic political debates over national security. At issue in these debates has been not only the question of how beset to realize German and Japanese interests but also the highly emotional areas of national identity and the definition of national interests. Different political actors in the German and Japanese contexts have held strong and widely divergent views on these subjects, leading to intense controversies over how to interpret external developments and how to respond to them. The extreme sensitivity of military security issues in the German and Japanese contexts has placed significant constraints on policy making in the area of security. German and Japanese political leaders are naturally reluctant to deal with such a highly sensitive issue, especially since the domestic political gains from taking a strong stance on defense are perceived by most politicians as minimal. 82
Moreover, the overall direction of the shifts both in German and Japanese behavior and in attitudes indicates a consolidation of, rather than a departure from, the antimilitarism approaches to national security that originally came together in the 1950s. Despite profound changes in their external security environments, German and Japanese policy makers have acted in a manner consistent with the core principles of the political-military cultures established by their nations in the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, German and Japanese behavior has had an increasingly significant impact on the security environments in those countries. Germany's commitment to political and economic integration has permitted the formation of a European security community, while Japan's eschewal of military power has greatly reduced tensions in the potentially volatile Asia-Pacific region.
To be sure, there have been incremental shifts all along in German and Japanese defense and national security, and such shifts are likely to continue as the two countries adjust to changes in the international system. A dramatic shift from the core principles of their political-military culture is, however, likely only if there is a major shock to the system that persuades the countries' leaders that their approach to defense and national security has been a failure. In the Japanese case, such an event would require a collapse of the U.S.-Japan alliance, combined with the emergence of a major new security threat. In the German case, even if the alliance with the United States came apart, there would remain the option of trying to find a purely European solution to the problem of nuclear deterrence. Alternatively, a failure of extended deterrence resulting in an attack on a German or Japanese population center might constitute a similar shock. Even under such extreme circumstances, however, German and Japanese behavior would not likely change overnight. Instead, there would be intense domestic political debate between different political actors about how to interpret these events and how to respond to them. The outcome of such debate would be, at least in part, strongly shaped by domestic political forces, and the kind of policies that would then be adopted are not predictable by considering external factors alone.
Note 1: On the contrasting implications for alliance relations of fears of entanglement and of abandonment, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 6. Back.
Note 2: See John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future," International Security 15, no. 1 (Summer 1990): 5-56; Christopher Layne, "The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise," International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993), esp. pp. 41-45; and Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Emerging Structure of International Politics," International Security 18, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 44-79. A number of Japanese experts make similar arguments; see Chalmers Johnson, "Rethinking Asia," National Interest 32 (Summer 1993): 20-28. Perhaps the most widely known representation of this view is George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, The Coming War with Japan (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). Back.
Note 3: See Catherine M. Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), chs. 7, 9, and 10. Back.
Note 4: Leading examples of this sort of approach include Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 5: See Earl C. Ravenal, "NATO: The Tides of Discontent," University of California Institute of International Affairs, Policy Papers in International Affairs, no. 23 (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 12-13. Back.
Note 6: John Mearsheimer's recent argument that the United States should seek to ensure that Germany acquires nuclear weapons in an orderly, nondestabilizing fashion, is in this sense perfectly consistent with earlier American policy initiatives. See Kelleher, Germany and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 180-81. Back.
Note 7: Recently key documents have been released to the public in Japan that revealed that the Defense Agency, on instructions from Prime Minister Sato Eisaku, had investigated the possibility of Japan's acquiring its own force de frappe. See Mainichi, August 1, 1994, p. 1. Back.
Note 8: Conversations with Motoo Shiina, spring 1991, and Professor Sato Seizaburo, summer 1992. See also Thomas Kielinger, "The Gulf War and Consequences from the German Point of View," Aussenpolitik 42, no. 2: 241-50, and the interview with Wolfgang SchŠuble in Der Spiegel, no. 4, January 25, 1993, p. 20. Back.
Note 9: See Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Jeffrey J. Anderson and John B. Goodman, "Mars or Minerva: A United Germany in a Post-Cold War Europe," in Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, and Stanley Hoffmann, eds., After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989-1991, pp. 23-63 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Edward Luttwak, "From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics," National Interest, no. 20 (Summer 1990): 17-23. Back.
Note 10: Traditionally, realists have shown a keen appreciation of the effects of nationalism on international politics. For the most part, however, they treat its existence as a given and do not even attempt to explain its origins or the reasons for the intensity or forms that nationalist sentiments assume at different points in time, thus rendering their use of nationalism post hoc. See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1978), esp. pp. 337-47. For more recent efforts to analyze nationalist sentiments from a basically realist perspective, see Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism and War," International Security 18, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 3-39. Both Snyder and Van Evera, however, have departed significantly from the core proposals of systemic realism, adopting approaches that come perilously close to certain variants of constructivism. Back.
Note 11: A similar argument is made with regard to the role of ideas in international relations by Geoffrey Garret and Barry Weingast, "Ideas, Interest, and Institutions: Constructing the European Community's Internal Market," in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, pp. 173-206 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 12: For an excellent yet succinct summary of the main features of a cultural theory of action, see Harry Eckstein, "A Culturalist Theory of Political Change," in Eckstein, Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change, pp. 267-71 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Back.
Note 13: For an interesting discussion of the relationship between national identity and national interest, see William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity, and International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. ch. 4; and Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics," International Organization 46, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 391-425. Back.
Note 14: The classic formulation of the concept of political culture can be found in Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 11-14. Back.
Note 15: For an example of the kind of internal contradictions that may emerge out of a culture over time, see Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). Back.
Note 16: Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder: Westview, 1990), ch. 5. Back.
Note 17: For more on the process of social learning, see Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1960); Lloyd Etheridge, Can Governments Learn? (New York: Pergamon, 1985); and Ernst Haas, "Why Collaborate? Issue Linkage and International Relations," World Politics 32, no. 3 (April 1980): 357-405. Back.
Note 18: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Back.
Note 19: Emile Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John D. Mueller, ed. George E. G. Catlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), pp. 1061-62. Back.
Note 20: See Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970); and Carole Pateman, "Political Culture, Political Structures, and Political Change," British Journal of Sociology 1, no. 3 (July 1971): 291-306. Back.
Note 21: For a similar type of argument, see John Gerard Ruggie, "Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution," in Ruggie, ed., Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 24-31. Back.
Note 22: See Volker R. Berghan, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861-1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Note 23: On the political influence of the military in prewar Germany, see Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). On Japan, see Richard J. Smethurst, A Social Basis for Japanese Militarism: The Army and the Rural Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Back.
Note 24: On the American efforts in Japan, see Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, Sheathing the Sword: The Demilitarization of Postwar Japan (New York: Macmillan, 1987). On Germany, see Lucius Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950); and Howard Zink, The United States in Germany, 1944-1951 (New York: Van Nostrand, 1957). Back.
Note 25: See Otake Hideo, Saigumbi to Nashyonarizumu (Tokyo: Chuokoshinsho, 1989); and Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer: Der Aufstieg, 1876-1952 (Stuttgart: Deutsche-Verlags-Anstalt, 1986). Back.
Note 26: On the considerable influence that the United States wielded in German and Japanese politics, as well as the extensive benefits it could provide in terms of aid and access to the newly emerging international trading system, see Hans Jurgen Grabbe, Unionspartei, Sozialdemokratie, und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, 1946-1966 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1983); and Akaneya Tatsuo, "Saikeikoku taigu o motomete," in Watanabe Akio, ed., Sengo Nihon no Taigaiseisaku, pp. 108-34 (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1985). Back.
Note 27: See Paul B. Stares, The Restrictions on the Forces of the Federal Republic of Germany (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991); and Boei Handobukku, 1989 ed. (Tokyo: Asagumo Shimbunsha, 1989), pp. 425-26. Certain ambiguities did remain. For example, the Japanese armed forces planned to acquire the ability to defend merchant shipping well beyond Japan's territorial waters in the event of hostilities. Back.
Note 28: The best English-language source on West German civil-military relations is Donald Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 29: For a brief overview of postwar Japanese civil-military relations, see Leonard A. Humphreys, "The Japanese Military Tradition," in James H. Buck, ed., The Modern Japanese Military System, pp. 21-40 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1975). See also Hirose Katsuya, Kanryo to Gunjin: Bunmin tosei no Genkai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989). On external bureaucratic controls, see Peter J. Katzenstein and Nobuo Okawara, Japan's National Security: Structures, Norms, and Policy Responses in a Changing World, Cornell East Asia Series no. 58 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 30: On the Left's fears of the government's intentions, see Utake Hideo, Saigumbi to Nashyona-rizumu. On the gullibility of the Japanese Left, see Kojima Ryo, Hangarii Jiken to Nihon: 1956 Shisoteki Kosatsu (Tokyo: Chuokoronsha, 1987). Back.
Note 31: An important factor that reinforced the polarization of the Japanese political system was the presence of the Communist Party, which competed with the Socialists for left-wing votes. In West Germany, on the other hand, the Communist Party was banned in 1951, making it easier for the spd to move to the right on defense and other issues. When an alternative to the left of the spd--the Greens--emerged in the 1970s pressure built for the party to shift to the left. See Josef Joffe, The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States, and the Burdens of Alliance (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1987). Back.
Note 32: On the concept of path-dependent development, see Douglas C. North, Institutions, Institutional Development, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. ch. 11. Back.
Note 33: Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die gezŠhmten Deutschen (Stuttgart: Deutsche-Verlags-Anstalt, 1985). Back.
Note 34: Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1992). Back.
Note 35: Question: Should Japan join the Free World, the Communist camp, or be neutral?
Note 36: Question: In your opinion, what would be better foreign policy: Should we continue to ally ourselves with the United States or should we try to be neutral, for example, like Switzerland?
Note 37: At the same time, support for German reunification remained very high. There were important generational differences, however, with younger Germans showing markedly less interest in reunification than their elders. See Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, ed., Jahrbuch (Institut fur Demoskopie, Allensbach, 1976), p. 83. Back.
Note 38: The peace movement and the acrimonious West German debate over the nato decision to deploy a new generation of intermediate-range missiles caused some temporary shifts, but overall the impact was almost surprisingly limited. See Hans Rattinger, "The Federal Republic of Germany: Much Ado About (Almost) Nothing," in Hans Rattinger and Gregory Flynn, eds., The Public and Atlantic Defense, pp. 101-73 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanhead, 1985). Back.
Note 39: Meyer, Der Burger und seine Sicherheit, p. 255, table 6.7.8. Back.
Note 40: Gekkan Yoron Chosa, July 1972, cited in Akio Watanabe, "Japanese Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs," in Robert A. Scalapino, ed., The Foreign Policy of Modern Japan, pp. 105-45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 115. Back.
Note 41: See Komiya Ryutaro, "Uerubeki Migi Senkai," Gendai Keizai 6 (Spring 1979): 71-84. For more on the employment of Japanese intellectuals in the Japanese policy-making process, see Frank Schwartz, "Of Fairy Cloaks and Familiar Talk: The Politics of Consultation," in Gary D. Allinson and Yasunori Sone, eds., The Political Dynamics of Contemporary Japan, pp. 217-41 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 42: See Umemoto Tetsuya, Arms and Alliance in Japanese Public Opinion (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1985). Characteristic of the new right-wing literature was Shimizu Ikutaro, Nihon yo Kokka o Tare!: Kaku no Sentaku (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 1980). Back.
Note 43: See Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle over the Euromissiles (New York: Free Press, 1991). Back.
Note 44: See Gordon D. Drummond, The German Social Democrats in Opposition, 1949-1960 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982). Back.
Note 45: Berthold Meyer, Die Parteien der BRD und die sicherheitspolitische Zusammenarbeit in Europa (Frankfurt am Main: Hessische Stiftung fur Friedens und Konflikt Forschung, Bericht 2, 1987), ch. 3. Back.
Note 46: See Clay Clemens, Reluctant Realists (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 47: See Umemoto Tetsuya, Arms and Alliance in Japanese Public Opinion, esp. pp. 175-80; and Horie Tadashi and Ikei Masaru, Nihon no Seito to Gaiko Seisaku (Tokyo: Keio Tsushin, 1980), chs. 2 and 3. Back.
Note 48: Typical of the centrists' ability to check the Right was the way in which they foiled Nakasone's efforts to link increasing defense spending above one percent of the gnp with a rekindling of Japanese nationalism. See Kaminishi Akio, GNP 1% Waku (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunko, 1986); and Akasaka Shintaro, "1% Waku de Tsumazuita Nakasone Shusho," Bungeishunju (January 1986): 178-82. Back.
Note 49: See Ishihara Shintaro, The Japan That Can Say "No": The New U.S.-Japanese Relations Card (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); and Eto Jun, Nichibei Senso wa owatte inai: Shukkumei no Taiketsu--Sono Genzai, Kako, Mirai (Tokyo: Nesco Books, 1986). Back.
Note 50: Sophisticated versions of this argument can be found in Amaya Naohiro, "Shoninkoku Nihon Tedai no Kurigoto," Bungeishunju (March 1980); and Okazaki Hisahiko, Senryakuteki Kangaekatta to wa Nani ka (Tokyo: Chuokoshinsho, 1983), pp. 9-13, 24-26. Back.
Note 51: See Utake Hideo, Nihon no Boei to Kokunai Seiji (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1983), pp. 26-100. Back.
Note 52: In Japan a mere 10% supported sdf dispatch with no limitations, and even among ldp supporters opponents of dispatch outnumbered proponents 41% to 14.9%; Nikkei, October 15, 1990. In Germany in January 1991, 71% of all German-supported allied actions, but only 20% would have supported Bundeswehr participation in the campaign; Der Spiegel 5, January 28, 1991, pp. 32-36. See also Der Spiegel 11, March 11, 1991, p. 36. Back.
Note 53: For an overview of the Japanese debate, see Ito Kenichi, "The Japanese State of Mind: Deliberations on the Gulf Crisis," Journal of Japanese Studies 17, no. 2 (Summer 1991); on Germany, see Michael J. Inacker, Unter Ausschlu§ der …ffentlichkeit: Die Deutschen in der Golfallianz (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1991). For a brief overview of the German intellectual debate at the time, see Cora Stephan, "An der deutschen Heimatfront," Der Spiegel 10, March 4, 1991. Back.
Note 54: See Yomiuri, July 9, 1994, pp. 1 and 2. Back.
Note 55: See the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 15, 1994, pp. 1 and 2. Back.
Note 56: On this point the author is indebted to conversations with Victor Cha on the evolution of the dialogue between North and South Koreas. Relations between Taiwan and China also contrast sharply with the German case. Back.
Note 57: For what is still one of the best overviews of the politics leading up to the Eastern Treaties, see William E. Griffith, The Ostpolitik of the Federal Republic of Germany (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), esp. ch. 5. Back.
Note 58: See Jonathan Dean, Watershed in Europe (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987); and Vjotech Mastny, Helsinki, Human Rights, and European Security (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 59: See Clay Clemens, Reluctant Realists. For a sampling of the fears that this policy caused abroad, see Christopher Layne, "Deutschland uber Alles," New Republic (September 1987); and Eberhard Schulz and Peter Danylow, eds., Bewegung in die deutsche Frage? Die auslŠndischen Besorgnisse uber die Entwicklung in den beiden deutschen Staaten (Bonn: Deutsche Gesellschaft fur auswŠrtige Politik, 1985). Back.
Note 60: See Utake, Nihon no Boei to Kokunai Seiji, chs. 1-3. Back.
Note 61: See Chuma Kiyofuku, Saigumbi no Seijigaku (Tokyo: Chishikisha, 1985), pp. 45-94. Back.
Note 62: See Dieter Mahncke, Nukleare Mitwirkung: Die Bundesrepublik in der Atlantischen Allianz (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972). Back.
Note 63: See Thomas-Durrell Young, Franco-German Security Accommodation: Illusion of Agreement (Carlisle, Pa: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 1993); Hilmar Linnenkamp, "The Security Policy of the New Germany," in Paul B. Stares, ed., The New Germany and the New Europe (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992), pp. 98-100; and Wolfgang Schlšr, German Security Policy, Adelphi Paper 277 (London: IISS-Brassey's, June 1993), pp. 30, 58-59. Back.
Note 64: See Hans Gunter Brauch, ed., Star Wars and European Defense (New York: St. Martin's, 1987). Back.
Note 65: On the sea lanes issue, see Chuma Kiyofuku, Saigumbi no Seijigaku, pp. 107-24; on Japanese defense spending, see Joseph P. Keddell, Jr., The Politics of Defense in Japan: Managing Internal and External Pressures (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), ch. 3. Back.
Note 66: See Helmut Schmidt, Menschen und MŠchte (Berlin: Siedler. 1987), p. 92; and Wolfram Hanrieder, Germany, America, and Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 110-11. Back.
Note 67: See Helga Haftendorn, Sicherheit und Entspannung (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 1986), pp. 250-51. Back.
Note 68: Christian Hacke, Weltmacht wider Willen (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1988), pp. 334-41; Ernst-Otto Czempiel, "sdi and nato: The Case of the Federal Republic of Germany," in Sanford Lakoff and Randy Willoughby, eds., Strategic Defense and the Western Alliance, pp. 147-64 (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987). Back.
Note 69: See the comments by General Inspector of the Bundeswehr Klaus Naumann on the prospects for a conventional defense of Western Europe in Naumann, "The Forces and the Future," in Stephen S. Szabo, The Bundeswehr and Western Security (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 174. Back.
Note 70: See Chuma Kiyofuku, Saigumbi no Seijigaku, pp. 110-12; Keddell, The Politics of Defense in Japan, pp. 112-18; interview with highly placed officials in the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Tokyo, October 1988. Back.
Note 71: See Asahi, July 7, 1987, evening ed., p. 1; Asahi, September 5, 1987, p. 3; Japan Times, October 8, 1987, p. 1; and Gotoda Masaharu, Seiji to wa Nanika (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1988), p. 172. Back.
Note 72: Schlor, German Security Policy, pp. 40-43; and Linnenkamp, "The Security Policy of the New Germany," pp. 95-96.
Note 73: The complete text of the Japanese peacekeeping law along with concomitant amendments to other laws governing the Japanese armed forces can be found in "Kokusai heiwaji katsudo nado ni tai suru Kyoryoku ni Kan suru Horitsu," Shinboeironshu 20, no. 2 (September 1992): 82-100. For more on the background of the law, see Aurelia George, "Japan's Participation in UN Peacekeeping Missions: Radical Departure or Predictable Response?" Asian Survey 33, no. 6 (June 1993): 560-75. On German Bundeswehr reorganization, see Otfried Nassauer, "Die NATO--Aufbruch zu neuen Ufern?" in Erich Schmidt-Eenboom and Jo Angerer, eds., Siegermacht NATO (Berg am See: Verlagsgesellschaft Berg, 1993), pp. 75-84; and Thomas-Durrell Young, The New European Security Calculus: Implications for the U.S. Army (U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, Carlisle Barracks, March 1, 1991). Back.
Note 74: See Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross; Ulrich Simon, Die Integration der Bundeswehr in die Gesellschaft (Heidelberg/Hamburg: R.v.Decker's Verlag G. Schenck, 1980); and Martin Esser, Das TraditionsverstŠndnis des Offizierkorps (Heidelberg/Hamburg: R.v.Decker's Verlag G. Schenck, 1982). Back.
Note 75: For an extensive documentary overview of the Bittburg visit and the controversy surrounding it, see Ilya Lefkov, ed., Bitburg and Beyond: Encounters in American, German, and Jewish History (New York: Shapolsky Books, 1987). Back.
Note 76: See Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Hans-Jurgen Rautenberg, eds., Bundeswehr und EuropŠische Sicherheitsordnung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991), pp. 50-51, 55-59; and Jurgen Kuhlmann and Ekkehard Lippert, "Wehrpflicht Ade? Argumente fur und wider die Wehrpflicht in Friedenszeiten," in Geld Kladrack and Paul Klein, eds., Die Zukunft der StreitkrŠfte Angesichts Weltweiter Abrustungsbemuhungen (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992). Back.
Note 77: Hirose Katsuya, Kanryo to Gunjin: Bunmintosei no Genkai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989); Nikkei, February 16, 1992, p. 2, and October 16, 1993, p. 2. Back.
Note 78: Keddell, The Politics of Defense in Japan, pp. 126-56. Back.
Note 79: Because of the institutional structure of the German state, where education is a responsibility of state governments, this issue rarely reaches national politics. For an exception, see Dieter Lutz, Der 'Friedens'-Streit der Kultusminister: Ein 'Schul' Beispiel (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1984). For an overview of the Japanese debate, see Teruhisa Hori, Educational Thought and Ideology in Modern Japan: State Authority and Intellectual Freedom (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1988), pp. 106-212. Back.
Note 80: See Asahi, July 1, 1992, p. 1; and Japan Times, July 1, 1992, p. 3. Back.
Note 81: For an overview of recent developments, see Sekai (February 1994), special issue on war guilt, Arai Shinichi, Senso Sekinin to wa Nani Ka"; and Tanaka Akira, "Nihon wa Senso Sekinin ni do taishite kita ka." Back.
Note 82: This is particularly true in Japan. The author has had numerous oportunities over the past five years to discuss defense issues with Japanese policy makers and it has been their unanimous view that a strong, prodefense position brings little electoral benefit. As a prominent liberal democratic Diet member put it to the author, "Boei wa Hyo ni Tsunagaranai" (interview with Nagao Eiichi, Tokyo, spring 1988), a point of view that was repeated to the author many times by politicians from both the Left and the Right. Back.
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