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This paper examines US, Japanese, and European political economy approaches to China, and their effect on US-Japan and US-EU relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less of a concern are preoccupied with calculations for wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe, and Japan are not that different in the scheme of things. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world to outflank the US-Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the evolution of APEC and the rejection of Japan's 1997 AMF proposal reflect a failure of Japanese and US leadership. Not only have the two countries failed to exercise either individual or shared regional leadership. Instead, both have used their considerable structural power negatively to block the other's proposals for regional collective action, rather than positively to exercise leadership. After developing the concepts of leadership and blocking power, the paper provides case studies of the APEC and AMF. It concludes that if a post-hegemonic US no longer has the willingness and/or the ability to undertake collective action single-handedly, and if in a post-Cold War world neither the US nor Japan has sufficient incentives to bridge their differences and sacrifice some interests to achieve a unified stance, then continued stalemate and under-supply of regional collective goods can be expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the formal and informal aspects of Japan's robust bilateralism on issues of external and internal security and discusses a variety of embryonic multilateral arrangements that have sprung up in the 1990s. Asian-Pacific multilateralism is not yet a strong and unquestioned collectively held norm in either Tokyo or any of the major capitals in the Asia-Pacific. What matters instead are political practices shaped by a strong tradition of bilateralism and, only very recently, by an incipient multilateralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2005 UNESCO produced its Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. This was largely a response to the worries of countries, especially in Europe and not least of which France, which feared the damaging effects to their cultures if trade in entertainment products remained too one-sided. Generally the argument of this paper is that while initial tensions between the United States and Europe were motivated by the usual commercial concerns, Europeans were increasingly worried about the cultural impact of this commerce. The Japanese, however, have not been nearly so concerned as the Europeans about becoming 'Americanized'. This lack of tension between the United States and Japan in the area of film and television is due to several factors. First, there is a complementarity between American entertainment and the Japanese electronics industry. Second, the Japanese are major players in some aspects of the entertainment industry, most especially in the area of animation, and they are especially influential in Asia. Finally, issues of cultural conflict between the United States and Japan are simply less salient to Tokyo than those which characterize Japan's relations with its Asian neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional financial arrangements and monetary integration in East Asia and Europe have made considerable progress in recent years. This paper discusses whether governments in both regions, Japan and Germany as the most advanced regional economies in particular, can use the new dynamics as levers to raise their status vis-à-vis the United States. It will be argued that activities are defensive rather than offensive, aiming at protecting the respective region from financial risk. Japan, in particular, would find it difficult to raise its status vis-à-vis the United States significantly by promoting regional financial and monetary integration, principal reasons being actor heterogeneity, the role of China, hesitation to bear burden and risk, and the historical legacy of a bank-oriented system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integrated system of political-economic relations that has prevailed in the Pacific since the September 1951 treaty of peace with Japan, known here as the San Francisco System, is distinctive in comparison with subregional systems elsewhere in the world. This paper outlines key defining features, such as (1) a dense network of bilateral alliances; (2) an absence of multilateral security structures; (3) strong asymmetry in alliance relations, both in security and economics; (4) special precedence to Japan; and (5) liberal trade access to American markets, coupled with relatively limited development assistance. After contrasting this system to analogous arrangements elsewhere, especially in the Atlantic, it explores both the origins and the prognosis of this remarkably durable political-economic entity. Complementary domestic political-economic interests on both sides of the Pacific, reinforcing a brilliant original Japan-centric design by John Foster Dulles, account for persistence, it is argued, while forces for change center on the dynamic emerging role of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does recognition matter for a region as much as it does for a state and a person? This article examines the power of recognition in shaping regional cooperation. Rather than focusing on the behaviours and interactions between member states, which most studies have done, this article introduces a recognition model to investigate how the social practices of a region with non-member entities promote regional cooperation. By viewing recognition as a tradable commodity and an independent variable, the framework illustrates how the contest for recognition permeates beyond interpersonal and interstate interactions to include the struggle for recognition by regions. The model hypothesizes that the extent of recognition accorded to a region has an influence on its development. Drawing on newly released US declassified diplomatic records, this article tests the soundness of the proposed recognition model for regions by analysing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) struggle for recognition in the 1970s. It discusses how recognition was traded between ASEAN and three foreign powers, namely the USA, Japan and the European Economic Community, during the grouping's formative years. The findings suggest that the strengthening of a regional concept is influenced by the willingness of, and the extent to which, foreign powers recognize the entity. The central theme of this article is that recognition plays an important function in the development of a regional concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For all its success in other high-technology sectors, Japan has largely failed to develop a strong aerospace sector. Its leading firms do not market finished aircraft and, in stark contrast to other sectors, the aerospace industry features a trade deficit with the United States. Japanese firms seem trapped as suppliers of components and sub-assemblies, mainly for the US industry. The general explanation for this state of affairs is that the Japanese industry has been effectively 'captured' by the United States; Boeing in particular dominates the sector and has effectively locked the Japanese firms into a relationship where moving up the value chain is difficult. This relationship may be changing. Japan's government has placed renewed emphasis on developing Japan's aerospace sector, while matters are evolving at the corporate level too, with Boeing's relations with Japan revealing a steadily increasing work share for the Japanese industry. The rise of Asia as an important market, and technological change making aerospace more like other manufacturing industries, presents Japanese firms with new incentives and opportunities beyond the US relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japan's foreign economic policy has undergone two crucial changes in the past decade and a half: first the shift from predominantly US-Japan bilateralism to the addition of regional multilateralism, and then the recent extension to regional bilateral FTAs for the first time. To what extent did these shifts in Japan's behavior in the trade area represent a deep shift in the purposes and goals of Japanese foreign economic policy? This article looks at how American policy changes and developments in the US-Japan relationship, and economic globalization, produced the changes in Japan's domestic policy thinking and process that led to these outcomes and to the particular pattern of development of these policy shifts. Using a simple version and modification of 'strategic interaction theory' it concludes that despite recent arguments that the shift to bilateral FTAs may presage a turning point toward an Asian bloc, instead it reflects a remarkable continuity in Japan's foreign economic goals in the post-war period. Although an important change, it indicates only using new means to adapt to the changed regional economic security environment after the East Asian financial crisis and the débâcle of trade liberalization in EVSL in APEC. Japan now has a full 'multi-tiered' range of trade alternatives to advance its constant goals of maintaining a US 'military shield' and promoting its own 'economic sword' in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

APEC's founding and subsequent development has been seen as primarily driven by the 'middle' and smaller powers of Asia, such as Australia and the ASEAN countries, with Japan as a secondary, if supportive, and the US as a passive and reluctant, player. This article, while acknowledging Australia's essential leadership in the founding process, uses new evidence about it to revise views of Japan and the US's roles in APEC. I argue that the former played a more major role in APEC's founding and that the latter was more positive in its thinking about that forum than has been acknowledged. This should force us to rethink the politics of APEC, paying more attention to how the political economy and relationship of the two major powers in the region influence the patterns of cooperation and conflict in it. It should also lead us to reconsider the efficacy of the major theories of international relations that might be used to explain APEC's politics and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]