Contested Memories in Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policy

Chapter 1

Theorizing the Role of Collective Memory in International Politics

Abstract

The first chapter introduces the theoretical framework of the book. First there is a discussion of how different approaches in social sciences, such as instrumentalism, historical determinism, and culturalism, have explained the origin and the evolution of collective memories and their role in building national identities. Secondly, the role of collective memory is located within the theoretical corpus of international relations theory, with discussion of why looking at the formation and contestation of collective memories can bring about significant progress for the discipline. Finally, an innovative approach is taken in explaining the relationship between collective memory and foreign policy, based on the interpretive approach to foreign policy, and rooted into concepts such as beliefs, traditions, dilemmas, and narratives.

Keywords

Collective memory; international relations theory; interpretive approach; instrumentalism; culturalism; historical determinism

1.1 Introduction

How does memory influence policy choices? How is collective memory negotiated and contested? How does this process influence political competition, the research of political legitimacy and policy choices in international affairs? Can a particular national narrative lead to international reconciliation, or foster international enmity? Is remembering past suffering, violence, and atrocities useful to achieve reconciliation? Can a government suppress the memories of a violent past?

This book addresses these questions, looking at East Asia, and particularly at the cases of China and Japan. These cases are especially significant when it comes to the relationship between collective memory and foreign policy. For Japan the history problem, namely the perception by other Asian countries that it has not come to terms with its past of aggression and militarism, has represented a political limit since the early postwar period. The history issue has limited the Japanese role in the region in a number of ways. First, it has led other countries in the region to perceive Japan’s role as threatening, despite its commitment to pacifism and antimilitarism. Secondly, it has dramatically diminished the possibility for Japan to present itself as a legitimate leading regional power for the process of regionalization in East Asia. Particularly between the 1980s and the 1990s, the perception that Tokyo had not done enough to come to terms with its past contributed to undermine the perspective in which Japan could translate its economic and commercial networks into a more developed system of regional governance and integration. Finally, the history problem severely amplifies the importance of international disputes that might have otherwise assumed a relatively minor strategic relevance for both Japan and other countries. Territorial disputes regarding islands with relatively minor strategic value, such as the Takeshima-Dokdo, with South Korea, or Senkaku-Diaoyu Island, with China, are now presented as vital issues regarding fundamental national interests. Probably those disputes would not be thus perceived if they were not amplified by nationalistic rhetoric generated by issues arising from retentive memory.

For China the relationship between collective memory and foreign policy appears to have different implications. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been the protagonist of a large-scale campaign aimed at rewriting national history, during the reform era and in particular after the Tiananmen Square Protests. The decline of ideology and the necessity of reinvigorating the legitimacy of the Party has led the political elite to promote a new version of the country’s history, based on a rhetoric of victimization and on the necessity for the party to prevent new humiliations at the hands of foreigners, Japanese or Westerners in particular. More recently the CPC has started to reevaluate the Confucian tradition, trying to reconceptualize both its past history and its contemporary role, through the lenses of traditional values such as the importance of harmony, virtue, and wisdom. These elements have produced a narrative radically different from those which characterized Chinese foreign policy in Mao’s and Deng’s era. On the one hand China is ready to assert its interests against foreign powers willing to humiliate it or contain its rise. On the other, the new leadership has elaborated a new form of exceptionalism that prefigures a leading role for Beijing at the regional or even at the global level.

The issues of history problems, nationalism, apologies, and different visions of history have been explored by a number of historians, sociologists, and political scientists. This book however aims at approaching these matters from a partially different angle compared from the existing literature. The scholarly production on the subject can be distinguished in several different groups. Firstly, historiographical researches which explored the evolution of processes of memorialization in a single country (Bodnar, 1992; Hashimoto, 2015; Saaler & Schwentker, 2008). Another type of research looked at the creation and the contestation of the memory of a single event or single issue (Soh, 2008; Takashi, 2009; Winter, 2006b; Zwigenberg, 2014). Sociologically inspired researches evaluated the coming into memory of events or periods in contemporary cultures and societies (Bell, 2003, 2009a,b; Olick, 2005; Wertsch, 2002). Other analyses looked at the role of textbooks and education in promoting reconciliation or fostering nationalism (Crawford & Foster, 2007; Korostelina & Lässig, 2013; Nozaki, 2008; Vickers, 2013). Political scientists and International Relations scholars tended to concentrate more on the role of apologies or nationalistic rhetoric on interstate pacification (Chen Weiss, 2014; He, 2009; Lind, 2008). This expanding literature, with which I will engage in detail later in the chapter, has the merit of dealing with very relevant research questions such as how can states overcome the grievances left over from past conflicts and achieve reconciliation? or can apologies lead to reconciliation?.

The main downside of this literature is that it has produced a number of prescriptive judgements on what nations should or should not do to overcome their problems related to history issues. This book, in contrast, will not produce suggestions on how Japan, China, or any other nation should address its past in order to achieve reconciliation or to promote its own national interests. Nor is it aimed at providing a new specific interpretation of the process of memorialization of a particular set of events. This book intends rather to provide different theoretical and empirical contributions. Firstly, it is aimed at contributing to the ongoing process of integration of studies on collective memory in the theoretical corpus of the discipline of International Relations theory. Secondly, it has the intention of contributing to the research agenda of the interpretive approach to foreign policy, exploring how collective memories are both a constitutive element of foreign policy traditions and narratives and a fundamental ground for competition between agents who are trying to legitimize their choices. More broadly, the book is also aimed at participating in the ongoing debate on Chinese and Japanese foreign policies, looking at how the interplay between collective memories and the contestation of national narratives and identities affects foreign policy choices. Finally, the book is intended also to connect the issue of contested memories in the broader picture of the evolving regional order in East Asia.

In order to clarify the object of this study it will be useful to clarify is the definition of collective memory. Jeffrey Olick has argued that collective memory is a central faculty of our being in time; it is the negotiation of past and present through which we define our individual and collective selves (Olick, 2003). In other words, collective memory is an intersubjective understanding of the country’s past, which is used to make sense of a country’s identity and role in the world, as well as its interests and the duties these give rise to. This book will look at how the actors shape, negotiate, and contest national memory and how this process is relevant for the realm of foreign policy. It will argue that the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) plays a vital role in conceiving and legitimizing foreign policy choices, especially for countries that have experienced defeat and destruction or occupation. The focus here is on nation states and particularly on policymakers. This research will look at how policymakers interpret history to conceive and legitimize their role and their choices.

The focus on the nation state has often led researches on this field to promote a substantialist account of national identities. In contrast, here we consider Nations as practices that occur, institutional arrangements that are continually enacted and reenacted (Olick, 2004, p. 11). As Olick has correctly underlined, a vast majority of the works on collective memory tend to reify collective memory and to assume a high degree of cultural and political homogeneity, which assumptions lead to the negation of processes of construction and contestation. This book, on the other hand, will look particularly at how collective memories can be contested and manipulated, and can change though time. Moreover, we will explore how the processes of creation and contestation of collective memories decisively constrain, inform, and influence foreign policy choices.

1.2 Memory, History, and the Idea of Usable Past

Collective memory has become a major field of investigation for several disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, history, and philosophy. Several scholars even identified a memory boom, occurring in the 1980s and 1990s. As Jay Winter observes, the debate on historical memory has become a cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe. (Winter, 2006a). The memory boom was generated by a coincidence of several historical, social, and political trends. The third wave of democratization led new democracies to rethink their past and reconsider their national narratives, together with their forms of government. The end of the Cold War caused a process of rereading national history in several regions, from East Asia to Central and East Europe and the post-Soviet space. The memory boom, as highlighted by the historian Charles Maier is not a sign of historical confidence, but a sign of retreat from transformative politics (Maier, 1988). It reflects a narrow focus on ethnicity and nationalism as a replacement for encompassing communities based on ideologies and political ideas.

Scholarly attempts to theorize collective memory can be divided into three main approaches: Instrumentalist, Historical Determinists, and Culturalist (Berger, 2012). They offer three different explanations of how collective memories arise and different accounts of how agents can shape or manipulate collective memories for political purposes. They also propose different conceptualizations regarding fundamental issues such as the relationship between history and memory; the possibility of suppressing the memory of certain events while selecting others; the possibility of resistance and the rise of countermemories; and how states and leaders should come to terms with the past to achieve reconciliation and pacification.

1.2.1 Instrumentalism

The Instrumentalist approach assumes that elites are able to shape collective memories for political reasons. Agents, particularly governments and political elites, are able to create a narrative that becomes common sense in their societies. Their vision of the past is relatively independent from historical reality as factual, objective reconstruction of the past. Moreover, their narratives do not encounter significant resistance or contestation from the civil society. From an Instrumentalist point of view, the elite manipulate the past to serve their interests and under the exigencies of the present. Memory, as a consequence, becomes, the continuation of politics by other means. It is a form of power used to provide legitimacy to elites and their policies. (Berger, 2012, p. 12). The Instrumentalist approach assumes the necessity for every state to achieve a usable past, a retrospective reinterpretation of the nation’s history aimed at legitimizing the current elite and its policies (Brooks, 1918; Maier, 1988; Olick, 2007).

The pioneer of the Instrumentalist approach, and more generally, the author of the first fundamental sociological investigation of the issue of collective memory, was the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. In his landmark Social Frameworks of Memory (Le cadres sociaux de la mémoire), originally published in 1925, he investigated the origin of collective memory in a society (Halbwachs,1976). According to Halbwachs, it is impossible for individuals to remember in any coherent way outside a group context. As he argued, it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in a society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories (Halbwachs, 1990, p. 39). Individuals remember through what he defined as social frameworks of memory. These frameworks are in turn defined by social groups, such as families, classes, and nations. Therefore, there is no universal collective memory because every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time (ibidem, p. 94). In fact, a group retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive. By definition it does not exceed the boundaries of this group, and for this reason there are as many memories as there are groups (ibidem, p. 80). Shared memories are instrumental in the preservation of social cohesion and solidarity within the group.

This definition highlights the influence of Halbwachs’ mentor Emile Durkheim. His definition is, in fact, coherent with the idea of collective representations as symbols or meanings that are properties of groups, whether or not any particular individual in those groups shares them (Lukes, 1985). The Durkheimian perspective on collective meaning tends to be rigidly structuralist. Meanings, therefore memories, are embedded in groups and societies and there is hardly anything agents can to change or alter them. Halbwachs, nevertheless, opens to plurality and to the possibility for the individual and groups of reelaborating collective memories (Misztal, 2003b). Social construction of collective memory serves the changing political and social needs of the present. Leaders of the group can rationalize the past to make sense of the present and to legitimize their choices.

Halbwachs has been criticized by following scholars, who considered his idea that all memories are necessarily social and that they can be assimilated to a Durkheimian social fact as presenting a high risk of essentialization. As Jan Werner Muller argued, the work of the French sociologist tends to "identify collective memory with some sort of Volkgeist or Jungian collective unconscious"(Müller, 2002). Halbwachs’ legacy, however, is central for those who contributed to prosecuting his effort to investigate collective memory. The French historian Pierre Nora, building on Halbwachs’ work, argued that social groups select dates and peoples to commemorate, deliberately choosing what to eliminate and what to remember. He described the choice of what to remember and what to forget as an essential exercise of power. As a consequence, to Nora, collective memory becomes both a tool and an object of power. The process of formation of a collective memory represents a crucial moment both for the formation of nation states and for the transition to political modernity. If modernity entails a destructuration of traditional meanings and values, then, he proposes, the construction or the invention of a national memory can provide a fundamental glue for the modern nation state. According to Nora, les lieux de mémoire, the sites of memory, are fundamental to the process of formation of a collective memory. Through them, in fact, the past crystallizes into memory and they thus embody a sense of continuity between the present and the past (Nora, 1989). Nora’s theoretical account represents an important advancement. However, his concept of crystallization of memory, though les lieux de memoire, appears to hide the process of revision and renegotiations of the past generated by contemporary political contestation. Nora’s work is also relevant in establishing the difference between memory and history in the Instrumentalist approach. According to Nora, history is constituted by dry facts, while memory is necessarily emotionalized and accessible.

The work of the historian Eric Hobsbawm represents another important contribution to this debate. Hobsbawm advanced the idea of invention of tradition, which can be presented as an expansion of Nora’s interpretation of collective memory as a response to the challenges of modernity and democracy. He argued in fact that the invention of national traditions served the broader aim of legitimizing national authority and social control and cementing a sense of identification with the national state. As for Nora, Hobsbawm assumes that the invention of tradition and the formation of collective memory is inherently an exercise of power. Hobsbawm illustrates how most of the invented traditions which claim to be rooted in centuries or millennia of history are the product of a couple of decades or emerge from an overt reinterpretation of previous traditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012). Similarly, Benedict Anderson argued that nations are imagined communities. When it comes to the invention of tradition and collective memories for the purpose of cementing national cohesion, according to Anderson, it does not make sense to distinguish between what is real and what is false. What is important is the reception of such putative memories as if they are real (Anderson, 1983; Misztal, 2003a).

Another important contribution to this debate has been offered by the historian Peter Novick. He pointed out that the main feature of memory is the tendency to simplify and to see events from a single committed perspective and to be impatient with ambiguities of any kind (Novick, 1999). In this respect memories represent the logical opposite of history and historiography as efforts to include the multiplicity and complexity of past events. Novick argues that memories are a-historical and even antihistorical (Novick, 1999, p. 3) since they focus on the continuity of the past in the present, negating historicity, and the complexity of the past. Memory rather tends to reduce events to mythic archetypes and eternal truths. John W. Dower reinforced this argument on the essential conflict between collective memory and history. Memory is composed largely of heroic narratives, which simply demand simple and unilinear stories. These narratives squarely contradict the basic assumptions of historiography and its need of complexity and multiplicity. Dower underlines how memorialization generally takes the form of intimate human-interest stories, populated by heroes and villains rather than by actual complex historical figures (Dower, 2012).

The Instrumentalist approach posits also that agents are highly selective in their construction of collective memories. As the same Dower has put it, collective memory is as much about forgetting as about remembering. Elites try to selectively suppress the memory of what is not instrumental to their political purposes or interests (Dower, 2012). This leads to leaving little room for opposition and resistance. In a democratic polity opposition can be determined by the presence of different political groups pursuing opposite political aims; and therefore instrumentally proposing different memories of the past. This theory marginalizes the possibility that different actors can resist the elite’s attempts to manipulate the past for normative reasons or more simply because the new version of events differs from what they remember or have been educated to