"America and Europe"
Writer Profile
Hirotaka Watanabe
Other : Professor, Graduate School of Global Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign StudiesKeio University alumni
Hirotaka Watanabe
Other : Professor, Graduate School of Global Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign StudiesKeio University alumni
2018/12/11
The motivation for writing this book stems from my starting point as a researcher. I have specialized in French politics and diplomacy, but since my student days, I have questioned why Japanese diplomacy is discussed almost exclusively in terms of relations with the United States. The earth is round. It was a simple question. The title of an essay I wrote 33 years ago on Mitterrand's French diplomacy at the time was "Both Alliance and Independence."
To discuss Japan-U.S. diplomacy, shouldn't we properly understand America's other, and more mutually intimate, relationship—the U.S.-Europe relationship? That was the starting point of this book.
A long time has passed as I worked to synthesize my areas of expertise, starting from French diplomatic history to contemporary French politics, diplomacy, and the EU. It was over 20 years ago that I wrote the historical overview paper on U.S.-Europe relations that served as the sketch for this book. Having studied in France as a student, my desire to study in the United States early on to directly learn their perspective on Europe was realized in the year following the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the start of the new century. I then spent over a year conducting research in Washington, D.C., in the midst of the lead-up to the Iraq War.
There, I witnessed the rivalry between the U.S. and Europe, a mix of love and hate. In the midst of fierce arguments between the U.S. and Germany/France at the UN Security Council, several English-speaking ministers from Germany traveled to the U.S. for ministerial meetings on cooperation for chemical weapons disposal, among other things. Weren't these two countries the primary adversaries in World War II?
In the Japanese intellectual world, which focused only on the anti-American sentiment in Germany and France and argued simply in terms of whether support for the Iraq War was black or white, there was no awareness of the structure of the international community as a whole heading toward war, the vision for the post-war period, or Japan's own role. Responsible debate regarding the international community remains uncertain in this country even today.
With these questions in mind, I published two books after returning to Japan: "Post-Empire" and "Cooperation and Conflict in the U.S.-Europe Alliance." This current publication came about because I felt strongly at that time that a general history serving as their foundation was necessary. I wrote this with the hope that as many people as possible would understand the U.S.-Europe alliance and consider the Japan-U.S. alliance relatively from a broad global perspective. I hope it will help, even slightly, to alleviate the pressing concerns in our country's diplomatic discourse.
*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.