Robert DujarricDirector Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies
Temple University Japan Campus, Tokyo
robertdujarric@gmail.com
8 June 2007 (edited for publication, v2)
Pacific Forum CSIS: Strategic Goals in U.S., Japan, and China Relations
Nanjing, April 25-27, 2007
Session V: Trilateral Relations and Regional Integration

Does Europe hold lessons for Asia?
European integration has been a two-step process. The first one followed the defeat of Nazi
totalitarianism and the Soviet occupation of Central Europe. The second one was initiated by
the unification of Germany, the liberation of Central Europe from communism, and the breakupof the USSR. We will focus on the first stage, which is one which laid the foundations oftoday’s Europe.
Asians often ask themselves if the success of European integration can serve as a model for theirregion. As we shall see, the European experience is rooted in unique circumstances which, witha few exceptions, do not apply to Asia.

US role1. Practically all Western European nations in 1945 were either US allies or under US
occupation. They were all dependent on American economic assistance to survive. This
gave the US enormous leverage. Obviously, this is not, and has never been the case, in
East Asia.
2. American officials reached the conclusion that only a US-allied integrated Europe could
create the necessary conditions to avoid a return of the “German problem” and provide
for a Western Europe that could face up to the foreign threat from the USSR and thedomestic dangers from Moscow-controlled communist parties. The geopolitics of Asia inthe decades following World War II were totally different. The United States also
perceived a communist menace, but geopolitics dictated a response that was not the sameas the one Washington adopted in Europe.
In Asia, until the Korean War, Washington paid no attention to the peninsula, andtherefore was oblivious to the relevance of Korea-Japan ties to American interests. Afterthe conclusion of the Korean War armistice (1953), for a variety of reasons, US political1

military ties in the region developed along separate bilateral lines (Japan-US, ROK-US,
Taiwan-US) rather than along the multilateral path of the Atlantic Alliance/NATO.
3. The United States and its main European allies shared comparable, though not identicalphilosophies, which gave the US an ideological stake in the success of western European
integration. In East Asia, the ruling Japanese conservatives (what became the LDP in1955) included in their ranks many whose commitment to liberal democracy was rooted
in pragmatism rather than conviction. Many Japanese socialists were dogmatic antiAmerican. Therefore, Japanese politics did not generate the same sort of shared transAtlantic philosophical community that existed with West Germany’s Christian
Democrats and Social Democrats.

European factors

Push for integration
1. Many of the leaders of Western Europe shared this American vision of a (semi) united
western Europe; in fact men like Jean Monnet (Europe’s senior Founding Father) played
a role in convincing Americans that this was the policy to pursue. This is not the case in
East Asia, where there was no significant political movement that favored regional
integration.
Moreover, the fundamental goals were different. From the start, many – though by nomeans all – Europeans wanted a supra-national entity which to which the member states
would transfer some of their sovereignty. In post-1945 China, Korea, and Japan, there
has never been any serious interest in giving up a large fraction of the state’s sovereign
prerogative to a supra-national body comparable to the European Commission.
2. Even Europeans who were ardent nationalists realized in the1945-1955 period that there
could be no economic recovery unless they cooperated. By making the Marshall Plan
contingent on the Europeans working together, the United States reinforced the economic
incentives to integration. In East Asia, intra-Asian trade is now important but in theimmediate post-World War II period it could not save the region for the simple reason
that China was in the midst of a civil war (to be followed by over two decades of selfdestruction, i.e. the Great Leap forward and the Cultural Revolution) and Korea was
wrecked the 1950-53 War. Therefore, while West Germany and its neighbors had to
trade to survive and grow after 1945, for Japan the road to economic recovery involved
exports to more distant markets in outside of Northeast Asia.
Europeans have always had to live with each other, though such cohabitation could as
easily involve war and invasions as cooperation and peaceful coexistence. In Japan,2however, there was an alternative. When the great Japanese thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi(1835-1901), who founded Keio University, called on Japan to “leave Asia, and join theWest/Europe” (脱亞入歐 in the traditional ideographs then in use) he expressed a viewthat still has some relevance to contemporary Japan. No European state, Britain included,
has ever been able to think of “leaving Europe.” (For Fukuzawa, Asia was a state ofunderdevelopment and Europe meant modernity. He did not seek to take Japan out of
Asia geographically but rather to move the country intellectually and philosophicallycloser to Western ideas. But for many Japanese, “leaving Asia” meant seeing themselves
as honorary Europeans who shaved westerners’ contempt for the mainland1).

Transnational institutions-Religion
Several of Europe’s Founding Fathers, including Konrad Adenauer (West Germany,
chancellor 1949-63), Robert Schuman (French, premier, then foreign minister, 1947-52),
Alcide De Gasperi (Italian, premier, 1945-52) were Roman Catholic Christian Democrats
who whose politics could not be separated from their attachment to the same transnational
political-religious movement to which they belonged (Monnet, however, was not a Christian
Democrat). Jacques Delors (President of the European Commission, 1985-95) and Helmut
Kohl (German chancellor, 1982-1998), two men who played a key role in furthering
European integration in the 1980s and 1990s were respectively a social-democratic Catholicand a Catholic Christian Democrat. John-Paul II (Pope, 1978-2005) actively sought to reintegrate Central Europe, in particular his native Poland, into the community of free
European societies.
Catholicism did not prevent Catholic statesmen from defending their national interests, but it
made them part of a fellowship that was politically significant. There is nothing similar in
Asia, where Confucian tradition provides a set of common concepts but without theorganizational infrastructure of the Roman Church. Protestantism and Judaism have played amuch less significant role in European integration but they too have created networks thattranscend national borders, and one day European Islam may also contribute to European
integration.
-Politics
Social-democracy is another international political force that pushed for European
integration. Though the Christian Democrats played a more visible role, one should notforget the contribution of moderate Socialists and labor unions to the construction ofwhat is now the European Union. In Asia, the divisions of the left between Maoists, proSoviet communists, Kim Il Sungists, doctrinaire socialists, and moderate socialists, andthe absence of democracy outside of Japan until the 1990s, prevented the emergence of a
Socialist International on the European model.
1

I am grateful to Masaru Tamamoto for pointing out to me that Asia was not, in Fukuzawa’s analysis, a place but astate of mind.

3

-Demography
Europe has been far more open to intra-European immigration than Asia has been to the
movement of population between one Asian country to the other. In Western Europe, a
far larger percentage of the citizenry, including members of the elite, are immigrants orthe children and grand-children of individuals who arrived from other European states.
Michael Howard, who rose to head the British conservative party in 2003, was the son a
Romanian refugee; the father of Elio di Rupo, president of the Belgian (francophone)Socialist party was the child of an Italian mine worker, and Nicolas Sarkozy, chairman of
the ruling French UMP party and a possible winner of the 2007 presidential race, hasonly one French grand-parent. In East Asia, such population flows have been muchsmaller, and even rarer in the upper strata of society.

-Language
In Europe, national and linguistic borders do not follow the same demarcation lines.
German is spoken in Germany, Austria, most of Switzerland, small parts of Belgium and Italy,
and widely understood in Alsace (eastern France), Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Central
Europe. French is also the mother tongue of many Belgians, of about a quarter of Switzerland’s
population, the official language of Luxembourg, and was historically the main foreign languageof numerous European countries until several decades ago. English, also spoken in Ireland, isalmost the second language of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and widely used on thecontinent. These linguistic networks, which straddle borders, have played a much greater role
than in East Asia.

Political and economic similarities
The core states of western Europe have not developed in lockstep, but compared to East
Asia their economies and politics have been, and remain, far more homogenous. Even limiting
ourselves to Northeast Asia, and excluding North Korea, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China
have far less in common when it comes to their political systems and economies than do the 15
nations of the pre-21st century enlargement EU.

Ease of travel
In the past ten years, borders controls have gradually been abolished in most of western
Europe. In the immediate post-war era, currency restrictions limited travel opportunities, but assoon as Europe recovered, western Europeans could easily travel to other European nations. In
the 1990s, some Central Europeans and Eastern Europeans had difficulties getting visas, but theentry of Central Europe into the European Union has solved this problem. In East Asia, however,it can take months for a Chinese scholar to get a visa to Japan (or to the US), creating a major
obstacle to contacts between Chinese and Japanese.
4Historical backgroundWestern Europe, unlike Northeast Asia, is an historical entity with a long pedigree. The
shared links inherited from Greece, Jerusalem, Rome, Western Christianity, Charlemagne,
the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are a far stronger glue than the Sinic Confucian
civilization of Northeast Asia. This did not prevent them from slaughtering each otherduring World War I and World War II, but unlike the Sino-Japanese wars and the invasion of
Korea by Japan, Europe’s conflicts were, to a considerable extent, civil wars. A western
European who travels to another nation in western Europe will feel much more at home thanan East Asian will in another East Asian polity.
Integration in Europe is partially a return to the past. Western Europe was integrated
politically during the Roman Empire, the heart of the western mainland formed theCarolingian realm, and the Habsburg reined over a multinational realm for centuries while
the papacy provided a supranational institution unknown in Asia. In Asia, however, there isno unified past to return to (in fact the word “Asia” or [“a” 亞 in Chinese] is a European
invention which is not native to any East Asian language). Korea and Vietnam were – atleast formally – vassals of China, which is not a state of affairs which appeals to them. Japanwas never incorporated into the Chinese political sphere, and its only contribution to Asian
integration was imperialism, which does not provide a roadmap for the future.

EU enlargement to Central Europe
The enlargement of the EU to states recently freed from communism (and to Cyprus andMalta) has made the Union more heterogeneous. Yet, the vast majority of the new citizens,
those from eastern Germany (integrated earlier through unification), Poland, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Baltic Republics live in countries that belong,
admittedly with differences, to the Western European tradition. The challenge is to help
them overcome the legacy of their Soviet-imposed systems and the disastrous decades that
followed World War I.

The History issue: Germany, Japan
We will now touch on the one similarity which almost all commentators mention, namely
the contrast between (West) Germany’s successful management of its history and Japan’s
failure to deal effectively with the crimes of the Showa Era. In many ways, (West)5

Germany’s predicament and Japan’s were similar. But even there, there are importantdifferences.
Before going into the differences between Germany and Japan, one should not that not
apologizing, or doing very little, is the norm, be it in Turkey with regards to the Armenian
genocide, in China concerning the Communist Party and the Great Leap Forward and the
Cultural Revolution, or in the New World when it comes to the fate of native peoples. In theJapanese case, however, what is critical is that the history issue affects directly its relations
with China, Korea, and the United States, and therefore its national interest.

Role of the US
The United States approached the German and Japanese cases differently. It was obvious
for Americans that if they were to bring about a new Europe, Germans had to make peacewith their neighbors, and therefore deal with their Nazi past. In the Japanese case, theUnited States occupation regime paid little attention to Japan’s relations with the mainland of
Asia, which were of far less importance to Washington than Germany’s ties with the rest ofWestern Europe.
Moreover, the attitude of Americans towards German and Japanese atrocities wasdifferent. Germany and America are European Christian societies. For the fifty years
preceding Hitler’s regime, Germany was the leading intellectual and scientific power in theWest. Its culture, its music, its philosophy, captivated Americans. To see this great Christian
European nation fall into barbarism on European soil (as opposed to brutalizing Africans or
Asians overseas) was shocking for Americans, and called for both punishment andredemption. Germany was held by the US and Europe to a higher moral standard than was
expected of Asian “pagans.” There is little doubt that no American would ever havetolerated the appointment of a former Hitler cabinet member as West German chancellor, but
the United States government did not hesitate to welcome Prime Minister Kishi, a minister in
Tojo’s government, in Washington DC.
In addition, it was possible in West Germany to find senior political figures who wereboth politically acceptable to US and western interests, i.e. moderate conservatives, liberals,
or social democrats, and relatively untainted by the Nazi era. In Japan, however, there were
far fewer men (almost no women were in important positions) who could simultaneously
serve American goals and had not been associated with the war-time regime.

Different geopolitical and cultural environments
As noted earlier, the (West) German leadership was well aware that something had to bedone to about the past. Germany needed good relations with western Europe far more thanJapan required better ties with China and Korea. Fundamentally, Japan’s reintegration into6

world affairs was a bilateral Japan-US story, whereas from the start West Germany’s was
multilateral, involving the US, but also France, Britain, the EU, the Atlantic Alliance, East
Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Sorting out Germany’s relations with Israel, andthrough Israel with Jews throughout the world, was essential for Germany’s image in theWest.
Europeans and Israelis realized that they had to establish a working relationship with
West Germany, for economic and/or strategic reasons, regardless of how they felt about
Germans. For China and South Korea, however, Japan was not a priority in the decades
following 1945. Therefore, unlike China and Korea, where to this day Japan-bashing can bea national sport supported by the government, most of Germany’s partners have played apositive role in reaching out the Germans. As a German diplomat told me, we extended ahand of friendship, and our victims reached out to us. It is worth noting that, in contrast to
China’s policy of ignoring the role of Japanese aid in its school curriculum, Israeli textbooks,
at least in the secular state educational sector, mentions the 1955 agreement with Germany
over reparations.1
In addition, the much stronger transnational civil society linkages that exist in Europe,
including churches, facilitated this process. One of the first acts of Polish-German
reconciliation was a letter of Polish bishops to the German episcopate in 1965. The weaknessof East Asian civil society made it more difficult to manage the process of healing thewounds of the past
The legacy of Soviet crimes has also helped Germany. In former communist countries,
in particular Poland, it is Russia, rather than Germany, that is the focus of national hatred.
Therefore, Germany becomes a more acceptable partner simply because it is not Russia.

Dissimilar experiences: Nazi regime and Showa Era
Showa Era atrocities were perpetrated almost exclusively against foreigners. Nazi
Germany, however, also slaughtered many of its own citizens and forced countless others,
often the country’s best and brightest (Einstein is but one example), to find refuge in foreign
lands. Even excluding the victims of anti-Semitism, many Germans were tortured ormurdered by the Gestapo and the SS or forced into exile, whereas far fewer Japanese sufferedfrom persecution by their own regime during the 1931-45 war. Furthermore, many of theJews murdered in Central Europe, though not German, were part of the German cultural
sphere (men like Arthur Koestler, who survived, come to mind). In addition, there were
death factories on German soil, whereas Japan’s massacres occurred overseas. This allowed
many Western military commanders to force local residents to visit these camps to see forthemselves what Germany had done, something that was not feasible in Japan.
Consequently, it is difficult for a German to be unaware of the crimes of Hitler – they are
etched on German soil in Dachau, Buchenwald, and railroad stations. They are found in the
biographies of great Germans killed our forced to flee, and in the histories of families who
7lost relatives or friends to the Nazis. For Japanese, however, there is little at home to remind
him of the crimes of the Showa War, making it easier to focus on the bombing of Japanesecities by the US Army Air Force and to forget the pain the Japanese military inflicted on
enemy civilians and POWs.
One should also take into account a country’s needs heroes, especially when it must cometo terms with a shameful past. In Germany, there were men of honor who rebelled against
the Nazis. Colonel Count von Stauffenberg, the aristocrat who attempted to kill Hitler andseveral of his co-conspirators come to mind. Willy Brandt, later the first social-democratic
chancellor of West Germany, who fled to Scandinavia to join the struggle against the Nazis is
another example. They were surely too few men and women who stood up to Hitler, but
enough to find figures whom Germans could be proud of.
Japan has no counterparts to Stauffenberg or Brandt whose bravery could be held as
proof that there was another Japan that stood up for decency. When Willy Brandt went on
his knees in front of the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, all knew that the West German
premier himself had an irreproachable past as an anti-Nazi. It is noticeable that whenchancellor Shroeder attended the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings in 2004, hecame with an old man, who as a young army officer had helped plan to the operation to kill
Hitler. There is no one comparable in Japan with whom the Japanese Emperor or the Prime
Minister could visit Nanjing.

In addition, Hitler was a lower-class outcast surrounded by misfits of humble
background and little education. They led a revolutionary movement, dedicated to crushing
the old conservative order. They were open about their contempt for the aristocracy, theofficer corps, and the capitalists. It was thus possible after the war to separate the evil Nazis
from the rest of the nation, especially the bureaucratic and military elite, even though its
great majority had served Hitler faithfully. The 13-year Reich could be portrayed as anabnormal psychotic parenthesis in German history.
In Japan, there was no Nazi revolution. The top criminals were generals and bureaucrats,
operating under the Meiji Constitution. The Showa emperor himself, whose role during the
war years remains unclear, stood at the apex of the state. Thus, unlike Germany, when Japanapologizes, it does so on behalf of venerable institutions. In Germany one can refer toatrocities perpetrated “in the name of Germany,” implying that gangsters hijacked the state.
In Japan, it is harder to paint the emperor, the court aristocrats, and the graduates of theservice academies and Tokyo University as pirates who temporarily took the helm of theempire.

Conclusion
8

Therefore, the history of Europe tells us how different Asia is from Europe.
Understanding the nature of the European integration and reconciliation processes
demonstrates that East Asia will have to come up with its own version, rather than seek toadopt, or adapt, European experiences. If there is one lesson that Asia can learn from Europe,
however, it is that complete and unreserved apologies, accompanied by generous
compensation, pay. Today, German soldiers are stationed on Polish soil, German troops canparade in France, the German Army can deploy units to the Balkans, and when Israel needed
to get one of its citizens freed from Hezbollah captivity it asked German intelligence tonegotiate his liberation. The past is still a burden for Germany, but it has not prevented itfrom establishing productive ties with its former victims. Japan’s road will have to bedifferent, and the challenges it faces are not the same, but the German experience, and the
behavior of Germany’s neighbors, deserves to be studied in both Japan and the rest of Asia.
1

I am grateful to Ralph Amelan, US embassy in Israel, for this information.

9