Nakasone Yasuhiro and Japan’s European Diplomacy

While Prime Minister Nakasone frequently showed his cordial personal friendship with US President Ronald Reagan, he was successful in creating new Japan-Europe relations based on his close ties with European leaders such as UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand. Nakasone felt that the so-called “Yoshida Doctrine” was not enough and focused more on “culture and politics.” This article reveals that this originated in his high school days when he learned French and the importance of the philosophy of liberalism.     

Buying National: Democracy,Public Procurement,and International Trade

Many studies show that democracy promotes freer trade. However, because they typically focus on “at-the-border” barriers such as tariffs, we know little about democracy’s effects on “behind-the-border” barriers such as discrimination in government procurement. We address this question by asking how democracy affects governments’ incentives to discriminate against foreigners when buying goods and services. We argue that “buy national” policies have unclear costs and are harder to attack than policies that visibly interfere with consumers’ ability to buy foreign goods. This makes such provisions more attractive than tariffs to democratic leaders seeking reelection. We thus hypothesize that democracy leads to lower tariffs but to greater discrimination in public procurement. We support this hypothesis with an analysis of procurement and imports in 138 countries from 1990 to 2008. Our results imply that a full understanding of the democracy–trade policy relationship requires attention to increasingly prominent behind-the-border barriers to trade.     

Are Free Trade Areas Good for Multilateralism? Evidence from the European Free Trade Association

Do free trade agreements (FTAs) help or hinder multilateral trade liberalization? This question, though much debated, remains unanswered because (1) there has been scant attention to the conditions under which FTAs have either effect, and (2) extant hypotheses have not been rigorously tested. In this article I identify conditions under which FTAs help and hinder broader trade liberalization: they do the former when members' intra– and extra–FTA comparative advantages are similar and the latter when the opposite is true. I test these hypotheses using trade, output, and tariff data from the European Free Trade Association. The trade data indicate that members with similar intra– and extra–FTA comparative advantages liberalized trade more rapidly than those with dissimilar comparative advantages. The output and tariff data suggest that these differences among members reflect hypothesized economic and political processes. My research implies that scholars should abandon universalistic arguments concerning the effects of regional arrangements and devote more attention to the conditions governing the relationship between regionalism and multilateralism.     

Explaining State Violence in the Guatemalan Civil War: Rebel Threat and Counterinsurgency

Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat‐response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.     

Nonviolent Interference in Civic Life During Civil War: Rebel Service Provision and Postwar Norms of Interpersonal Trustworthiness in Sri Lanka

While previous studies focus most of their attention on the impact of civil-war violence on postwar norms of interpersonal trustworthiness, they overlook the importance of political actors' nonviolent interference in civic life during such conflicts. This paper investigates the relationship between wartime provision of public services and postwar trustworthiness norms among civilians. Using original survey data collected from Sri Lanka, empirical analysis suggests that postwar norms of interpersonal trustworthiness tend to weaken if individuals experienced higher amounts of service provision by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. To build their own apparatus to provide efficient services, the rebels deeply intervened in and altered local institutions. Such transformation of local institutions dissolves existing social groups and associations that previously tied residents together. Efforts of post-civil-war community development would be ill equipped if these institutions were treated as nonexistent. Postwar development programs need to provide new, effective local institutions to replace those established in wartime.     

The ethics of competition

This paper analyzes the ethics of market competition with reference to sport games. The metaphor of games suggests that different games represent three elements or models that are related to man and society: record, struggle, and cooperation. Record-type games pursue excellence or virtue; struggle-type games determine winners in zero-sum games; and the idea of cooperation or teamwork demands the just rules of competition based on solidarity. Moral criticism of market competition is sometimes in confusion with regard to the targets of criticism. Distinction should be made between the aims, rules, and motives of competition. A free society based on self-interest should be maintained by improving the aims and rules of competition, which are often defective and degraded. Thus the ethics of competition should consist of the ethics of virtue, of justice, and of freedom.     

The Rise and Fall of Japan's Grand Strategy: The “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” and the Future Asian Order

This article examines the “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” which symbolizes a new direction of Japanese diplomacy and reinforced cooperation with countries where such ideals as democracy, freedom, and human rights are shared. Originally proposed by Foreign Minister Taro Aso, the concept has since moved into the background but nevertheless remains in the thoughts of current Japanese diplomatic strategy.     

Tariffs and Carbon Emissions

International trade and the environment are uneasy partners. Both environmentalists and free traders worry that the pursuit of one goal may obstruct the other. Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the area of climate change. Does trade liberalization increase carbon emissions? Do efforts to reduce carbon emissions lead to protectionist pressures? This paper addresses these questions by examining the relationship between CO2 emissions and tariffs in 109 to 153 countries from 1988 to 2013. Using instrumental-variable regressions to address reciprocal causation, I find that emissions reductions led to higher tariffs on manufactured goods. This suggests that carbon-intensive industries responded to carbon restrictions by lobbying against trade liberalization. In contrast, emissions did not affect tariffs on less carbon-intensive primary products, and neither type of tariff affected CO2 emissions. My results imply that efforts to combat climate change may obstruct trade liberalization, but the latter should not hinder climate change mitigation.     

Historical Memories and Security Legislation: Japan's Security Policy under the Abe Administration

In Japan, two political issues came to the forefront in the year marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. While usually dealt with separately, the Statement by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, issued on August 14, 2015, and the security legislation based on the concept of a “Proactive Contribution to Peace” both relate to the question of how we view Japan's place in international society. This article examines how both these issues support Japan's commitment to maintaining its identity as a peace-loving nation and its responsibility to contribute to international peace and prosperity.