POINT OF VIEW/ Konrad M. Lawson: Will East Asian Community create a utopia?

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has repeatedly set forth his ambitious plan for an East Asian Community based on his core principle of yuai, or "fraternity."

In his introductory remarks March 17 at the Japan Institute of International Affairs symposium "Towards the Building of an East Asian Community," Hatoyama said there is a "pressing need to bring about an opening of Japan to the world, and especially the further opening up of Japan as one of the countries of Asia through a plan for an East Asian Community."

Even before his party swept into power last September, Hatoyama wrote about the idea in his essay "My Political Philosophy" that appeared in the September issue of the Japanese monthly Voice.

He justified the breadth of his vision with a quote from a figure he greatly admired: "All great historical ideas started as a utopian dream and ended with reality."

These words were taken from the manifesto Pan-Europa written by Count Richard Nicolas Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972), who was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and an aristocratic Austrian father serving in Japan as a diplomat.

Hatoyama's own grandfather, the former Prime Minister Ichiro Hatoyama, translated another work by Coudenhove, "The Totalitarian State Against Man" (1935), into Japanese. Coudenhove is now best known in Japan as the inspirational figure behind the watchword yuai.

In a speech he gave in 1931, Coudenhove made the following prediction: "Between the 'national' period of humanity and the period that will come one day of the organization of the whole world as a single federation of states, we must pass through a 'continental' period, a time when narrow national patriotism changes into patriotism for large areas of the world."

In the aftermath of the destruction of World War I, he made it his lifelong goal to establish a Pan-Europe, or what he later called a "United States of Europe," in which nations were preserved but sovereignty was limited, supplemented by regional economic, political, and judicial institutions.

Coudenhove imagined Europe to be only one of five such regional blocs, which would also include a Pan-America, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and an East Asia built on a foundation of Sino-Japanese cooperation. Together they would form a federated world free of war.

A tale of two federalists

Another unique utopian of the same generation was the Indian aristocrat Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh (1886-1979), an independence activist and philosopher who came to embrace world federalism after World War I. He traveled widely, meeting with other great visionaries of this time, such as Sun Yat-sen and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. He corresponded with many more, including Mahatma Gandhi and the reigning Dalai Lama.

While Coudenhove believed world peace required everyone to embrace a "spirit of fraternity," Pratap believed the same required adopting a "religion of love." He also dreamed of a Japan joined together with China, establishing its capital not in Tokyo but the more centrally located Qingdao.

Always seeking to tear India away from the British empire, Pratap would make several trips to Japan, where he found much sympathy for his cause. Following the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War, he made common cause with Pan-Asianists who advocated overthrowing Western imperialism and received the support of its leading theorists, including Okawa Shumei, who was among those indicted for Class-A war crimes after the war.

Coudenhove and Pratap developed their ideas across several decades, with nationalist, regionalist or global elements coming to the fore at different points. However, in 1936 Pratap seems to have clearly grasped, if only for a brief moment, one of the great risks of allowing the world to pass into a 'continental period.'

"One who loves Asia, he can love Japan, China, India and the other countries of this continent alike. And one who loves Asia, he cannot love Europe or America. He will sow seeds of bigger struggles of the continents," he said.

Here he simply recognizes the fact that the stronger certain identifications and loyalties become, the more they contain the potential for exclusion.

We see this already in the experience of the European Union. While that federation is still weak and fractured, it is slowly becoming more common to speak of a "European foreign policy" of a European deployment of military forces, and of "European values." Within Europe, ethnic and racial antagonisms grow with the fear of a loss of cultural and ethnic uniformity.

The important question of whether or not to allow Turkey to join the EU, and how it will address the issue of immigration, will determine exactly how "open" regionalism can truly become.

Ultimately, the choices of our two federalists led them to different fates. Coudenhove fled the Nazi occupations of Europe for England and later the United States while Pratap supported Japan's war efforts. They were both nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1932. But while Coudenhove would continue to receive nominations for the prize almost every year through 1951, at the close of World War II Pratap would spend time in Tokyo's infamous Sugamo prison as a suspected war criminal before finally returning to India in 1946.

People, not nations

At the symposium in March, Prime Minister Hatoyama spoke of an East Asian Community built upon flexibility, transparency and openness. "Which country should be included, which country should be excluded? This kind of exclusive way of thinking should be abandoned," he said.

Unfortunately, if the idea of an East Asian Community ever takes an institutional form, these assurances hide what will become real and difficult choices that will ultimately result in alienation, as well as exclusion.

If the goal is to solve economic and environmental problems, we should recognize that these are global problems without regional solutions.

If the goal is to restrain nationalism and ease tensions within East Asia, we must guard against a future scaling of these problems up to the regional level. Before East Asian regionalism truly takes hold, we ought to seriously consider its limits and long-term risks.

The stronger any given community becomes, two changes naturally take place: the contrast between those within a community and those outside it becomes sharper, while simultaneously within it marginal groups or outsiders come under new pressures. This happens everywhere and all the time, and we need not pass judgment upon this process.

However, supporters of regional federations of states desire to artificially create a territorial or culturally defined community that scales up beyond the "narrow" national level at just the moment in human history when digital communication and mass travel have given us many more ways to interact with each other.

We now have genuine opportunities for the formation of organic communities that may not reach the scale of a national community but are likewise not bounded by its traditional territorial or cultural boundaries.

By all means we should encourage governments to create the international institutions needed to solve specific problems, but let us leave "community" formation to the people, not the states.

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The author is a Ph.D. candidate at the History Department of Harvard University, writing his dissertation on political retribution against accused collaborators with Japan in China and Korea from 1937 to 1951.