Speaking to students at Cambridge in October 1928, the British author Virginia Woolf insisted that “history is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.” Both Antony Best in his introduction to this stimulating collection and Akira Iriye in his concluding remarks make similar points. Both insist that it is time to rethink what they reckon to be the narrowness of earlier works, and call for transnational approaches where conflict between nations is no longer the chief concern of the historian of the Asia-Pacific.
The dozen chapters in what is perhaps a rather ambitiously titled text go some way to supporting the Best-Iriye thesis. They form the final product of the multi-volume Anglo-Japanese History Project that was established in 1995 through generous Japanese funding to re-examine relations between two countries with two highly divergent collective memories. It remains to be seen, however, if such laudable efforts will have much resonance with the wider public. Here, as Ian Nish calmly notes, the impact of cooperative scholarship “takes time. One cannot assume that the message percolates to the people at large in the short term.”
The bulk of the essays have little or nothing to say about post-Pacific War dealings. Those few that do, conclude in all but one instance by 1960 when the British moment in Asia was finally ending and Japan was already a major economic presence once again in Southeast Asia. Yet the concentration on pre-war themes is surely correct. It is hard to make any particularly large claims for Anglo-Japanese relations once the lengthy occupation and the tortuous negotiations that led to the San Francisco peace settlements of 1951–1952 confirmed that Tokyo's fate depended very largely on its relations with Washington. (The fact that very few Japanese students in the early twenty-first century are aware that the British Commonwealth had stationed troops in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions in 1946–1947, or that the head of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was an Australian judge, suggests that the Occupation too is seen as an all-American show.)
Instead of offering the conventional trajectory of a gradual switch from the cordiality of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902 to its collapse and replacement by the Washington system after 1921, followed by outright hostility in December 1941 and years of post-1945 wariness, most of the authors attempt a different approach. It is here that the words “international” and “internationalism” keep cropping up and the novelty of the enterprise is evident.
We get detailed analyses of the gradual shift in personnel within the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, bids by the League of Nations to restrict opium, the lengthy interwar attempts to promote a naval arms holiday and two papers on pan-Asianism. Perhaps Joseph Maiolo's essay entitled “Internationalism in East Asia: The Naval Armaments Limitation System, 1922–39” serves as the best illustration of the collection's theme. He demonstrates with rare clarity the shared strategic thinking of the admirals in all major navies that made possible the initial tonnage ratios of the Washington Treaty of 1922 and also the later challenges that would in time lead to the structure's collapse.
Maiolo's thesis does indeed illustrate that the unprecedented international agreement worked throughout the 1920s, and functioned slightly beyond, thanks to the fact that naval “competition was managed and contained.” Yet he also shows that after the mid-1930s “the explanation of why the naval limitation broke down cannot be found within the workings of the system itself” but must instead be traced to the more general state rivalries. Issues of national prestige and supremacy now overtook the earlier cautious cooperation. In the process, those who had hoped against hope that the sword and gun had had their day were disappointed. Perhaps, though, Maiolo might have said a little more on Japan's domestic background where, as Professor Asada reminds us, the road to Pearl Harbor had its origins in fierce disagreements within the Imperial navy from the very first days of the Washington Treaty onwards.
The research by Harumi Goto-Shibata on the League of Nation's efforts to limit opium in the region also demonstrates the massive difficulties of attempting to create any humanitarian-based international order. The challenges over getting a host of different nation states to first agree and then actively cooperate on a policy that might well damage their particular interests were also evident in the League's parallel failure to stop human and sexual trafficking, despite another plethora of international agreements, this time over anti-slavery codes.
Perhaps the emphasis on what Iriye, in his concluding remark, welcomes as a shift from “a preoccupation with wars, hot and cold, toward a concern with what may be termed non-geopolitical frameworks” runs the risk of airbrushing the state from the picture. It is difficult to imagine that a laudable emphasis on economic globalization can be adequately substantiated without noting the obvious political and security factors that underpin free and active trade in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Japanese leaders, for example, tend to downplay the security roles of the United States, both during the long Cold War era and the as yet untitled post-1989 years, in their understandable wish to emphasize domestic factors behind their nation's rapid reconstruction and later economic advances. A criticism, though, that most certainly cannot be made of the authors in this collection, where Shigeru Akita and Nicholas White look afresh at the complementarity of Anglo-Japanese financial and trading links in Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s against the backcloth of US-driven “military Keynesianism” at the height of the Cold War. Equally, it would be difficult for most social, developmental and medical NGOs working across borders to function without considerable state assistance, not only with regard to funding and personnel but also over contingency planning for emergency situations.
The contemporary state undoubtedly can be seen as a wounded beast, but those who would wish to write its obituary do so at their peril. Nothing, at least to date, looks like having the ability or resources to replace the thing. We may not win any ideal or even adequate regional or wider order from a combination of nation states in some rough, temporary accord, but the alternatives appear to be even less comforting. Approximate order under a hierarchy of nation states remains preferable to either anarchy or empire.
