[특집] Global화 지향하는 냉전후 일본의 안보정책

New World Order and Japan's Way

The collapse of the Cold War has ended the large ideological cleavage that drove the great international conflicts between the two superpowers have been ended. Since the collapse of Communism there has been some mutual efforts among the major states to build a new world order through The United Nations. The United Nations is the political arm and since the collapse of communism the Security Council has been working more effectively. We shall always need the leadership of the United States which I hope will continue to playa global role. But the United States is certainly less powerful at the end of the 20th century than it was in mid-century During the Cold War. Japan is well endowed with economic and technological strength. but Japan would have to make major changes in its attitudes toward military power. Because in the era of Post-Cold War. it is altering that Japan and its role in the world of making new world order. Japan's foreign and defense policy has been changed after the Cold War. Japan has extended the participation of Peace Keeping Operation since the Cambodia' s UNTAC. Former prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa played down Japan's desire for permanent membership of the UN Security Council. since there was no early prospect of its fruition. And Japan is eager to make multilateral politico security dialogues in the Asia-Pacific Region. Japan has been eager to expand its involvement in regional matters, and the developing of political and economic dialogues have provided reassuring ways to move its efforts forward. This is because in the next century the Pacific Rim will be the principal center of enterprise and economic power in the world. Japan Problem' is one of large geopolitical problems that The United States faces in the 1990s, that is guiding the rising power of Japan into peaceful institutional channels. In the 1980s, Japan gradually increased its military posture, in part as a result of American prodding. Japan possesses the economic and technological capability to develope a significant strategic and conventional force within a decade. Joseph Nye believes that Japan may change its military strategy some day, and it would face external as well as internal constrains. Japanese rearmament will stimulate fears and countermeasures by its Asian neighbours which may limit the gains sought by rearming. Paul Kennedy said that “all acquainted with the pattern of war and change in world politics wiH find it unsurprising if. one day, a different political leadership in Tokyo decided to turn its economic strength into a large degree of military strength. And Nye indicated that Japan has certainly done far better with its strategy as a trading state after 1945 than it did with its military strategy to create a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1930s. Are we entering a “Japanese period in world polities as N ye asked?