Pax Consortis in an Age of Interdependence:
The Challenge for Japan

The problems can only be dealt with adequately through a mechanism of management based on shared responsibility among the major players in the system that have the will and the capacity to play such a role.

With regard to this order based on what might be called pax consortis, however, it must be said that this might look like an ideal order on paper, but in practice it will be the most difficult order to maintain.

First, pax consortis means an order whose viability depends upon positive cooperation through sharing the burden of maintaining the order among the major players in the system. To put it in another way, the order cannot be sustained as an effective order, unless there is political will to maintain it on the part of each one of the major players.

Second, by contrast, it is an order in which paradoxically it is quite easy to be a free rider at the cost of other members of the system. This is so because there are such a number of players who jointly share the burden for sustaining the order that each one of the players may be tempted to make its own share of contribution as small as possible. In addition, the situation can be aggravated when the system consists of a number of members whose power relationship is not quite in equilibrium, since in such a case the temptation is greater for each member to try to minimize its share for responsibility for the management of the order.

Third, the most essential prerequisite for the proper functioning of this order is the identification of common objectives to pursue, based on shared values and common interests, followed by a strong political commitment to work for the achievement of these objectives. This clearly is not easy to come about at the present juncture. When there is a clear and present danger to such shared values which are vital to the order from an external source, it is comparatively easy to forge a strong political commitment, as the experience of East-West confrontation has demonstrated. Under less compelling circumstances, the order has a built-in fragility in this regard.

It will be easy to see from what has been stated that in order to make this order truly viable, it is essential to create a community framework in which we can agree on identifiable, common shared values as the foundation of this order and to make this framework workable for defending and promoting such common values. It is precisely here that trilateralism as a movement has to exert its efforts in order to create such a community framework for pursuing common shared values as the foundation of such an order.

Within such a community based on common shared values, the advanced industrial democracies in the trilateral regions of East Asia, Europe and North America can play a particularly crucial role.

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The demise of the Cold War has affected the situations in each of the trilateral regions in such a way that a satisfactory maintenance and advancement of trilateral relations as a process can be put into question. In the case of Japan, it will hardly be an exaggeration to say that this new development has shaken the societal structure of the postwar Japan to a much larger extent than it has affected the other regions of the trilateral partners....

It is often said that modern Japan has gone through “the opening of the country” twice in the past, one in the middle of the 19th century when Commodore Perry came to the shore of Japan, and the other in the middle of the present century, when Japan had to restart the process of integrating itself into the outside world after the shattering defeat in the Second World War. However, it would seem fair to say that each time the process was incomplete as a social revolution, to the extent that it was always an attempt for a quick-fix to graft new ideologies and new institutions to the old socio-cultural substructure of traditional Japanese society.

Now, the impact of the third wave of “opening of the country” is hitting Japanese society in the form of globalization in political, economic, and social processes. These processes inevitably shake the political, economic, and social culture of Japanese society in its more traditional aspects in a much more radical manner than the country has experienced on the two previous occasions. In this sense, it is fair to say that the country is going through the process of a major societal transformation which will probably take a decade to complete.

What is significant to our purpose for trilateral cooperation, however, is the impact of this process of societal transformation upon the external behavior of Japan in the immediate future. It is disconcerting to note in this context that presumably reflecting the mood of the nation under stress with all these painful developments, a visible shift would seem to be taking place in the nation’s outlook towards the world. What was once a growing trend towards the sense of willingness to search for an appropriate role for Japan in the world, which marked the Japan in the ’80s and the early ’90s, is now being replaced by an overly pessimistic outlook for its own future, which forms a hotbed for an attitude of inward-lookingness, only buttressed by occasional outbursts of nationalistic emotions as a defensive reaction....