As Japan and the UK face serious challenges at home and in their respective regions, this report makes the case that a stronger relationship could advance each country’s ability to address shared global concerns.
A Japanese translation of the report is also available as a PDF via this link.
The UK and Japan have much in common that ultimately derives from their similar geographic situation as groups of islands at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass. Both have an ambivalent relationship with their respective regions, Europe and East Asia. While geographically and culturally close to the continent, they pride themselves on their self-defined uniqueness and originality, and have remained separated from it. Even when they have engaged in regional affairs, they have tended to do so in a half-hearted way, and have often shown some degree of mistrust and even animosity towards the main continental power of the time.
Since the end of the Second World War, both Japan and the UK have attempted to become integrated into regional structures, though often in a limited way. The UK became an active – though semi-detached member – of the EU. Yet its referendum decision in 2016 to leave the bloc after 43 years both reflected and further contributed to divisions at home about the UK’s identity and role in the region and the world. Similarly, Japan was active in a number of initiatives such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Chiang Mai Initiative and the East Asian summit, but its attempts to create a tighter East Asian community failed disastrously. Meanwhile, both powers have prioritized a close relationship with the US, and are its closest allies in their respective regions.
Despite their ambivalence about their respective regions, the UK and Japan cannot change the realities of geography. Intraregional transactions have deepened significantly in the post-war period, and both powers have also helped to shape the regional structures into which they are integrated. The UK drove the EU’s single market project, and – whatever arrangement is eventually reached after Brexit – it will remain closely linked to the European economy and deeply committed to European security. Japan has also helped its region – particularly through development aid and other financial instruments. Although political integration has not gone as far in Asia as it has in Europe, Japan nevertheless benefits enormously from economic interdependence with its neighbours.
It is therefore impossible for either country to isolate itself completely from its region. As regional power shifts towards China’s increasing dominance in Asia and, to a lesser extent, Germany’s in Europe, the future of both the UK and Japan will be determined to a large extent by these developments – whether they like it or not. For these reasons, it is useful to compare their relations with the respective regional structures in Europe and East Asia. This chapter examines each relationship in turn, and concludes by exploring the implications for UK–Japanese relations.
The UK’s traditional geopolitical role in Europe was as offshore balancer. As a sea power, it sought to remain aloof from the European continent while maintaining a balance of power on it. In particular, it sought to stay out of continental European conflicts in order to pursue trade – and later an empire – beyond Europe. To borrow from Henry Kissinger, the UK was ‘the one European country whose raison d’état did not require it to expand in Europe’.122 However, it periodically intervened in Europe in order to prevent the emergence of a dominant continental power that could threaten its own security. As Churchill declared: ‘For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power.’123
Each time the balance of power had been restored and the UK was safe, it tended to revert to ‘splendid isolation’ in relation to Europe in order to concentrate once again on its global empire. As noted by the American strategist Nicholas Spykman, a believer in the significant impact of geography on international politics, its focus was the problems of the Congo rather than problems on the Vistula.124 The danger, however, was that when London thought it was in a commanding position in relation to its continental counterparts and focused on the world, it often took its eye off the European ball.125 As equilibrium in Europe eventually gave way to the domination of another continental power, the UK would once again be forced to intervene. Thus Spykman wrote in 1942, ‘British policy towards the European Continent seems to move in a long series of cycles in which with monotonous repetition occur the stages of isolation, alliance, and war; shift of powers, isolation, alliance, and war; and so on ad infinitum.’126 He thought that the UK would always choose isolation from Europe if it could: ‘If Great Britain had her wish, she would never leave the stage of isolation, that happy situation that gives her freedom from worry about the eternal quarrels of the continental states, freedom to attend to her imperial affairs.’127 However, he wrote, although the UK sought to avoid alliances for as long as possible, the ‘enchanting illusion’ of ‘splendid isolation’ would always eventually be shattered. Ultimately, the UK was geographically part of Europe – ‘how much, she is now learning reluctantly under constant air-bombardment’.128
Even as the UK lost its empire after the Second World War, it continued to aspire to a global role. But following the Suez crisis in 1956, British foreign policy focused above all on the ‘special relationship’, and, in the context of the Cold War, collective security through NATO. This also changed the UK’s attitude to Europe. It initially distanced itself from the first steps towards European integration in the 1950s. But by the early 1970s, as trade with the Commonwealth declined and trade with Europe increased, the UK’s national interest had changed. In 1973 it joined what was then the European Economic Community (EEC) – a decision endorsed by two-thirds of voters in a referendum held two years later.
All the same, the UK remained ambivalent about its membership of what eventually became the EU. While it played a leading role in the single market project in the 1980s, as the bloc continued to deepen as well as widen in the 1990s, after German reunification, increasingly its attitude towards the EU as a whole was semi-detached. In particular, the UK’s response to the creation of the single currency, a new phase in European integration, was essentially to negotiate ‘opt-outs’ – for example, from Economic and Monetary Union. This approach frustrated its EU partners, who saw the UK as pursuing the kind of narrowly defined national interest that the European project was meant to overcome (although Denmark and others also emulated the UK approach to some degree). But the approach allowed the UK to remain within the EU even as popular Euroscepticism increased from the 1990s onwards.
Three years after voters in the UK opted to leave the EU, there remains great uncertainty about its relationship with the bloc – not least because it is also not clear how the EU itself will develop without the UK as a member. Since the euro crisis began at the end of 2009, multiple fault lines have opened up between member states that raise fundamental questions about the viability of the entire European project. The crisis created a new division between creditor and debtor countries in Europe, and raised a series of complex economic and institutional questions that, almost a decade on, have still not been resolved. Moreover, the refugee crisis that began in 2015 further increased tensions between member states.
Since the euro crisis began at the end of 2009, multiple fault lines have opened up between member states that raise fundamental questions about the viability of the entire European project
Since the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, fundamental questions have also arisen about European security. Historically, European integration took place in the context of the US security guarantee, which Trump has questioned in an unprecedented way.129 The logical response to this radical uncertainty – particularly given the threat from a resurgent and revisionist Russia – would be for the EU to develop greater ‘strategic autonomy’. German Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed to suggest that she would lead Europeans in doing exactly this when she declared in May 2017 that Europeans must now take their destiny into ‘our own hands’.130 But, quite apart from the difficult institutional and technical questions involved, Europeans (and in particular Germans) remain reluctant to make the kind of dramatic increase in defence spending that would be necessary to become genuinely independent of the US in security terms.
While there are objective pressures on the EU27 to integrate further – particularly on economic, refugee and security policy – it is by no means clear that they will do so. Many in Europe now believe the solution is the kind of ‘flexible’ or ‘differentiated’ integration that would allow each member state to integrate only in the specific policy areas for which there is public support – in other words, something like a generalized version of the approach to European integration taken by the UK from the 1990s. The problem is that this kind of integration is likely to make it even more difficult to reach the kind of grand bargain that is needed in the EU’s ‘core’ – that is, the group of member states that are part of both the euro and Schengen areas. In particular, it would allow Germany to resist the further debt mutualization that many believe is necessary to make the euro sustainable.131
In this context, it is difficult to know what the future relationship between the EU and the UK might look like. There are important shared interests – particularly in European security – that could help drive continuity. While collective defence will continue to be organized through NATO, it is possible that the EU and the UK can cooperate on foreign policy in a kind of ‘EU27+1’ format. For example, the UK could coordinate sanctions against Russia with the EU (and the US), much as Japan and other countries have done. But a lot will depend on the outcome of the negotiations on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and on an eventual trade deal. If these become more acrimonious, it is likely to undermine the goodwill that will be needed to ensure that cooperation in other areas such as security will work.
It is also unclear what the UK’s withdrawal from the EU will mean for its relations with other powers, including with Japan. On the one hand, the UK will be preoccupied with Brexit for years – perhaps even decades – and could therefore become more inward-looking, which may limit the possibilities for deepening relations with Japan in any meaningful way.132 On the other hand, it will want to reach out to other powers around the world as part of the vision of ‘Global Britain’ – in the interests of deepening trade ties in order to compensate for the likely new barriers to trade with Europe, as well as demonstrating that the UK is a ‘fully engaged global power’, as Prime Minister Theresa May put it in 2017.133 This could create opportunities for cooperation, particularly around the maintenance of the liberal international order that both Japan and the UK see as crucial to their prosperity and security.
Japan was long a recipient of civilization from the Asian mainland, notably from China and Korea, and slowly nurtured its own national culture out of this interaction with the continent. It sometimes consciously promoted itself as distinct from, or even superior to, the continental civilization. However, apart from sporadic episodes such as Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s failed attempt to conquer the Ming dynasty in the 16th century, or Yamada Nagamasa’s brief political ascendancy in Siam in the 17th century, Japan largely confined its political ambitions to the main and surrounding islands.
Rather exceptionally, in the 1930s and 1940s Japan made an explicit bid for regional dominance and thereby sought to rewrite Western-centric history. In fact, imperialist expansion by Japan had started in the early Meiji period in the 1870s, and the annexation of Korea and the series of invasions of China in the early 20th century can be seen as the culmination of that activity. Yet what particularly distinguished the 1930s and 1940s was Japan’s undisguised ambition to rule the region. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere remains a reminder of Asia’s bad experience with regionalism. Since then, Japan has remained reticent about promoting its own version of regionalism. When it has done so, it has let other actors – such as Australia or, at the multilateral level, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – take the lead.
In the post-war period, regional integration in East Asia evolved quite differently from that in Europe. As a result, Japan has not had a robust regional bloc with which to engage, even in the semi-detached way that Britain did with its European partners. Instead, there was a ‘hub-and-spoke’ structure of regional security architecture that centred on the US. This meant that the single priority for Japan was its bilateral relationship with the US, on which it continues to depend for its external security. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution (the so-called ‘peace clause’ that renounced war and the use of military force) and the 1960 Japan–US Security Treaty made the alliance with the US the cornerstone of Japan’s international political life over the past seven decades.
While intraregional economic interdependence in East Asia started to deepen during the Cold War, it was never translated into an institutional structure comparable to the EU. It should come as no surprise that regional actors such as South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines are all keen to protect their independence and much-valued bilateral relations with the US, preferring not to build any multilateral framework reminiscent of the pre-war Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. What has emerged instead is a complex set of competing regional structures.134
For its part, the US also obstructed Japan’s efforts to form regional structures in Asia. When Japan co-founded the ADB in the 1970s, the US provided only lukewarm support and rejected a Japanese proposal to host the bank’s headquarters in Tokyo. In the 1980s, Japan and Australia initiated the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, a forerunner of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which itself was also viewed with scepticism by the US when launched in 1989.135 During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Japan’s efforts to establish an Asian Monetary Fund were firmly opposed by the US. This led to the Chiang Mai regional currency swap arrangement – a much softer initiative.
Japan is now faced with a set of interrelated uncertainties that are relevant to its current regional thinking. The most important is the rise of China, which is today taking the initiative in the region. Its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is widely seen as a success – everybody except Japan and the US rushed to join. An increasingly assertive China has also started to express its desire to shape the region through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The once hegemonic US is struggling to find a way to respond to such initiatives. Meanwhile ASEAN, seen previously as the central arena for any regional formation in East Asia, has been used by China to ‘divide and rule’ the region.
At the same time, the pressing issue of the North Korean nuclear programme leaves Japan with little option but to continue to rely militarily on the US. Yet any cohesion that might have been created by US-led economic sanctions against North Korea has not proved strong enough to create a meaningful regional bloc. The acute crisis has also frozen South Korea’s conception of an Asia-Pacific region along the lines imagined by its former president Kim Dae-jung, who tried to create a favourable regional environment within which Korean unification might become possible.136
All this means there is little appetite or capacity for most Asian countries to promote some sort of regionalism – except perhaps an increasingly powerful and financially resourceful China. The AIIB is a case in point – an organization in which only one country, China, has veto power. The BRI is much more vague and is wider in terms of its implications than the AIIB. While China sells it as its contribution to an open and mutually beneficial form of globalization, many outside China suspect it to be a strategic tool designed to project influence and create dependence (as well as to digest China’s excess capacity in industries such as cement and steel).
Japan has now begun to set out its own regional plans and ambitions. After the US withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) following the election of Donald Trump as president, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed ahead with negotiations with the other 11 members of the agreement. In early 2018 they signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), also known as ‘TPP11’. In April 2018, Japan concluded an economic partnership agreement with ASEAN. Under Abe, it has gone beyond regional groupings, for example by signing an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) and Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with the EU in July 2018. Japan has also induced the US to refocus on a strategy for the Indo-Pacific region that emphasizes the importance of the rule of law and freedom of navigation.
However, instead of a firmly institutionalized form of regionalism in Asia or the Asia-Pacific region, there remains a set of competing visions. The fundamental obstacle to creating such an institutionalized form of regionalism in East Asia analogous to what exists in Europe lies in the rivalries between the regional visions and political ideologies of the two principal actors: China and Japan.
Strictly speaking, China is not in search of a region at all. Its initiatives are primarily based on geopolitical calculations and aim to create a favourable environment for the pursuit of Chinese power and interests. For example, the BRI is not so much a concept of regionalism as a form of global connectivity that includes a land-based element (the so-called Silk Road Economic Belt) and a sea-based element (the so-called Maritime Silk Road Initiative).137 Through these elements, China aspires to expand its influence throughout the Eurasian landmass as a base from which to project power.138
As a sea power and island nation, like the UK, Japan tends – or wishes – to see the space that surrounds it as open and free. It too looks for a milieu, rather than a region, in which it can live comfortably. In the mid-2000s the then foreign minister, Taro Aso, talked about an ‘Arc of Freedom and Prosperity’ that included the vast areas from Japan’s sea lanes in East Asia and the Indian Ocean through the Middle East to Eastern Europe. Then, in 2012, Prime Minister Abe identified a ‘democratic security diamond’, made up of Australia, India, Japan and the US, as the cornerstone for Japan’s diplomacy.139 More recently, there has been much discussion of Indo-Pacific strategies, which set out a geopolitical focus but not quite a vision of regionalism.
Nevertheless, Japan and China share some, particularly commercial, interests. As the Trump administration takes an increasingly mercantilist approach to trade, the two countries are looking for ways in which to cooperate. But they have very different world views. Although it has several defects and has in some ways regressed over recent years,140 Japan’s liberal democracy remains stable, generally respecting basic human rights and in particular freedom of expression. China, by contrast, is far from liberal or democratic: the Communist Party is the sole body that establishes the rules, interprets them, and bends them if necessary. After a brief period of loosening under Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping has brought power back to the centre and the state has become increasingly repressive.141 A number of lawyers, journalists and activists have been detained for no justifiable reason;142 in Hong Kong booksellers have been kidnapped;143 and in Xinjiang there are reportedly massive ‘re-education’ camps for Uighur Muslims.144 Moreover, many ‘average’ citizens in China are reported as being cynical about the human rights activism and democratic movements.145
In an interdependent world, the implications of such practices by a country as large and powerful as China are huge. Even in a distant region like Europe, for instance, the publishers of some prestigious academic journals have, at the request of the Chinese authorities, started to withdraw thousands of articles that deal with such sensitive themes as Tiananmen Square and Tibet.146
For most Japanese policymakers, therefore, the principal task is not to pursue a vision of regionalism. Rather, beyond the immediate challenge of how to reduce – or at least contain – the threats posed by a nuclearized North Korea, their minds are more or less fixed on how to prevent a region – or even a world – that is dominated by China.
Thus, although the UK and Japan are strikingly similar in terms of geography, regionalism has developed quite differently for each. Now, for the former, there is deep uncertainty about the future relationship with Europe; for the latter, the dominant relationship is one of competition with China over geopolitical groupings in Asia. So what are the implications of these differences for their bilateral relations? There has long been discussion about the potential for a kind of ‘special relationship’ that would complement the relationship that each has with the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe described Japan and the UK as ‘a priori partners’.147 But what does this mean in practice?
There has been a significant deepening of security cooperation between Japan and the UK in recent years. A series of bilateral agreements have been signed, beginning with a memorandum on defence cooperation in 2012 and agreements on defence equipment cooperation and security of information in 2013. Since 2015 the two countries’ foreign and defence ministers have convened for ‘two plus two’ meetings. A Defence Logistics Treaty, or Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA), was signed in 2017, intended to facilitate cooperation between the two countries’ armed forces in activities including UN peacekeeping operations and joint humanitarian aid and disaster relief missions.148 With the exception of each country’s traditional alliance partnerships with the US, for the UK, Japan is its closest security partner in Asia, while the UK is Japan’s closest security partner in Europe. The question remains, however, whether the bilateral relationship can go beyond such security cooperation – and indeed whether developments in other policy areas have the potential to undermine this cooperation.
With the exception of each country’s traditional alliance partnerships with the US, for the UK, Japan is its closest security partner in Asia, while the UK is Japan’s closest security partner in Europe
One particularly important variable for the future of the bilateral relationship is UK policy towards China. As, under former Prime Minister David Cameron, the UK sought to attract investment from China and to make the City of London a centre for renminbi trading, ministers spoke of a ‘golden era’ in relations between the two countries. On a visit to China in September 2015, the then chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, said he wanted the UK to be China’s ‘best partner in the West’. This somewhat sycophantic approach to China caused concern in Tokyo and Washington. Notably, after the UK announced it would join the AIIB in March 2015, an official in the Obama administration criticized the UK’s ‘constant accommodation’ of China,149 and some spoke in private of a ‘betrayal’ – though many influential figures in the US also thought that the UK had taken the right decision.
Under Theresa May, there were initially tentative signs of a recalibration of UK policy towards China away from the so-called ‘Osborne doctrine’ to what one British China expert called ‘a more sober phase in relations between Beijing and London’.150 In particular, May announced a review of Osborne’s decision to allow the state-owned China General Nuclear Power Company to invest in the Hinkley Point nuclear plant. Although, the investment ultimately went ahead, the UK – like other European countries – has taken steps to tighten rules on Chinese investment.151 Notwithstanding these moves, the recent debate over the potential security risks associated with Huawei’s possible role in the creation of Britain’s 5G communications network suggests that government, political and public opinion remain divided over the merits of a closer relationship between the UK and China.152
UK officials insist that the country is taking a tough approach on China. The then foreign secretary Boris Johnson said in December 2016 that the UK’s approach to the region ‘must go beyond the quest for exports and commercial contracts’.153 In August 2018 a Royal Navy vessel, HMS Albion, conducted a freedom of navigation operation close to the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. Admiral Sir Philip Jones, the head of the Royal Navy, subsequently stated that the UK had an obligation to demonstrate support for its allies in the Asia-Pacific region, and to resist Chinese violations of international law.154
However, the concern in Tokyo, as well as in Washington, is that the UK’s increasing economic dependence on China, especially in a post-Brexit context, could undermine such values and also have potentially troubling security implications. If the UK wants to develop a close relationship with Japan, it will need to cooperate with it to challenge Chinese violations of the international rule of law. (For its part, Japan needs to maintain economic sanctions on Russia, notwithstanding Prime Minister Abe’s desire to finally resolve the issue of the Northern Territories and to peel Russia away from China.)
In August 2017, during an official visit by Theresa May to Japan, the two prime ministers took a further step in deepening security cooperation, signing a joint declaration that emphasized their countries’ shared interests and values, and set out priorities such as North Korea, maritime security, capacity-building and cybersecurity.155 While the declaration did not make explicit reference to China, it emphasized the importance of the rules-based international order and of free and open access to oceans. At the same time, the two prime ministers signed a joint declaration on prosperity cooperation that stated: ‘As the UK exits the EU, we will work quickly to establish a new economic partnership between Japan and the UK based on the final terms of the EPA.’156 (Negotiations on the EPA, which were ongoing between Japan and the EU at the time of May’s visit, were concluded in December 2017, and the agreement entered effect in February 2019.157)
The two declarations illustrate UK and Japanese priorities and sensitivities. The UK is of course keen to avoid disruption to trade and investment with Japan after Brexit, particularly in the context of the EU–Japan EPA. Recently, the UK government has also expressed a desire to be part of CPTPP.158 Meanwhile, ever mindful of a rising China, Japan seems to have succeeded in securing an enhanced British military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, which Abe has long said he wanted – and which is also aligned with the notion of a ‘Global Britain’.159 For both sides, the cost of doing nothing is high: the UK does not want Japanese banks and manufacturers to relocate to the European mainland, and Japan wants to prevent the UK from forging a closer relationship with China, as it seemed to be doing particularly under the Cameron government.
However, this sort of security cooperation is unlikely to change China’s behaviour significantly – and there is little more that Japan and the UK could do to prevent a Chinese military build-up in the South China Sea. Likewise, given the May government’s precarious position, its commercial policy may not be stable; Japan may have to wait and see what the UK truly wants. Moreover, conspicuous by its absence in the joint declarations between Japan and the UK is a joint strategy to combat authoritarian influence on universal values, whether that emanates from Beijing or from Moscow (or elsewhere). Both Japan and the UK express a strong rhetorical commitment to the shared values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. But their words are not yet sufficiently backed up by concrete actions – except perhaps in the area of cybersecurity. Apart from passing references to climate change and sexual exploitation, there seems to be no aspiration on either side to take action to even maintain, let alone enhance, safety, labour and environmental standards.
This absence points to the limits of the interests that are shared by Japan and the UK. This is in part a function of the different ways in which regionalism has evolved in Europe and East Asia, and the different approaches that the two countries take to their respective regions. But it is also a function of the evolution of the relationship between Japan and the EU, now embodied in the EPA, and of the potentially disruptive way in which the UK is developing relations with other powers in East Asia, and in particular with China. In other words, the way that both countries are forging relations within the other’s region could to some extent hinder the further consolidation of the bilateral relationship between the UK and Japan.
The situation is, however, somewhat asymmetrical. The EU does not represent a real threat to the UK – at least not in security terms – in the way that China is for Japan. Consequently, for the UK, Japan’s relationship with the EU is not as problematic as the UK’s relationship with China is for Japan. In fact, the UK could benefit from the Japan–EU EPA, and may even seek to replicate it in the interests of maintaining Japanese investment in the UK after Brexit. There is an imbalance, too, in the area of commercial cooperation: because China is not a direct military threat to the UK, the latter will resist pressure to choose between China and Japan and will want to work with both. Moreover, there are also limits to the contribution that the UK can realistically make to Asian security. Any future efforts towards deepening UK cooperation with Japan will have to be made with some awareness of these constraints.
