With the nearing of the fifth anniversary of the January 25 Revolution, this panel examines the nature of politics under the rule of the current military sponsored regime in Egypt. What implications will the recent legislative elections have for political stability and the cohesion of the ruling coalition? How is the regime responding to the various economic challenges it currently confronts? In what ways has the persistence of state repression affected and shaped the space for political contestation and resistance?
Panelists
Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History,
Stanford University
Lisa Blaydes Associate Professor of Political Science,
Stanford University
Amr Hamzawy ARD Visiting Scholar,
CDDRL, Stanford University
Nancy Okail Executive Director,
The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
(via Skype)
Hesham Sallam Associate Director, ARD
CDDRL, Stanford University
Moderator:
Larry Diamond Senior Fellow, FSI;
Senior Fellow Hoover Institute,
Stanford University
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, 1994, 2004-05, and 2006-08 and in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa; co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
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Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project. Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.
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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Liberation Technology, Arab Reform and Democracy, and Democracy in Taiwan. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia. He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.
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Amr Hamzawy is a visiting scholar at the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. After finishing his doctoral studies and after five years of teaching in Cairo and Berlin, Hamzawy joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington, DC) between 2005 and 2009 as a senior associate for Middle East Politics. Between 2009 and 2010, he served as the research director of the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2011, he joined the Department of Public Policy and Administration at the American University in Cairo, where he continues to serve today. Hamzawy also serves as an associate professor of political science at the Department of Political Science, Cairo University. His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. Dr. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the 25th of Jan 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a daily column and a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper Shorouk.
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Nancy Okail is the Executive Director of TIMEP. She brings more than 15 years of experience promoting democracy and development in the Middle East and North Africa region to this role. Prior to joining TIMEP, Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and has managed programs for Egyptian pro-democracy organizations that challenged the Mubarak regime. She was also one of the defendants convicted and sentenced to prison in the widely publicized case of 43 non-governmental organization workers charged with using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the U.K. where her dissertation examined the power relations of foreign aid.
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Hesham Sallam is a Research Associate at CDDRL and serves as the Associate-Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).
Abstract: The 1995 launch of a sounding rocket from Andoya in Norway allegedly misinterpreted as an attack in Russia and the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 1962 have one thing in common: they have both been referred to as "the closest we came to nuclear war." The 1962 crisis has mostly been studied from an American perspective due to the availability of documentary evidence and of the Kennedy tapes, until the 1990s when Cuba and the Soviet Union were given a voice, with the rest of the world still largely absent from the understanding of the event. The 1995 close call has been controversial and is remembered in conflicting ways: an alarmist and an untroubled one.
In this presentation, I will offer new findings on those two cases, based on previously untapped primary sources on the experience of and threat perception during the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 13 countries worldwide and on an oral history workshop I organized in London for the 20th anniversary of the 1995 "Black Brant event", which gathered for the first time Norwegian, American and Russian participants in the event. By focusing on those two events as exemplary cases of near use of nuclear weapons, I will outline a research program on such cases and its implication for social sciences and for the teaching of post-1945 world history to the next generations.
About the Speaker: Benoît Pelopidas is a CISAC affiliate and lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2011-2012 academic year.
He received his Ph. D. in political science from Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Geneva in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in 2010-2011. Since 2005, he has been teaching international relations at Sciences Po (Paris), the University of Geneva and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Graduate School of International Policy and Management).
In 2010, he won the "outstanding student essay prize" from the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Competition and in 2011, he was awarded the "Best Graduate Paper 2010" from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Also in 2011, he won the SNIS Award 2010 for the Best Thesis in International Studies from the Swiss Network for International Studies. A book based on his dissertation is forthcoming in French by Sciences Po University Press.
He published When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia (with Didier Chaudet and Florent Parmentier; Ashgate, 2009) as well as articles in The Nonproliferation Review, the European Journal of Social Sciences, the Swiss Political Science Review, and the French Yearbook of International Relations. His research focuses on epistemic communities in international security, renunciation of nuclear weapons as a historical possibility, the uses of nuclear history and memory and French nuclear policies.
Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Join us Wednesday to celebrate International Education Week! We’ll be conducting our first open webinar at the 2015 Global Education Conference (#globaled15). Drop in to receive some free classroom resources and chat about historical memory, media literacy, perspective/bias, and the legacies of WWII in East Asia.
What: “Divided Memories: Comparing History Textbooks in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States” webinar (Full description: http://tiny.cc/r1bv5x) When: Wed, Nov 18 @ 4:00pm PST / 7:00pm EST Where: Online at tiny.cc/SPICEatGEC15 (Choose your time zone to view full conference schedule.)
During and after the webinar, use hashtag #DividedMemories to live-tweet with us and our friends at Shorenstein APARC.
616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall, C332
Stanford, CA 94305-6060
(650) 725-1486
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rybo@stanford.edu
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Rylan Sekiguchi is Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Design at the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). Prior to joining SPICE in 2005, he worked as a teacher at Revolution Prep in San Francisco.
Rylan’s professional interests lie in curriculum design, global education, education technology, student motivation and learning, and mindset science. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.
In 2010, 2015, and 2021, Rylan received the Franklin Buchanan Prize, which is awarded annually by the Association for Asian Studies to honor an outstanding curriculum publication on Asia at any educational level, elementary through university.
Rylan has presented teacher seminars across the country at venues such as the World Affairs Council, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and for organizations such as the National Council for the Social Studies, the International Baccalaureate Organization, the African Studies Association, and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. He has also conducted presentations internationally for the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines; for the European Council of International Schools in Spain, France, and Portugal; and at Yonsei University in South Korea.
The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Egyptian academic and Former Member of Parliament Amr Hamzawy as a visiting scholar for the 2015-16 academic year. Hamzawy, who teaches political science at Cairo University and the American University in Cairo, brings to the program a deep knowledge of Middle East politics and specific expertise on democratization and reform processes in the region. A former Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Hamzawy’s research focuses on questions of political change, human rights, and the rule of law in Egypt. He is a daily columnist for Al-Sherouk, an independent Egyptian newspaper, and writes regularly on the role of civil society actors and parties in Egypt’s often restricted political arena. Hamzawy is a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights, and was elected to serve in Egypt’s first parliament after the outset of the January 25 Revolution before it was dissolved in the summer of 2012.
Hamzawy will spend his residency at CDDRL working on a research project on the liberal elite and reemergence of autocracy in Egypt. His residency is generously funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to support scholars from the Arab world. In the interview below, Hamzawy describes his current project and research plans. Hamzawy will be sharing his research findings with the CDDRL community in a seminar on October 27.
What are your research goals and priorities?
While at CDDRL, my research objective is to analyze contemporary liberal discourses on democracy and human rights in Egypt. The fact that the majority of Egyptian liberals called on the military establishment - prior to the July 3, 2013 coup which deposed the elected president Mohamed Morsi - to interfere in politics and terminate the emerging pluralist dynamics warrants an in-depth examination. Equally puzzling, is the readiness of Egyptian liberals to allow the former minister of defense and current president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s rise to power, to accept a subordinate role in an increasingly restricted public space, and to tolerate without any noticeable resistance the emergence of a new autocracy in Egypt.
What has your research uncovered?
The research journey has been going in some fascinating directions and yielding some interesting answers. For instance, one set of factors pertains to the formation of the modern Egyptian state and the long-standing dependency of liberal elites on successive autocratic rulers and governments. Another revolves around historical legacies of mistrust and fear towards religious-based social movements and political actors. These legacies have contributed to the tendency of liberals to side with autocrats against popular opposition currents. Finally, the predominance of rent-seeking tendencies inside the state bureaucracy and among economic elites has limited the integration of liberals into Egypt’s social fabric. While there are fascinating historical analogies between the current moment and previous experiences in Egypt from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, my research will remains focused on the contemporary era.
How is your experience in Egyptian politics informing your current projects?
Throughout the last four years, and while putting on different institutional hats and operating in very different contexts, I have collected first-hand insights on liberal narratives on the formation of the Egyptian state and state-society relations. These experiences also deepened my understanding of liberals’ discourses on their historical encounters with religious forces, their social and political preferences, and their views on the wider public—which some key liberal figures have been willing to disenfranchise to avoid Islamist victories in the polls. These insights, as well as my own experiences as an elected member of the Egyptian People’s Assembly of 2012, the first legislature that was elected freely and without government manipulation, will inform the research.
What are the most important factors that undermined the movement that supported the January 25, 2011 Revolution in Egypt?
That is a tough question. It is easy to state that neither the military establishment nor the vastly entrenched security apparatus wanted the January 25, 2011 Revolution. They feared that it could lead to a democratic transition in which their roles, benefits, and privileges would have been limited or at least subjected to greater scrutiny. Also, there is no doubt that the rent-seeking economic elites and various forces of the Mubarak regime were heavily invested in blocking an orderly transition to democracy. These are facts that have been well documented and researched.
However, no less significant is the recurrent retreat of liberal elites from pluralist processes and procedures. It appears as if Egyptian liberals have never been ready to support a democratic opening that could bring Islamists to power. Liberals have also been reluctant to shoulder the burden of standing against the autocratic ways of the military and the security establishment, or to help civil society and human rights groups garner more popular support. To explain the root causes and impacts of Egypt’s illiberal liberals is the task of my current research project.
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Amr Hamzawy. Photo from Bündnis 90/Die Grünen flickr page
The fate of a soldier serving in the Russian army in the First World War largely depended on luck and circumstances. But even though his own means of influencing his fate were limited, there were available certain active choices – such as shirking and desertion – that could turn his life around in both positive and negative ways. For Russian civil and military authorities, of course, desertion was a nuisance that was fought against by all available means. Sometimes, such as with physical punishment, these means only succeeded in lowering the already low morale and increasing the number of deserters.
Dr. Mart Kuldkepp's presentation will focus on a small and somewhat exceptional group of deserters from the Russian army: the soldiers who served in the border guard regiments in Northern Finland and deserted alone or in small groups over the border to neutral Sweden. He will consider their motivation in doing so, and their subsequent fate, as much as it is known. At the same time, he will also look at how Sweden administratively handled this very unforeseen phenomenon and how the deserters were treated by Swedish authorities.
Mart Kuldkepp completed his PhD dissertation at University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2014 and joined University College London in 2015. Dr. Kuldkepp has been active as an academic in the field of Scandinavian Studies since 2007. Dr. Kuldkepp’s primary research focus is on 20th century Scandinavian political history, with a particular interest in contacts between the Scandinavian and the Baltic states, but also has interest in the history of secret services and espionage and Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. His teaching has mostly concerned the history of Scandinavian culture, society, and politics from the earliest times up to today. He has taught subjects related to Old Norse studies and overview courses in humanities.
Organized by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and Stanford University Libraries
Mart Kuldkepp
Lecturer
Speaker
Scandinavian Studies, University College London
This is the second meeting of the workshop series on Civility, Cruelty, Truth. A one-day event hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center, the workshop will explore the genealogies, promises, and limits of civic virtue—at the heart of which is the city, the classical polis, itself— as a universal ideal. European in its moral contours, constituted by a deep fascination with the rule of law, borders, and security, at once coercive and oblique in whom it excludes and includes, how it punishes and protects, the city held out the promise of a humane center for ethical and sovereign life, one upon which anticolonial struggles against European empires too were first conceived and mounted. This workshop will examine the ambiguous foundations and resolutions of that vision in Asia, Europe, and the fatal waters in between; a vision that has come to be marked today by extreme violence and tragic displacements, and which now presses new questions against the very limit of modern political imagination.
Student Assistant: Ahoo Najafian (Department of Religious Studies)
Schedule (coming soon)
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of Religious Studies, The Europe Center, The France- Stanford Center for interdisciplinary Studies, Program in Global Justice, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Global Studies, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Humanities Center, Center for South Asia
Abstract: The nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran moved the International Atomic Energy Agency to the center of public attention. Based on multi-archival research and oral history interviews, this talk will look into the early history of the IAEA’s nuclear inspectorate. The foundations of today’s safeguards system were laid in the mid-1950s, when a group of twelve nations negotiated the Statute of the IAEA. In the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union abandoned its formerly critical stance on nuclear safeguards. Following the entry-into-force of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) comprehensive safeguards were introduced. The control of diversion was at the heart of the IAEA’s early safeguards system, while it neglected other aspects of the proliferation problem, such as the distribution of dual-use technology and related knowledge, or the development of clandestine nuclear programs. It was not lack of knowledge or imagination, but the complex technical, political, and legal background that was the reason for this limitation.
About the Speaker: Elisabeth Roehrlich is a senior researcher and project director at the University of Vienna’s Department of Contemporary History, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. She received her PhD. in History from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and held fellowships at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., and Monash South Africa. Her research focuses on the history of international relations and the evolution of the global nuclear order. She is the author of a prize-winning book about the former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky (Kreisky’s Außenpolitik, Vienna University Press, 2009), and her work on the IAEA has been published or is forthcoming in journals such the IAEA Bulletin and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Roehrlich has been awarded funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and the Austrian Central Bank to support her research on the IAEA.
The International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Safeguards, 1953-1971
Abstract: Many scholars contend that there was a specific German nuclear question. To them, asking the question “Was there a German nuclear question?” may be surprising and odd. In their view, there is no question that Bonn actively sought to transform non-nuclear West Germany into an atomic power and that Bonn had the capability to do it. This view is related to the late 1950s and early 1960s in particular. Most accounts do not address the question whether the postulated objective of Bonn’s nuclear policy remained the same throughout the 1960s. Furthermore, this narrative has led many scholars to believe that the German nuclear question came to an end when West Germany acceded to the NPT by signing the treaty in late 1969 after a change of government which heralded the beginning of Bonn’s ‘New Ostpolitik’. I will present a different narrative. Based on an historical approach and on new archival material, I will reappraise this complicated topic by introducing the analytical concept of West Germany’s limited nuclear revisionism. Thereby, I will postulate that the NPT had no nonproliferation effect regarding West Germany. And I will propose another understanding of the question whether there was a German nuclear question.
About the Speaker: Andreas Lutsch is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. In August 2015 he received his Doctor of Philosophy in history at the University of Mainz, Germany. His dissertation offers a new interpretation of West Germany’s nuclear policy during the 1960s and 1970s - from the controversy about the Non-Proliferation Treaty since the early 1960s until the agreement on NATO’s dual track decision in 1979. The dissertation is based on printed and edited sources and on multi-archival research in Germany, the U.S., the UK and Belgium, thus making use of recently declassified files. Besides completing the book manuscript, Andreas is engaged in a research project on the historical management of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence regarding NATO Europe. Andreas analyzes whether, why and to what extent mechanisms of nuclear consultation were important as tools of extended deterrence management. A previous research fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany, Andreas is an Assistant Professor (on leave in the academic year 2015-16) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He organized three workshops for PhD students and postdocs and is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP).
Was There a German Nuclear Question? A Critical Reappraisal
Marking seventy years since the end of World War II, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed “profound grief” on Friday for his country’s actions. While pointing to short comings in the statement, the Stanford scholars said the prime minister’s words represented a genuine effort to reflect on the past and provided opportunities to improve relations in the region.
The highly anticipated statement, issued on behalf of the Japanese cabinet, was closely followed by its East Asian neighbors who have raised concerns over Japan’s views of the wartime era.
Leaders of South Korea and China have said Japan has not apologized fully for crimes committed during WWII and each dispute historical narratives seen in the others’ textbooks, popular culture and other domains.
Advancing historical reconciliation in East Asia is a key research area of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. The center leads a research project, Divided Memories and Reconciliation, which has produced numerous articles and books, including a ground breaking comparative study of high school history textbooks in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.
In May 2014, the center convened an international conference “Pathways to Reconciliation” on historical issues, co-sponsored by the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat, the governmental organization promoting Japan-China-South Korea trilateral cooperation.
Earlier this year, the Japan Program asked Stanford scholars to write their own version of the 70th anniversary statement as if they were the prime minister of Japan. The scholars’ statements were compiled into a report, published in May 2015.
Eight scholars contributed to the exercise in an effort “to understand the diversity of reasonable views on the issue of Japan’s responsibility for the cruel and violent war and Japan’s role in building a peaceful and prosperous world,” the introduction stated.
Themes that emerged in the report included a need for Abe to show heartfelt remorse about Japan’s actions during WWII and its desire to work toward a peaceful future.
Three noted Japan experts who contributed to that report offered their analysis of the prime minister’s statement issued yesterday in Tokyo.
Below are brief summaries of their analysis, you may click on each link to expand in full.
Duus recognizes that Abe’s statement offers a reiteration of the statements made by Prime Ministers Murayama and Koizumi by including four key words – aggression, colonial rule, apology and remorse. Unlike past statements, however, Abe’s begins by putting war in the historical context and offers a more explicit statement of the victims of the war, not only the three million Japanese but also citizens of China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. The statement can be viewed as “a small but important step toward a truce in the history wars that have raged in East Asia for the last three decades,” he says. However, Abe's attempt at reconciliation will have little effect if he does not rein in contrary actions by neo-nationalists in his own party.
Peter Duus is the William H. Bonsall Professor of Japanese History, emeritus; and a senior fellow, by courtesy, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Hoshi notes that Abe’s statement mentions past apologies expressed by the Japanese government, but has no explicit apology from the current administration. He says there are two surprising elements about the statement. The first is the length – it is much larger than predecessors Murayama and Koizumi at 1,664 words in English and 3,970 characters in Japanese. The second is the emphasis on history rather than on forward-looking components. He says it is commendable that Abe provided an expanded view of history. Hoshi notes that it is nearly impossible to satisfy everyone’s views in such a statement, as scholars witnessed firsthand when working on the Japan Program project.
Takeo Hoshi is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; a professor (by courtesy) of finance at the Graduate School of Business; and director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University.
Sneider says Abe’s statement must be judged on following criteria: that it is a valid effort to draw lessons from Japan’s wartime past and that it contributes to the improvement of relations in Northeast Asia. He says the statement advances these goals, but there remain a few caveats. Sneider says the version of history communicated “will not satisfy many people, including many historians,” but that it does move away from the idea that revisionist Japan was in a war of self-defense not aggression. To move Japan, China and South Korea toward reconciliation, the prime minister and his cabinet must embrace the spirit of the statement in full and open the door to convening a long-delayed trilateral summit.
A version of this essay was also published by Nippon in Japanese and English.
Daniel Sneider is the associate director for research at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University.
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Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan. | Flickr/CSIS
