午夜剧场

The motivation for writing this book stems from my starting point as a researcher. While I have specialized in French politics and diplomacy, since my student days I have questioned why Japanese diplomacy is discussed almost exclusively in terms of relations with the United States. The earth is round. It was a simple question. The title of an essay I wrote 33 years ago regarding Mitterrand's French diplomacy at the time was "Both Alliance and Independence."

To discuss Japan-U.S. diplomacy, shouldn't we properly understand America's other, and more mutually intimate, relationship—the U.S.-Europe relationship? That was the starting point for this book.

A lot of time has passed as I summarized my own areas of expertise, starting from French diplomatic history to contemporary French politics, diplomacy, and the EU. It was over 20 years ago that I wrote the historical overview paper on U.S.-Europe relations that served as the sketch for this book. Having studied in France as a student, my desire to study in America early on to directly acquire their perspective on Europe was realized the year after the 9/11 attacks, at the start of the new century. I ended up conducting research for over a year in Washington, D.C., right in the midst of the lead-up to the Iraq War.

There, I witnessed the rivalry between the U.S. and Europe, a mixture of love and hate. While the U.S., Germany, and France were in the middle of a heated argument at the UN Security Council, several English-speaking ministers from Germany visited the U.S. to hold ministerial meetings on cooperation for chemical weapons disposal. Were these two countries not the primary adversaries of World War II?

In the Japanese intellectual world, which focused only on the anti-American trends in Germany and France and discussed support for the Iraq War in simple black-and-white logic, there was no awareness of the structure of the international community as a whole heading toward war, nor of the vision for the post-war period and one's own role. Such responsible discussion regarding the international community remains uncertain in this country even now.

With those questions in mind, I published two books after returning to Japan: "Post-Empire" and "Cooperation and Conflict in the U.S.-European Alliance." This current publication is because I felt strongly at that time that a general history serving as their foundation was necessary. I wrote this with the hope that as many people as possible will understand the U.S.-European alliance and think about the Japan-U.S. alliance relatively from a broad global perspective. I hope it will open up the urgent diplomatic discussions of our country even a little.

Hirotaka Watanabe (Author)

Chuko Shinsho

256 pages, 820 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.