EU looks east to balance US dominance

Date: 13/06/1996

FOREIGN Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek once remarked that it was hardly surprising that most Europeans had a hard time coming to grips with Japan. From their earliest days at school, he said, they had been looking at world maps that showed Europe at the centre and Japan flung out on the far edge, as though it were clinging to stay on the map at all.

Japan has been inching its way into the picture. Indeed, to hear Trade Commissioner Sir Leon Brittan talk, one would think the archipelago had migrated to the centre.

Trade is the key reason for the change, but in the post Cold War world, where economic power has nearly replaced political power as the driving force in foreign relations, the EU is forging a relationship with Japan aimed at turning a bipolar world into a tripolar one.

Union officials talk unceasingly about the EU-US-Japan 'triangle' and the need to strengthen the two arms emanating from Europe. Brittan approaches Japanese markets as though he is in a race with Washington.

But market share is only the beginning of a challenge with much higher stakes.

The Union and Japan share an interest in that triangle - both seek political influence commensurate with their recognised economic power and neither has managed to transform its economic muscle into political weight, although not, as Van Den Broek has stressed, “for lack of ambition”.

Japan's former envoy to the EU, Ambassador Tomohiko Kobayashi, puts it this way: “Both are economic superpowers, but both lack clout in international affairs.”

The Japanese Advisory Group on Defence Issues has called on the government to stop being passive and take on an “active role in shaping a new order” - something Europe has also tried to do.

The Union wants a common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and a military capacity independent of the US, while Tokyo wants a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Both admit their shortcomings. Van Den Broek says Europeans have not yet fully developed a list of their joint interests, while Kobayashi admits Japan has a “shyness on security questions”.

Japanese peacekeeping contributions to Bosnia and Rwanda, and its financial contributions to fending off Eastern European and North Korean nuclear perils, are both examples of its attempts to overcome its insular image.

Japan is a member of the G-24, which supports reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and an observer in the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata, and Yasushi Akashi, until recently the UN secretary-general's representative in former Yugoslavia, are both Japanese.

The Commission has been a vocal advocate of Japan's bid for a security council seat, but EU governments are less enthusiastic. Last year, Union foreign ministers told the Commission they could not endorse its proposal to allow Japan to join, due to a lack of consensus on the issue among member states. They did, however, “welcome the desire shown by Japan to play a political role more in keeping with its economic weight in the world”.

Since the 1991 joint declaration on EU-Japan relations, the former's policy towards the latter has been geared, in the Commission's words, towards strengthening the third side of the EU-US-Japan triangle - extending the relationship beyond trade discussions to other forms of cooperation.

Political dialogue consists of a yearly summit, twice-yearly meetings of foreign ministers and expert-level meetings. These are still few in number, however, compared to the scores of trade meetings, which Commission officials say are too numerous to count.

In return for cooperating with the EU in closing nuclear reactors in the Ukraine and supplying reconstruction funds for Bosnia, Tokyo wants more European participation in North Korean nuclear weapons - particularly the KEDO energy development program it shares with the US.

Both the Union and Japan want the other to keep some grip on the giant nation between them - Russia. The EU wants Japanese funds to help Moscow stabilise the country's economy and help curb tensions on Russia's eastern front. Tokyo wants the Union to keep a close eye on what it says is Russia's illegal occupation of Japan's northern territories.

Van Den Broek says a joint initiative which led to the UN register of conventional arms making armaments transfers less secretive shows the “potential for joint action if Japan and the European Union put their heads together more often”.

Inspired by their leading roles in world trade talks which established the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the Commissioner also argues that the two should find “the moral equivalent of the Uruguay Round in the political field”.

Since 1991, the EU and Japan have held yearly conferences on labour issues such as employment practices, industrial relations, social security and working conditions, and have produced joint studies on working conditions in manufacturing and immigrant labour's effect in Europe and Japan.

They have also established cooperation in biotechnology (Japan pays for 80&percent; of the Strasbourg-based Human Frontier Science Research Centre), nuclear fusion technology and industrial technology. Environmental cooperation has included studies on waste disposal, acid rain and tropical forests.

In a speech in Tokyo last year, Brittan said that while trade problems had for years prevented the EU and Japan from developing a “fruitful partnership”, real efforts for dialogue and the fact that European economic goals were in Japan's interest as well had helped the relationship enormously.

True, that relationship is mostly based on trade. With the current administration in Tokyo, that is not surprising. Prime Minister Ryutaharo Hashimoto - a right-wing trade hawk - was trade minister before taking over the premiership in January.

Japan has been watching the development of the single market closely and keeping an eye on the plan for a single currency, whose sponsors clearly aim to rival the yen. But instead of fearing the single market, Tokyo has welcomed the dismantling of barriers to foreign goods.

The Union still has not, however, replaced the US as Japan's number one partner and preoccupation.

“The US-Japan relationship is very deep, but the EU-Japan relationship has not reached the strength of the EU-US or the US-Japan relationships,” says a Tokyo trade official.

The Japanese invest more in US than in Europe, more Americans are employed by Japanese firms and the large number of trade disputes between Tokyo and Washington are a measure of the two countries' interdependency.

But a Japanese trade lobbyist said Tokyo officials appreciated the quiet tactics employed by Union officials, finding them refreshing after loud and sometimes threatening American ones.

“The European Commission does not need so much PR as its American counterparts,” he said. “They get more down to business.”

Kobayashi gave EU officials a few hints last year on how to win even more points. “The EU will have to express greater delicacy and show more understanding and more patience” on issues such as human and workers' rights, he said, adding that it should also do away with “arbitrary” anti-dumping measures imposed on Asian exporters on the pretext of preventing social dumping.

Japan has asked for a stronger EU presence in southeast Asia. It is a request which the Union began to fulfil with the Asia-Europe summit (ASEM) in Bangkok in March.

“An enhanced political and economic presence of the EU in Asia is desired by most Asian countries, since they wish to counterbalance the dominant influence of the big powers in the region, ie the US, Japan and China,” Kobayashi has said.

If the EU implements its Asia strategy and its communication on EU-Japan relations, he argues, “the EU will greatly increase its influence in Asia, ensure a more visible presence there and intensify its trade and investment in that continent”.