Northern Territories, Asia-Pacific Regional Conflicts and the Åland Experience: Untying the Kurillian Knot (review)

Readers who follow international relations may long ago have grown bored with writings on the territorial dispute between Japan and Russia. They could not fail to notice that many of these writings became repetitious, exaggerating prospects for decisive concessions from the other side or just hurling blame on it. Advocates with well-known positions rarely had anything new to say. Sources influenced by state positions on each side presented issues in a manner that failed to explain the actual barriers or to specify mutual measures that may build trust and make a difference. Yet, tuning out has the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing the impression that this problem is irreconcilable and its consequences are unworthy of consideration.

There have been exceptions to the uninspiring quality of writings on the territorial issue. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's two-volume treatise achieved a historian's depth in detailing the long history of the dispute.¹ In an attempt to get experts on both sides to reassess a half-century of bilateral relations, I organized a joint effort to place the territorial dispute in the context of diplomacy and national identities just as the pace of negotiations was accelerating at the end of the 1990s.² Joseph Ferguson explored the ideational and domestic political context of relations, balancing coverage of both sides as he put the dispute in a broad international framework.³ Finally, outdoing the other books in depth of analysis of diplomacy was Kazuhiko Togo's insider's analysis of five lost windows of opportunity from the 1980s to the 2000s.⁴ Writers may seek to build on these recent studies or they may take an entirely new tack, as the Hara-Jukes book on the Åland experience does with its presumption that a case drawn from the history of international diplomacy can serve as a model for resolving the Russo-Japanese dispute.

The Hara-Jukes book is premised on the idea that a multilateral framework has promise in the Russo-Japanese dispute over four islands if it utilizes innovative arrangements similar to those that helped to resolve the Åland Islands dispute between Sweden and Finland. With the Japanese diplomat Nitobe Inazo heavily involved as deputy secretary-general, the League of Nations in 1921 decided that the Åland Islands would remain under Finnish sovereignty, newly recognized after Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917, while Swedish residents, who comprised a majority of the islanders, would be reassured with guaranteed political autonomy and a treaty that required demilitarization and neutrality. Justifying this set of essays on the grounds that no in-depth study of the potential applicability of the 1921 precedent to this dispute has been undertaken, Kimie Hara introduces this volume and offers a concluding chapter on how this precedent can serve as a model. Hara collected eight other contributions, whose value depends primarily on how relevant they are to the model.

Two of the essays focus on clarifying what was the Åland conflict resolution and how Finland's experiences serve as an inspiration. Elisabeth Nauclér gives the historical background of Åland and the League of Nations decision with its various provisions. She concludes that this settlement has become famous for its autonomy arrangements and for the far-reaching international guarantees in support of both demilitarization and neutralization, which are not outdated even now. Markku Heiskanen's chapter concludes that an international forum could use this model, adding hopefully that the North-South Korean summit in Pyongyang on October 2-4, 2007, "may mark the first step towards a permanent peace regime in the whole of Northeast Asia" (p. 112). Neither author shows awareness of the real nature of the dispute between Japan and Russia, so they are not helpful in demonstrating the relevance of their model. Indeed, three years later Heiskanen's remark about Roh Moo-hyun's desperate, lame duck meeting with Kim Jong-il appears hopelessly out of touch...