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Chapter 7 Conclusion It is the fashion of tough-minded realists, and of many social scientists , to dismiss philosophical disputes over the requirements of political order and to place emphasis, instead, on power and political interests. Certainly, there can be no doubt that power and interests were at stake in German debates over unification and East-West relations . At the heart of the debate between Adenauer and Schumacher, for example, was a disagreement over the best way to serve Germany’s interests in the arena of high power politics: to begin by aligning the FRG with the Western powers or by acknowledging Soviet interests? Later, once the FRG’s position in Europe was secure enough to devote more attention to the East, Kiesinger and Brandt parted ways over another forthrightly political calculation. The former thought that the best guarantees of German interests were to be had by approaching the Soviet Union directly, whereas the latter expected indirect pressure , applied through negotiations with East European states, to be more productive. Domestic political calculations also certainly figured in these debates. When Kohl explained in the era of Deutschlandpolitik that the CSCE process would remain the centerpiece of an all-European architecture , the SPD took careful note of public sentiment and overruled its own leader’s opposition to embrace the chancellor’s Ten Point Plan.1 To have any chance of beating Kohl in the upcoming elections, the Social Democrats recognized that they would have to support an economic and monetary union between the FRG and the GDR. Otherwise , the SPD would be the party of obstructionism and continued economic crisis. And yet the SPD could not defeat Kohl merely by agreeing with him. So its leaders stressed how they would have followed a different path toward the same eventual goal, had they been in power. In particular, they viewed the improvement of living conditions in the GDR as a more pressing problem than the political unity of the two German states.2 On this conflicted platform, desiring both to move ahead and to go slow, while giving more attention to welfare 137 138 Cultures of Order and environmental policies, Lafontaine led the SPD in 1990 to its worst election results since 1957. The SPD electoral strategy may not have been particularly coherent, but it is understandable in terms of the conflicting domestic pressures on the German left. In Japan, meanwhile, domestic politics worked against a serious debate over Japan’s role in postwar East Asian order. The phrase “tough-minded realist” fits Yoshida as well as anyone, but domestic concerns—the perceived threat of the radical left on one hand, and of a resurgent militarist right on the other—were even more important as a motivation for the political compromise inherent in the Yoshida Doctrine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, in both Japan and Germany after the Second World War, domestic and international politics were inseparably joined. National, party, and personal interests were thus inevitably at the forefront of political disputes over international order. Yet such political rationales, whether tough-minded or otherwise , explain neither the pattern nor the outcomes of the debates that persisted in postwar Germany and that flourished and then subsided in postwar Japan. Each of the preceding chapters has drawn attention to choices that confronted German and Japanese leaders. The alternatives were never so constrained that the choices disappeared. Indeed, Germany and Japan ultimately went different ways. Without appreciating how distinctive ideas about order took hold in each of these countries, and how both were constrained by the memory of the war itself, it is hard to explain why these countries adopted such consistent , but divergent, approaches to international order. Each was left, we have argued, with a “chicken or egg” problem. Either they could base political solutions on the promise to build and abide by a new framework of international institutions, or else they could work first to secure their own positions in the postwar international order so that they, like other states, could enter freely into the new postwar institutions. At any given moment, the choice was between moving forward to adopt new institutional structures (leaving the problem of rights to be worked out later) or insisting on respect for rights (leaving the emergence of new institutions hanging in the balance). Simply put, the choice was to construe international order as a problem of partnership and trust, or of citizenship, sovereignty, and quasi-legal arrangements. In Germany, the preference for international partnership...

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