Overcoming Isolationism: Japan's Leadership in East Asian Security Multilateralism by Paul Midford (review)

Paul Midford draws on his extensive knowledge of Japanese security and the international relations of East Asia to produce this historically detailed work on Japan's apparent turn toward multilateralism in the early 1990s and to pose three questions: Why did Japan exist in security isolation during the cold war? Why did the 1991 "pivot" to multilateralism occur? And, why have Japanese policymakers championed regional security multilateralism since that time? The book describes Japan's postwar security isolation from its region, locked as it was in a security treaty with the United States, before charting the efforts of key individuals to introduce and sustain a new approach based on collective security initiatives.

Midford poses some of the theoretical challenges facing scholars interested in Japanese foreign policy, in multilateralism in international relations, in conceptions of security, and in understanding the agency of individual actors in the formation of policy. He also makes reference to social psychology approaches and to a need to consider the value of reassurance when assessing Japanese security ambitions (p. 18). In so doing, Midford seeks to demonstrate how Japan's "reassurance imperative" sits in tension with its "alliance dilemma," as it manages its ongoing commitments to the United States alongside its newer regional security concerns. Methodologically, Midford could have gone further to explain how to apply this eclectic approach to his case studies, particularly by engaging more fully in the concept of epistemic community, which he details in the central chapters, and by elucidating how to conduct process tracing and the "method of difference" in practice (p. 7). Nevertheless, the core part of the book is based on a significant amount of personal data and archives of key individuals collected over many years and provides an important historical narrative insight into Japanese policymaking.

The book speaks most readily to three broad bodies of literature around Japan and the Asia Pacific. First, the field of scholarship on multilateralism in Asia is broad, and Midford makes reference to this body of literature in part 1. Scholarship in the 2000s formed the basis of reflections on multilateralism, and work such as Kent Calder and Francis Fukuyama's East Asian Multilateralism and Michael Green and Bates Gill's Asia's New Multilateralism set the tone for much of the debate, which Midford echoes here. Later work, notably Amitav Acharya's two works, Whose Ideas Matter? and Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia, also highlighted the need to look beyond state capabilities. Other constructivist examinations of norm-driven change in Asia around the idea of "soft power" illuminate changing foreign policy approaches around this time (see, for example, Jing Sun's Japan and China as Charm Rivals [2012]). Midford's work builds on this scholarship. One important conversation Midford could have had is with William Tow and Brendan Taylor's Bilateralism, Multilateralism and Asia-Pacific Security, as they offer a view of how to reconcile these apparently conflicting approaches from a different standpoint. Moreover, an approach to understanding the role of processes in institution building is particularly well developed in Jochen Prantl's edited work on Effective Multilateralism, and it would be worth reading Overcoming Isolationism against the background of this body of literature.¹

Second, Midford engages with the extensive literature on Japanese foreign policy and makes the case for understanding Japanese leadership approaches within multilateral fora, from the time of the development of the ASEAN Regional Forum. In terms of English-language Japanese foreign policy studies, Midford's work complements the wider observations made in Andrew Oros's Japan's Security Renaissance, Sheila Smith's Japan Rearmed, and Christopher Hughes's Japan's Remilitarisation.² These works set the context and define the possible terms of Japan's attempts to assume leadership in regional initiatives and are echoed principally in part 2 of Overcoming Isolationism, which narrates the history of Japan's involvement in security multilateralism from the early 1990s. Midford opens up...