The Transformation of the Liberal International Order

This open access book aims to emphasize the potential for Japan, Europe and Indo-Pacific countries including the US to respond to shared domestic and international challenges on finding joint ways to uphold and develop the liberal international order (LIO) in the Asian Pacific region and the world. It explores how these countries and the region (the EU) can work together to promote solidarity and cooperation to advance democratic standards and rules-based norms globally.

The US understands the LIO in a political sense and centers its focus on democracy, aiming to build a coalition of democracies opposed to China and Russia which represent a kind of authoritarian axis. The US aims both to defend the LIO and respond to the China challenge and to build a coalition of countries that will do both. In contrast European countries aim at defending the “rules-based order”—a term preferred because they fear that the concept of the LIO might alienate or antagonize non-democratic countries. They face a dilemma between working with China to reform the LIO or, in seeking to defend it from China, excluding China. Germany and France differ regarding whether to play a passive or active role in the Indo-Pacific, the former choosing to preserve peace and stability for continued exports, and, until recently, doing little to contribute to security. Its views echo those of the ASEAN countries, which are unable or unwilling to take an active role in protecting the LIO. On the contrary France, along with the UK, actively carries out presence operations in the Indo-Pacific. Rather than upholding US dominance, France supports a multipolar order that will also reduce China’s influence in the region, with France acting as a balancing power and offering an alternative to the choice between China and the United States. Japan and India show interest in European views with the former leaning more toward its allies, the US and AUKUS, and the latter seeing Europe less as an alternativeto the status quo and more as a complement of QUAD. This book concludes that the US needs to build coalitions rather than forcing allies and neighbors to choose sides, while Japan, Asian countries, and Europeans should more actively reform the LIO.

Yuichi Hosoya is a professor of international politics at Keio University, Tokyo. His research focuses on postwar international history, British diplomatic history, Japanese foreign and security policy, and contemporary East Asian international politics.

His most recent publications include Security Politics: Legislation for a New Security Environment (Tokyo: JPIC, 2019); History, Memory & Politics in Postwar Japan (co-edited with Lynne Rienner: Boulder, 2020); “Japan’s Security Policy in East Asia” in Yul Sohn and T.J. Pempel’s (eds.) Japan and Asia’s Contested Order: The Interplay of Security, Economics, and Identity (Palgrave, 2018); and Modern Japan’s Place in World History: From Meiji to Reiwa (co-editor, Springer: Singapore, 2023).

He received the Yomiuri Yoshino Sakuzo Prize (Chuokoron Shinsha) in July 2010, the Sakurada Prize for a Book on Political Science (Sakurada-kai) in 2010, and the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities (Suntory Foundation) in December 2003.

Professor Hosoya is Director of International House of Japan and Director of Research of Asia Pacific Initiative, Tokyo. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Nakasone Peace Institute (NPI), a Senior Fellow at The Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, and Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA). He was a member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on Reconstruction of the Legal Basis for Security (2013–14) and the Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel on National Security and Defense Capabilities (2013).

Professor Hosoya studied international politics at Rikkyo (BA), Birmingham (MIS), and Keio (Ph.D.). He was visiting professor and Japan Chair (2009–2010) at Sciences-Po in Paris (Institut d’Études Politiques), visiting fellow (Fulbright Fellow, 2008–2009) at Princeton University, and visiting fellow at Downing College, the University of Cambridge (–July 2022).

Hans Kundnani is an associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, where he was previously director of the Europe programme. Before joining Chatham House as a senior research fellow in 2018, he was a senior Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2016 he was a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, D.C. He is also an associate fellow at the Institute for German and European Studies at Birmingham University.

Hans is the author of Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (2009), The Paradox of German Power (2014), which has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish, and Eurowhiteness. Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (forthcoming 2023). He studied German and philosophy at Oxford University and journalism at Columbia University in New York, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He tweets @hanskundnani.