Bulletin n. 2/2007 | ||
October 2007 | ||
Suh J. J. |
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War-like history or diplomatic history? Contentions over the past and regional orders in Northeast Asia | ||
in Australian Journal of International Affairs , Vol. 61, n. 3 / September , 2007 , 382-402 | ||
Northeast Asian countries have been engaged in disputes over history. While their historical contentions have caused suspicion and friction among them, I argue that they have also served as a medium of dialogue that helps establish a common understanding about the individual countries' contemporary reality and future direction. Historical contentions contribute to such a dialogue if and only if two conditions are met: regional actors recognise each other as legitimate participants in a dialogue about the salient past; and they contend over the past within a common framework of meaning. Northeast Asia, through historical contentions in the 1980s and 1990s, produced an embryonic form of a regional public sphere that made possible transnational communications about the region's future and each nation's desires, but it now stands at a fork between strengthening the regional public sphere and fracturing it into a contentious regional sphere. | ||