Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780472055760.
Walter Hatch, a professor emeritus of government who has published extensively on Japan and economic integration in East Asia, breaks new ground in this slim volume by broadening his investigation to six countries on two continents and by venturing into the still poorly charted waters of historical reconciliation in international relations. He thus joins a small cohort of scholars—mostly political scientists—that adopt such a comparative approach. Hatch emphatically rejects those who primarily focus on the discursive power of apologies or official narratives as well as those who place great weight on the benefits of economic interdependence for rebuilding trust between countries. Instead, in dealing with the “ghosts” from the past, Hatch turns to what he terms the “healing power of institutions.”
Hatch begins the book by defining his key concepts and laying out competing approaches in the current scholarship. He distills the essence of reconciliation into four essentials: history, propinquity, transcendence, and mutuality. He then provides a useful background of the “bloody history” in Europe and East Asia, highlighting the transgressions of Germany and Japan against their neighbours. Here he also briefly stakes out his own comparative approach, dismissing the variables of geopolitics, regime type, and level of economic development as indispensable factors for understanding the different outcomes in reconciliation, and instead focusing on economic interdependence, discourse, and institutions as plausible explanations. The main part of the book consists of four neatly structured case studies examining four bilateral relationships: German-French, German-Polish, Japanese-Korean, and Japanese-Chinese. Each chapter begins with a brief survey of their post-1945 development, followed by a discussion of plausible explanations as to why the ghosts have vanished, more or less, in two European cases but persisted in East Asia. This difference, according to Hatch, owes much to the sharply different American approaches to regionalism in Europe versus East Asia in the postwar era—promoting multilateralism in the former and bilateralism in the later. Reaching far back in history, Hatch attributes America’s “Janus-face” to its cultural and racial biases vis-à-vis the two continents. The book concludes with a short chapter reiterating “the healing power of institutions.”
Hatch is to be commended for breaking down the barriers between regional studies and between disciplines of history and IR/political science, and, above all, for shifting our focus to actions and institutions. As he convincingly shows, bilateral cooperation, let alone reconciliation, is never a straight line, even in the best case (i.e., Franco-German relations). Equally important is that political leaders—within these countries as well as in the US—can matter a great deal, even under structural constraints such as the preponderance of US power as well as the Cold War confrontation in Europe. He concurs with Jennifer Lind and others in showing that obsessing with political apologies alone doesn’t always go very far in healing past wounds. Hatch goes a step further by quoting a ranking former French official, approvingly: “You don’t create trust or mutual understanding through speeches. You get there through actions, through joint projects” (30). It was through their extensive institutionalized integration in economy, politics, society, and defence, we are told, that postwar France and Germany have succeeded in freeing their bilateral relations from ghosts of the past and can now speak of “post-reconciliation.” This, as Hatch repeatedly emphasizes, was achieved without France demanding and Germany offering apologies in the early postwar decades.
As Hatch’s work shows, the healing power of institutions may not be immediately obvious as discursive statements of apology and forgiveness, but the former can be more lasting and effective, without the backlash against the latter. It’s not that the history of conflict disappears, but that the differences, even when they surface, are well managed and do not threaten the overall bilateral relationship, thanks to institutionalized cooperation through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms.
Hatch has packed a great deal of history, politics, economics, and popular opinion into 140 pages. He makes his arguments clearly and forcefully and keeps political science jargon to a minimum; he also weaves in interviews with colleagues in both East Asia and in Europe. All of this makes the book highly readable. Historians and others may quibble over his inaccuracies or gaps, but his broad arguments about why institutions matter are convincing.
Still, Hatch’s comparative analysis begs further questions: If France and Germany have indeed reached the “post-reconciliation” stage and apologies were largely absent early in their postwar cooperation, to what extent can this be generalized when compared with three other bilateral relationships? At a structural level, besides both being US allies after 1945 and despite several wars between them in modern times, France and Germany were more on par culturally and their relationship thus differs considerably from that between Japan and Korea, which bears a greater resemblance to that between Germany and Poland in modern times. Hence, apologies are very much being reiterated whenever German leaders visit Poland, while French and German leaders jointly mourn their war dead (tellingly, of World War I). Moreover, could it be that France and Germany “locked in” their institutional cooperation without apologies in the 1950s and early 1960s when geopolitics clearly dominated, whereas we are living with what Charles Mair calls a “surfeit of memory,” when history seems to weigh more?
In 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China received a group of French visitors who claimed that “we can never trust the Germans.” In response, Premier Zhou noted that Chinese people had succeeded at reconciling with the people of Japan. It was also around this time when Chinese leaders like Mao Zedong explicitly told visiting Japanese that no apologies were needed. Half a century later, the table has turned, with France and Germany widely considered to have exorcised the “ghost of the past” while China and Japan are very much haunted by that ghost. Hatch’s book offers a perfect start for understanding this “paradox of reconciliation.”
Daqing Yang
The George Washington University, Washington, DC