Perspectives in Business Culture. Milan: Springer, 2014. viii, 348 pp. US$179.00, cloth. ISBN 978-88-470-2567-7.
Despite being separated by thousands of kilometres and centuries of divergent social development, Italy and Japan share a number of characteristics, which makes them interesting candidates for comparative analysis. Sidney Tarrow and Richard J. Samuels have described them as an “odd couple” by virtue of their common national features and yet distinct national identities, while Andrea Boltho, Alessandro Vercelli, and Hiroshi Yoshikawa have depicted the two countries’ respective economic development as successfully different from the dominant Anglo-American model. Indeed, these countries share a number of geographic, economic, demographic, political, and military features, and, despite their many differences, both are former conventional great powers, whose status has been somewhat difficult to describe since the end of WWII. Still, comparative analyses of such nations are relatively rare.
Against such a background, this volume, edited by Beretta, Berkofsky, and Rugge, offers interesting insights. Methodologically, it presents a qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis of Italy and Japan, introduced through a set of topic-related chapters that show different viewpoints on a common theme. The book is divided into four sections, dealing with society and demography, politics, economics, and international relations, respectively. In part 1, three chapters effectively outline the two countries’ demographic and societal peculiarities, including the fact that the two national populations are amongst the oldest in the world and have already started declining. In part 2, the first two chapters present a historical account of Italy’s and Japan’s postwar constitutions, while the remaining chapters present in-depth investigations of the two countries’ almost unique political systems, underlining their strong similarities. The first half of this volume therefore offers the reader a solid guide to the path the two nations have followed from their defeat in WWII to the present day. Part 3 is entirely dedicated to a comparative analysis from an economic perspective, outlining comparable economic structures, past and current trends, as well as debt and growth crises, with Martin Schultz’s chapter being the highlight of this section. His contribution is an insightful and wide-ranging investigation of Italy’s and Japan’s ageing, debt, and growth crises, with the author providing a number of potential solutions of reasonable feasibility. Lastly, part 4 explores the two countries’ international relations, tracing their domestic constraints, post-WWII historical burdens, and peculiar relationships with the US. In sum, the second half of the book discusses with competence their economic characteristics and their trajectories in the international arena.
Parts 3 and 4, however, also reveal some of the volume’s shortcomings. Despite providing a useful account of the Italian economy’s structural weaknesses, Targetti Lenti’s chapter, in part 3, seems to depict an overly pessimistic scenario in which the author is doubtful about a foreseeable end to Italy’s recession (202), which ended just a few months after the publication of this volume. Further, conceptual clarity is occasionally problematic in the last section. In Matteo Dian’s chapter, the author seems to contradict himself when describing Italy and Japan only as “junior partners of the US” during the Cold War (307), only to state shortly after that “both Japan and Italy were very fundamental elements and partners in the context [of] American containment and policies” (310). One is more perplexed, however, when reading Donatello Osti’s final chapter, where the author explicitly and often defines Italy and Japan as “middle powers,” while citing only one piece of relevant literature (340) throughout the chapter to support these statements.
The reader should note the fact that modern middle-power theory, built upon the works of Andrew F. Cooper, Richard A. Higgott, and Kim R. Nossal, among many others, does not include Italy or Japan. Further, although a few authors have sporadically applied this terminology to the former (Carlo M. Santoro, Nicola Chelotti, Marco Valigi) and the latter (Yoshihide Soeya, Richard J. Samuels) over the years, two countries that are among the ten largest global economies, with equally high hard-power indicators (see, for example, the National Power Index, the Military Strength Index, and the Military Presence Indicator), vast diplomatic networks, and global cultural influence, could more appropriately be described as “secondary” or “non-conventional” great powers. The difficulty of precisely tracing the two countries’ status in IR is further demonstrated by the fact that authors such as Giampiero Giacomello and Bertjan Verbeek detect for them a position which could be placed between middle and great power status, whereas Edward Rhodes, Milena Sterio, Philippe Lagassé and others have simply described Italy as a great power, and Douglas Lemke, Nicholas Eberstadt, Richard J. Ellings and others have applied the same status to Japan. Lastly, another group of scholars, including Bernhard Blumenau, John J. Kirton, Laurent Rucker and Risto E. J.Penttilä, links great power status to G7 membership, thus further weakening the argument that Italy and Japan are middle powers.
In conclusion, this volume is an interesting, comprehensive, and well-sourced comparative analysis of two countries that are often understudied with regards to their international status, and that share a wide set of important characteristics. Despite the aforementioned issues with the theoretical approach in one chapter and minor concerns in two others, along with a number of typographical errors, this edited volume is commendable for its overall quality and the diversity of its Italian and Japanese contributors, and, ultimately, for shedding light on an interesting but neglected topic.
Gabriele Abbondanza
The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
pp. 811-813