WORLD VIEW:The multiple disasters could mean a turning point for Japan's role internationally, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
'EUROPE RESEMBLED a large family reunited after its difficulties". So wrote Voltaire in his satirical novel Candideabout the impact of the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake on Europe's consciousness. Its lessons are worth recalling as the world responds to the equally powerful and destructive Japanese earthquake at a time of similarly large-scale change.
Voltaire’s book asked how a good God could have visited such a disaster on such a pious city on All Saints’ Day. Between 30,000 and 100,000 people died in the earthquake and the ensuing wave in Portugal and in North Africa. The shock was felt across Europe and the wave also reached the Caribbean, England and Ireland, where it destroyed part of the Spanish Arch in Galway.
The event stimulated early journalism all over Europe, including its sensational element. Candideused it to mock the then popular Leibnitzian view put forward by the eponymous hero's tutor, Dr Pangloss, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. If this is the best of worlds, what are the others like? The debate fed into the Enlightenment discussion on the nature of evil, the justification of God and the need for humans to control their destiny, despite natural and man-made disasters. Hence Voltaire's famous conclusion that "we must cultivate our gardens".
A similar worldwide awareness of how vulnerable even its most developed parts are to the awesome power of nature has been a feature of the Japanese earthquake. Intensive media coverage, amplified by local photography and the many acts of heroism and humanity, create a bond across many cultures.
This earthquake awaits its Voltaires, but it is not hard to imagine them fastening on the blow the tremor has struck to Panglossian accounts of the nuclear energy industry, just as it had been reasserting itself as a solution to growing shortages of fossil fuels and their bad climatic impact. Sensational journalism notwithstanding, that ambition stands deflated and its advocates made more humble by the failure to anticipate the tsunami’s damage and the growing realisation of how the powerful nuclear lobby in Japan cut safety and regulatory corners. These add hugely to the technical confusion over how serious a threat is actually posed.
Japan has relied on imported oil, coal and gas for most of its energy, so the attraction of nuclear energy was obvious. Plans to increase it to 50 per cent of Japan’s energy use by 2030 by building 25 more plants are now threatened. Some 90 per cent of its oil comes from the Middle East, indicating its interest in a more stable supply.
Such statistics of global interdependence flowed more prolifically during the week, filling out our understanding of how central a role Japan plays in the world economy. Thus global supply chains in the auto and electronics sectors were promptly affected by the rolling shortages arising from the earthquake.
According to the Irish Japan-based financial journalist Eamonn Fingleton, the widespread talk of how Japan’s government is so deeply indebted and its sluggish growth obscures the colossal continuing strength of its export industries, especially of high-end industrial production goods, and the fact that most of its debt is Japanese owned. It is the world’s largest creditor, with net external assets of 60 per cent of GDP, reflecting those trade surpluses (including with China). Another indicator to watch will be the global financial effects of the repatriation of funds needed for insurance and reconstruction.
The symbolic parallelisms between geophysics, geoeconomics and geopolitics in this story are nonetheless too tempting to resist commenting on. This earthquake was caused by shifts between the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates running from Japan to the Philippines. Geophysicists identify five other plates: the African, Antarctic, Indo-Australian, North American and South American. They have a rough symmetry with emerging world regions in a period of growing multi-polarity.
This disaster could be a turning point for Japan’s international role, but if so, which way will it turn geopolitically? Towards a China made more relatively powerful by this setback, and a southeast Asia with which it now has a much more extended economic relationship? Or, to balance such potential new dependencies, will it reinforce the existing dependent relationship on the United States visible in the recent shifts of policy and a much more active US Asian policy?
Prime minister Naoto Kan’s Democratic Party government, which executed this change following an earlier period of unsuccessful dabbling in a new Asian strategy by his predecessor Yukio Hatoyama, was widely discredited and not expected to survive before this crisis. It is now benefiting from the acclaimed Japanese ability to pull together. A notable feature of the last week is how friendly both the Chinese and the US have been in solidarity. There is also talk that Japan’s now more pressing need for natural gas will improve relations with Russia.
Rather than reacting fatalistically to such widespread change, political leaders need to take Voltaire’s advice by asserting control over these gardens.