Beyond Versailles by Tosh Minohara

Author:Tosh Minohara
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498554473
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 7

Making Peace from the Great War

A Generational Shift in Japanese Diplomacy in 1919*

Tadashi Nakatani

The Changeover of Japanese Diplomacy in the Aftermath of the Great War

The outbreak and lengthening of the Great War created a sea change in international relations not only in Europe, the main theater of the war, but also in the Asia-Pacific region. This region’s own great-power politics had developed but basically as a subsystem of Eurocentric world politics. At the center of the region’s international politics, of course, were European powers such as Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, while Japan and the United States were also factors. The main arena was China, where both the Europeans and the Japanese set up their spheres of influence, and a bigamous relationship of the spheres was the essential international agenda, as if China were a miniature version of the balance of power that European powers held all over the world through their colonies.

As a result, great-power politics in the Asia-Pacific region had been conducted under an essential rule, that of a mutual respect of each sphere of influence in China, on which the region’s international order had been based since around the end of the nineteenth century. The sea change that the war brought about in the region was the breakdown of that old rule; however, the war alone could have not caused this international change. Something else was needed to transmit the impact of the war, mainly fought in Europe, to the region, and this was the initiative of American diplomacy.1 The United States was the only power that did not have its own sphere of influence in China, and before the war, successive American governments had criticized, to a greater or lesser extent, the exclusive manner of the other powers’ activities in China, using phrases such as “Open Door” or “Equal Opportunity.” Such principles of American diplomacy did not, however, have power enough to change the reality, because until the Wilson administration led the nation into the war in 1917 and took the initiative in the peace negotiations in 1919, these principles were basically verbal. President Wilson as well as his diplomats and advisers were the first to attempt to make a structural change in international relations in the Asia-Pacific, involving the breakdown in China of the system of great-power politics based on spheres of influence. This was of course part of the administration’s ideal vision of a new world order after the first total war.

In the author’s judgment, that endeavor of American diplomacy was successful in achieving its goal, and Japanese diplomacy was indispensable in the argument. In the wake of the combined effect of the war and the initiative of American diplomacy, Japan took its own initiative to stop following the old rule in international politics, and this was decisive in preventing the old order from being reestablished in the region.

Therefore, based on the author’s Japanese book dealing with international politics between Japan, the United States and Britain with respect to the region’s international order

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