Human Security as Statecraft: Structural Conditions, Articulations and Unintended Consequences by Nik Hynek

Author:Nik Hynek [Hynek, Nik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Peace, Political Science, Political Freedom, General
ISBN: 9781136460722
Google: i-HGBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17542809
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

whereby administrative plans and decisions are made through the circulation of a document called ringisho. This is drafted in the first instance by an official of low rank. It is then circulated among other officials in the ministry or agency concerned who are required to affix their seals if they agree with the policy proposed. By complex and circuitous paths the document gradually works its way up to higher and higher administrators, and finally reaches the minister or top executive official. When he approves the ringisho, the decision is made.

(Tsuji 1970: 457–58; emphasis in original)

As a result, it would be a flawed oversimplification to understand the Ringisei as decision-making by consensus, or a linear bottom-up process, as has sometimes been argued (cf. Kovačić 1994: 71; Sethi 1975: 51–55). Rather, its strategy consists in ensuring politicians’ procedural and substantial dependence on bureaucrats in relation to policy formulation and, simultaneously, the impossibility of politicians circumventing the bureaucrats. After all, it was the administrators and not politicians who introduced the method during the Tokugawa bakufu.

While the Meiji Restoration led to the emergence of new power-holders, also among bureaucrats (Silberman 1993: 159–62), as well as to massive ideational borrowing from the West (though of the form rather than the content, cf. West-ney 1987: 9–32), one needs to resist the temptation to mechanistically explain these processes in terms of a complete political transformation and Westernisation respectively. As Silberman (1978: 385) argued in a seminal study, ‘the Japanese did not experience “a variety of political systems” but rather experienced a continuity of bureaucratic authoritarian politics in which the seeming transformations were changes in style that were primarily functions of bureaucratic development’. Based on this view, one will immediately see how bureaucratic continuity played a constitutive role in the definition of Japanese post-1868 development. While Western ideas were introduced and circulated, the Meiji bureaucrats engaged in the practice of thought guidance (shisō zendō), putting themselves into the position of final interpretive arbiters (van Wolferen 1989: 364). One of the results of these politico-bureaucratic deliberative efforts to avoid revolutionary attitudes has been an increasing bureaucratic conservatism of the Meiji era (Pyle 1998: 121–28). In order to achieve their national goals and, at the same time, to control the development of the society, the Meiji oligarchs appropriated the conservative reform framework of Prussian/German organismic political-economic theories, especially the thinking of Lorenz von Stein and Rudolf von Gneist. In this framework,

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