Japan's values-based diplomacy and the free and open indo-pacific vision

Abstract

This dissertation briefly explores the Japanese values-based diplomacy from the post-Second World War II period to the present with an emphasis on Shinzo Abe’s diplomatic initiatives focused on “universal values”. The research is primarily carried out on a chronological fashion that first analyzes the earliest examples of a values-based diplomacy up to the most recent ones. Based on both primary and secondary sources, I observe how, up to the 1990s, Japanese diplomacy rather followed a low profile diplomacy in which the promotion of democratic values was manifest in the relations with the Western Bloc, but rather avoided with Asian partners. However I argue that, with the end of the Cold War, Japan started to incorporate democracy promotion objectives more actively in his diplomatic initiatives for Eurasia as a means to rekindle his diplomatic exercise. Among the most notable examples we can find the publishing of the Official Development Assistance Charter in 1992, the Partnership for Democratic Development and the Silk Road Action Plan. The factors that might have pushed Japan to do so—i.e. the will to change the international perception of a mercantilist Japanese diplomacy, the interest to highlight its own democratic character in the region and the synergies generated by it with the United States—can also be considered in the later articulation of the Arc of Freedom and Prosperity and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific initiatives. Both of them, however, should be interpreted as direct expressions of Shinzō Abe’s self-proclaimed “assertive” and “strategic diplomacy” based on a set of “universal values”. After an analysis of Shinzō Abe’s policies, I conclude stating that the allusions to the concepts of the “rule of law”, “freedom”, “freedom of navigation” and “democracy” characterize the diplomacy of a government cabinet devoted to the protection of the so-called “rules based international order” in the face of an increasingly strategic Indo-Pacific region