Japanese Diplomacy

The Role of Leadership

H. D. P. Envall

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438454986, 9781438454979
• eBook ISBN: 9781438454993
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A political leader is most often a nation's most high-profile foreign policy figure, its chief diplomat. But how do individual leadership styles, personalities, perceptions, or beliefs shape diplomacy? In Japanese Diplomacy, the question of what role leadership plays in diplomacy is applied to Japan, a country where the individual is often viewed as being at the mercy of the group and where prime ministers have been largely thought of as reactive and weak. In challenging earlier, simplified ideas of Japanese political leadership, H. D. P. Envall argues that Japan's leaders, from early Cold War figures such as Yoshida Shigeru to the charismatic and innovative Koizumi Jun'ichir? to the present leadership of Abe Shinz?, have pursued leadership strategies of varying coherence and rationality, often independent of their political environment. He also finds that different Japanese leaders have shaped Japanese diplomacy in some important and underappreciated ways. In certain environments, individual difference has played a significant role in determining Japan's diplomacy, both in terms of the country's strategic identity and summit diplomacy. What emerges from Japanese Diplomacy, therefore, is a more nuanced overall picture of Japanese leadership in foreign affairs.

1

Leadership and Diplomacy

In 1978, James MacGregor Burns observed that “[l]eadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”¹ More than three decades later, Burns’s statement still encapsulates the challenge facing the leadership studies field. Undoubtedly important, but somehow indistinct in its influence, leadership is difficult to capture. The failure to understand this phenomenon, however, is not for lack of trying. At the popular level, the widely held but mistaken view is that leadership equals the art of acting strongly—that to lead must be to go ahead or to direct by example. However, history is replete with examples of leaders failing through too much aggression, and strong leadership may be bad leadership if it is unethical or immoral. In academia, sociologists, political scientists, management theorists, and psychologists all study leadership, often at cross purposes. For political science too, as Robert C. Tucker notes, “leadership is an elusive phenomenon and … there is no consensus amongst political scientists on what it means.”²

Whereas subsequent chapters focus clearly on the Japanese context, this chapter is largely concerned with the leadership studies field. The aim is to establish the basic framework needed to understand the role of leaders in international affairs, what is known about political leadership, and how leadership in diplomacy might be most usefully understood. The chapter is broken into four basic parts. The first part synthesizes the current leadership literature so as to draw out the basic concepts that might be useful later in studying Japan. Three fundamental aspects of leadership are examined: (1) the concepts surrounding leadership, especially power, values, legitimacy, and authority; (2) the major leadership typologies from the field; and (3) the leadership styles used as analytical tools for understanding particular leaders. The second part then extends this leadership framework by developing the concept of leadership strategy as a way of assessing both the processes and the outcomes of political leadership. The third part explains the domestic and international environmental context in which leadership operates, and also how these environments are linked. Since the book’s case studies focus on the Group of Seven/Eight (G7/8) summits, this part also explores the nature of international summitry and the evolution of the G7/8 process. The chapter’s final part then seeks to resolve where the leader, when acting as a nation’s chief diplomat, fits within this framework.

Conceptualizing Leadership

Burns made his observation in the midst of a boom in leadership studies in the United States in the late 1970s. Yet, as the concept has received ever greater attention, so the definitions have multiplied while the prospects for conceptual clarity have arguably declined. One count of attempts to define leadership produced 221 entries between the 1920s and 1990s.³ In his guide to the theory and practice of leadership, for example, Peter Northouse outlines five approaches to the study of leadership, three broad theories, and three types of leadership.⁴ Burns argues that leadership is being “exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers.” Elsewhere, he describes leadership as when leaders induce followers “to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations—of both leaders and followers.”⁵

The task of defining political leadership is no less challenging. As Jean Blondel argues, “political leadership is almost certainly broader than any other form of leadership.” Robert Elgie also describes in great detail the many attempts at definitions but declines to provide a definition of his own. He argues instead that, because of the thousands of definitions already in existence, and because the cultural factors surrounding leadership make anyone’s definition as accurate or inaccurate as anyone else’s, there is little value in further clarification. The “incremental addition to knowledge of a new definition,” he suggests, “would be as near to zero as makes no difference.”⁶

Power, Values, Legitimacy, and Authority

Understanding how political leadership has been defined does, nonetheless, provide some insight into the roles leadership might play in politics. The interaction between authority, power, and values is especially relevant. In his definition of political leadership, Burns suggests that leadership is the “processes and effects” of power where a number of actors, with various motivations, engage with the motives of potential followers for the purpose of reciprocal benefit or real change. Political leadership, thus understood, is “broadly intended ‘real’ change” or “collectively purposeful causation.”⁷

Power is thus a central dimension of leadership. Any kind of leadership—but particularly political leadership—is inevitably concerned with it. As Joseph Nye argues, “[y]ou cannot lead if you do not have power.”⁸ Likewise, Burns details humanity’s obsession with power in the twentieth century and its terrible consequences. He argues that politics is more than simply power and the use of it; indeed, there is a need to recognize that, where some humans influence others, not all these relationships are exploitative or coercive. Beyond coercion, Burns asserts, there is scope for persuasion or exchange, as well as elevation and transformation. Leadership might thus be seen as a “special form of power.”⁹

The task of defining power in political science unsurprisingly attracts controversy. Sometimes viewed as the capacity to “affect the behavior of others to get the outcomes you want,” power can be divided into three dimensions: influence over decision-making, agenda-setting, and preferences.¹⁰ Yet because leadership also operates on a non-coercive basis, there must be some reconciliation of motive and purpose. As such, leadership is often viewed as a moral relationship and must therefore be intimately concerned with values and have moral implications. In discharging values, leaders should take heed of the implications for good conduct, equality and justice, and the well-being of followers. Burns argues that a “leader and a tyrant are polar opposites.” However, history is full of leaders who have demonstrated varying degrees of morality, thereby making any decision to exclude them from the study of leadership highly controversial. Blondel, for instance, views the exclusion of such leaders as “unjustifiable, unrealistic and indeed practically impossible.”¹¹

In terms of how leaders use their power, two further ideas are also important. These are legitimacy and authority. The process of obtaining legitimacy and authority again involves both leaders and followers, with the latter playing a key role in “legitimating” the former. Edwin Hollander argues that, as actors who legitimize leaders, followers have considerable power to shape leaders’ influence, as well as the style of leadership offered and, ultimately, the group’s performance. Thus viewed, followers are a major source of this authority. In his three models of legitimate authority, Max Weber places leaders into types depending upon the source of their authority, whether it is grounded in rationality, tradition, or charisma. These types are in turn based on the rights of leaders under society’s rules (legal authority); society’s belief about established customs and leaders’ roles within those customs (tradition); and charisma, or leaders’ personalities, alone. The first two types of authority clearly rest on the position of the leader, whereas the third depends on the leader’s personality. It is therefore possible to refer to assigned leadership (the first two types) and emergent leadership (the third type).¹²

Leadership Typologies: Agency versus Structure

Unsurprisingly, key assumptions, methodologies, and typologies are widely disputed in this diverse field. Yet the central debate in the historical development of leadership studies concerns the role of agency versus structure. As Brian Jones asks, “[t]o what extent are the actions of leaders determined … by forces beyond the leader’s control? To what extent is leadership dictated by structure, and to what extent is there room for independent action?”¹³

In its early development, the study of leadership focused first on individual political actors—the great men of history. This approach quickly drew criticism, however, which prompted a shift to an emphasis of structure over agency—to the great forces of history.¹⁴ The contemporary literature has responded with a third paradigm, one acknowledging that individual personality and characteristics, as well as environmental influences, affect the processes and outcomes of political leadership. The political process, thus understood, has been described as a set of intricately wired computers where “political actors can be viewed as key junctures in the wiring, for example circuit breakers.”¹⁵ Much recent work on leadership takes this as a basic assumption, but differs in terms of the emphasis it places on either agency or structure.

Current approaches to leadership fall into five broad categories: the trait, behavior, influence, situational, and integrative approaches. The trait approach focuses on the various attributes possessed by leaders, notably personality, values, motives, and skills. By contrast, the behavioral approach emphasizes the actions of leaders and seeks to study how they manage the demands, constraints, and conflicts in their leadership roles. A key research question for this approach concerns the kinds of behavior exhibited by effective leaders. The influence approach focuses on leaders’ interaction or influence, and is therefore concerned chiefly with the way in which leaders exercise power. Situational approaches focus on the opposite end of the leader–follower spectrum: how follower dynamics affect leaders. Accordingly, they tend to place greater emphasis on environmentally focused perspectives. For example, contingency theory posits that effectiveness in leaders depends upon how suited their leadership style is to the given context. Finally, integrative approaches are eclectic in nature as they draw on more than one of the other four approaches.¹⁶

Studies acknowledging the role of both agency and structure generally assume “the existence of certain general leadership qualities … along with the variability of leadership traits according to the demands of group situations.”¹⁷ This provides what is sometimes described as an interactional understanding of leadership or interactionism. This concept of leadership brings together the situational and trait approaches by employing three variables as analytical categories—situation, psychology, and skills—as well as the fourth variable of followers or environments. Political leaders are thus constrained by the process of government, meaning that “particular political structures” are clearly important to the outcomes of political leadership.¹⁸

Leadership Styles

A key problem for the various approaches to studying leadership is classification: which leaders go where and why? The widely used transformational-transactional model of leadership seeks to classify leaders based on their leadership style, or leadership processes, with the model’s two basic leadership styles differing in their objectives, methods, and values.

Burns characterizes transforming leadership as an engagement between leaders and followers that raises both parties to “higher levels of motivation and morality.”¹⁹ By contrast, transactional leadership, according to Burns, is “when one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things.”²⁰ Transformational leadership, therefore, rests on a nonrational sentiment or emotion, whereas a transactional relationship is based upon a rational relationship of self-interest. The chief values of transactional leadership “are modal values, that is, values of means—honesty, responsibility, fairness, the honoring of commitments,” while transformational leadership “is more concerned with end-values, such as liberty, justice, equality.”²¹ In reality, however, political leaders generally demonstrate both tendencies. As Bernard Bass notes, “[m]ost leaders do both but in different amounts.”²²

The contemporary transformational-transactional model of leadership rests on six basic factors, with the first four relating to transformational leadership and the final two rela...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Leadership and Diplomacy
• 2. Locating Japanese Leaders
• 3. Leadership and Japan’s Strategic Identity
• 4. Ōhira Masayoshi: Overdetermined Environment
• 5. Suzuki Zenkō: Laissez-Faire Leadership
• 6. Nakasone Yasuhiro: Widening Possibilities
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover