Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization

R. Johnson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137455376
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137455383
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essays in this volume examine United States-East Asian relations in the framework of global history, incorporating fresh insights that have been offered by scholars on such topics as globalization, human rights, historical memory, and trans-cultural relations.

Part I

Global Transformations—Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

1

Asia Pacific Relations and the Globalization of the Environment

Nick Kapur

The phenomenon we now know as “environmentalism” emerged in the postwar period as a global movement and philosophical framework for rethinking humankind’s relationships with its surroundings. The rise of environmentalism was both triggered by, and in turn contributed to, the increasing pace of globalization. A multitude of factors converged to help foster the almost simultaneous emergence of environmental movements across the world in the years around 1970. On one hand, technological advancement had endowed humankind with the ability to reshape its environment with unprecedented scale and speed, and environmental problems that had previously seemed local increasingly began to take on regional, transnational, and even global dimensions. At the same time, scientific advancement shed new light on the fragility of ecosystems and their vulnerability to man-made pollutants. On the other hand, the rise of new visual media, especially television, made the world seem like a much smaller, and shared, space, and citizens around the world began to demonstrate much greater interest in events far from their local environments. Even the Moon landings contributed to growing environmental consciousness by providing photographs of Earth from the Moon, offering up the new perspective of the world as a tiny, fragile blue marble in a vast, lifeless void. In addition, the years around 1970 also coincided with both the emergence of large, grassroots transnational nongovernmental organizations, as well as stateless, truly multinational corporations who in their ceaseless quest for profits were no longer beholden or accountable to local communities or even individual nations; the former provided the means to create a new type of global movement, while the latter provided the most convenient targets in opposition to which such a movement might coalesce.

Understanding the impact of environmental thinking on international relations since 1970 requires examining the environmental policies and interactions of the great industrial nations of the Asia-Pacific rim, especially the United States, China, and Japan. For much of the time period in question, these three nations have been among the world’s largest economies and its top environmental polluters. In recent years, these three nations have also been the three world leaders in promoting and developing green energy solutions. Moreover, these three nations, along with the European Union, have been the crucial actors on the world stage in either promoting or stymieing international efforts to cooperatively address environmental issues of global concern.

Given their varying positions in the worldwide economy and the international system, the emergence of environmentalism in these three nations followed somewhat divergent trajectories. In Japan and the United States, long simmering dissatisfaction with the less salutary results of heavy industrialization and the activism and new social consciousness of the 1960s generation were readily channeled toward a new environmental consciousness. Many American environmentalists trace the origin of their movement to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the fall of 1962, but a Japanese edition of the work had already appeared by 1964, and was the first translation of the book into a non-European language. (The first Chinese-language edition would not appear until 1979.)

In Japan, a series of prominent industrial pollution cases, most notably the “Big Four” pollution-related diseases (yon daikōgaibyō), comprising “Minamata Disease,” caused by mercury poisoning, “Niigata Disease,” also caused by mercury poisoning, “Itai-Itai Disease” (literally “ouch-ouch” disease), caused by cadmium poisoning, and “Yokkaichi Asthma,” caused by air pollution, helped elevate environmental consciousness nationwide over the course of the 1960s. Finally in 1970, after decades of corporate cover-ups and government denials, the so-called “Pollution Diet” passed 14 environmental protection laws in one session, leaving Japan with what were at the time the most stringent environmental regulations of any nation on Earth. The following year, Japan’s Environmental Agency commenced operations. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, land, air, and water pollution dramatically declined, as Japan transitioned from a nation widely viewed as one of the world’s most polluted, to a nation that by the 1990s was widely hailed as one of the world’s cleanest.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the first Earth Day was celebrated in several major cities on April 22, 1970. That October, one of the first and most prominent global environmentalist NGOs, Greenpeace, kicked off with a benefit concert in Vancouver headlined by Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and backed by Joan Baez. By the following year Earth Day was already an international event, as United Nations Secretary General U Thant led a worldwide celebration by ringing the Japanese-made UN Peace Bell and speaking eloquently of all of humankind sharing one “Spaceship Earth.”

Around the same time several prominent environmental catastrophes in the U.S, most notably a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California in 1969, and the iconic catching fire of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland that same year, combined with the Earth Day upswell of popular pressure to convince the conservative Richard Nixon administration to oversee the passage of a series of sweeping environmental protection laws, including the 1972 Clean Air Act, the 1972 Clean Water Act, and the 1973 Endangered Species Act, as well as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by executive fiat in 1970.

In contrast to Japan and the United States, China was slower to embrace environmentalist modes of thought. In 1970, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was still embroiled in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and the militaristic rhetoric of a “war on nature” still predominated. Although the PRC, newly rehabilitated as a member of the United Nations, did take part in the first significant international conference on environmental issues—the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm—for most of the 1970s the Chinese government largely adhered to Mao Zedong’s “war on nature” line, passing no significant environmental regulations of any kind.

It was not until the reformist Deng Xiaoping gained firm control of China in 1978 that the state began to pay greater attention to environmental issues. China’s first environmental protection statute, the Environmental Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China, was passed in 1979, and in 1982, the Fifth National People’s Congress adopted a revised constitution, which for the first time committed the Chinese national government to “protect the environment and natural resources by controlling pollution and its societal impact, ensuring the sensible use of natural resources, and safeguarding rare animals and plants.” That same year, China’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) was established.

In contrast to the concentration of environmental regulation enforcement at the national level in Japan and even in the federalist United States, the PRC, normally thought of as a highly centralized state, implemented a highly decentralized environmental protection regime in which enforcement of environmental regulations was delegated to local authorities who, as an incentive, were allowed to retain 20 percent of any fines levied. This system proved highly ineffective, as fines for environmental violations remained low and in practice most localities found it far more lucrative to overlook or even actively lure polluting industries as a part of an environmental “race to the bottom” than to police and fine them.

Meanwhile, over the course of the 1980s, worldwide thinking about humankind’s relationship to its environment was expanding and globalizing in a variety of ways. A series of prominent man-made environmental catastrophes, perhaps most notably the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in 1986 and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in 1989, underscored the increasing scale of humankind’s capacity to inflict destruction on the environment as well as the growing potential for environmental disasters to spread beyond national boundaries. The 1980s also witnessed increasing media coverage of two ongoing environmental phenomena—the expanding “hole” in the ozone layer and anthropogenic global warming—which fueled a growing perception that environmental degradation might not only threaten individual lives, species, or regions, but might also fundamentally threaten all life on Earth. In this light, environmental issues increasingly came to be viewed as global issues that might need to be addressed with global solutions. This view ultimately resulted in the formation of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 and a series of international conferences intended to foster worldwide collaboration to combat global warming.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Japan in particular sought to take full advantage of the globalization of the environment by positioning itself as a world leader on environmental issues. At the time, Japan was riding high on the seemingly inexhaustible wealth generated by the Bubble Economy, and was seeking ways to increase its prestige and influence on the international stage. The end of the Cold War in 1990–91 seemed an opportunity for new nations to rise to the fore, and Japan’s leaders perceived environmental protection as a rapidly emerging international norm that might be leveraged to increase Japan’s international prestige.

Popular support for the stringently anti-war Article 9 of Japan’s postwar constitution prevented Japanese leaders from seeking traditional power and influence based on shows of military force, as painfully underscored by what Japan’s conservatives saw as their humiliating inability to send troops to the Gulf War. Exercising environmental leadership through funding environmental science, green technology development and transfer, environmentally focused economic aid, and leadership roles in international conferences on environmental issues seemed to be the next best alternative, and an agenda that also dovetailed nicely with traditional concerns among Japanese conservatives for increasing Japan’s energy self-sufficiency as well as the interests of Japan’s deeply entrenched nuclear power industry. Japan’s efforts to become a world leader on environmental issues resulted in the nation’s successful bid to host the major international climate change mitigation conference that resulted in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

However, Japan’s efforts to win recognition as a leader on environmental issues were not a total success. Although polls in other nations have shown a rising trajectory in approval of Japan’s environmental record since the 1970s, views remain mixed thanks to the Japanese government’s continued support of commercial whaling. In 1982, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) voted to establish an international moratorium on whaling, but in 1986, Japan resumed commercial whaling under an exemption for so-called “scientific” whaling, typically aiming to kill around 2,000 whales per season. Although Japan was not the only nation to engage in whaling after the moratorium (Iceland and Norway also did so), the size of Japan’s catch, the fact that Japanese whalers targeted endangered species as well as the plentiful minke whale, and the fact that Japanese whalers traveled far afield from their home waters, made Japanese whaling a magnet for worldwide opprobrium. In particular, Australia and New Zealand developed lucrative whale-watching industries, and the Japanese whaling fleet’s habit of sailing in southern waters close to Australia and New Zealand led to constant friction with those two nations. Meanwhile, the Japanese government, at the behest of bureaucrats in the Fisheries Agency, engaged in a thus far unsuccessful decades-long drive to get the IWC to reverse the moratorium, even going so far as to bribe a variety of landlocked African nations with foreign aid. The issue has become a major cause for international environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace, and even resulted in an exploitationist American reality TV show, Whale Wars (2008–present), about the bumbling attempts of an environmentalist group to harass the Japanese whalers.

Although Japan’s post-moratorium whaling program was originally intended to protect a domestic industry, the economics of whaling changed dramatically in the ensuing decades, such that in recent years several Japanese whaling concerns have gone bankrupt, and even the lone surviving government-backed whaling corporation has been unable to sell much of its annual catch. Despite Japan’s financial woes in recent years, the whaling program, with its budget of “only” around $20 million per year, has actually proven too cheap to kill off, especially given conservative attachment to the whaling program as a symbol of Japanese nationalism in the face of foreign hectoring.

In contrast to Japan’s embrace of most environmental causes from the 1980s onward, the United States played an increasingly ambivalent role in the setting of international environmental policy. The rapid expansion of environmental protection regulations and programs under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations in the 1970s produced a conservative backlash and resulted in the Reagan administration’s aggressive efforts to impede new regulation or even roll back existing regulations, as well as symbolic gestures such as Reagan’s removal of the solar heating panels Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.

Although efforts to further protect the environment regained some momentum under the administrations of George H.W. Bush and especially Bill Clinton, globalization itself was increasingly hindering the progress of the U.S. environmental movement. With the neoliberal consensus of the 1990s leading to ever expanding free trade, even a nation as wealthy as the United States was not entirely immune to the effects of a worldwide race to the bottom in terms of trading environmental degradation for economic growth, as multinational corporations increasingly proved willing and able to shop for lower regulations and export production to regions more willing to overlook pollution.

Within this context, American conservatives were increasingly successful in portraying an inverse relationship between environmental regulations and American jobs. Although Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, there seemed little hope that it would be approved by the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate. Meanwhile, American environmentalists increasingly became aware of globalization’s undermining of the environmentalist agenda, and certain elements in the movement aligned themselves with other movements such as the labor movement to oppose free trade, as most famously exemplified by the massive protests in Seattle in 1999 against a meeting of the World Trade Organization.

Compared to the United States and Japan, China was relatively unengaged with international environmental policy in the 1990s. In damage-control mode following the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, China’s leaders under Deng Xiaoping placed an ever greater emphasis on economic expansion after 1990, leading to two decades of unprecedented breakneck economic growth. Within this context, concern for environmental protection largely fell by the wayside. Nevertheless, some small strides were made, especially in the realm of popular consciousness. As economic imperatives brought ordinary Chinese into contact with the rest of the world, prevailing notions of environmental protection began to seep into domestic Chinese discourse. In 1994, the very first Chinese environmental NGO, Friends of Nature (zhiran zhi you), was established, although they had to register as a “cultural group” because the single slot allotted for environmental NGOs in China’s nascent NGO registration scheme had already been awarded to a sham group backed by the government. Friends of Nature would later go on to establish dozens of local environmental NGOs around China (owing to a rule forbidding Chinese NGOs from establishing local branches in order to limit their influence). Meanwhile, as China’s role in world affairs expanded in tandem with its economic expansion, the Chinese government increasingly came under both internal and external pressure to conform to international environmental norms, at least at the level of rhetoric if not in practice, and as the Chinese government increasingly indulged in the rhetoric of environmental protection, Chinese citizens increasingly came to expect and demand action commensurate with the rhetoric.

In the United States, the victory of George W. Bush in the fiercely contested 2000 presidential election brought a decisive end to any lingering hope that the United States might join the Kyoto Protocol. Enabled by an acquiescent Bush administration and led by the virulently anti-environmentalist House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the one-time owner of a pest extermination firm who had originally been drawn into politics in the 1970s after the EPA banned the pesticide used by his firm and made fighting environmental regulation his life’s work, the Republican majority in Congress embarked on the most aggressive rollback of environmental regulations yet seen in an advanced, industrialized nation.

On the international stage, the United States and China tacitly worked together throughout the 2000s to scuttle any chance of a major international agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Although no formal agreement was ever signed, and both nations retained sufficient plausible deniability to blame repeated failures on the other, as two of the three largest economies in the world and the two largest polluters in the world by a wide margin, the two nations each benefitted from their mutual intransigence in that the repeated failure of either to agree to hard carbon targets allowed the other to cite the specter of economic ruin were they to unilaterally pursue carbon emissions reduction while the other did not.

Meanwhile, under the guidance of legendary Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Global Transformations—Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
• Part II Trans-Pacific History and Memory
• Part III Culture and Internationalism
• Index