Toward Northeast Asian Community

By Heo Mane

Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has made a series of statements that seemed to signal a move from the U.S.-first policy to a Northeast Asia-oriented policy.

On this occasion, Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada proposed making a common history textbook covering Korea, Japan and China.

The Lee Myung Bak government welcomed this idea. If the idea were to be realized as proposed, it would set up a solid basis of maximum trust and cooperation, which would certainly help create a Northeast Asian Community.

Starting with the breeding of interdependence and globalization since the 1990s, world politics has been plunged into multilateralism.

Multilateralism is a wide range of interdependent and globalized cooperation and dialogue with regional strength in which divergent transnational issues can be tacked with less cost, less effort and less suffering than at the national level.

Nation states should, however, clearly raise their identifiable voices in cooperation and dialogue. Such a move can result in sustainable and greater economic development between emerged and emerging economies.

Any biased policies by stronger powers imposed upon small and medium-sized nations can no longer work. In this sense, the recent evolvement of G20 is a positive sign for multilateralism.

For example, the continuation of climate change, the rapid spread of influenza A (H1N1), the proliferation of nuclear weapons, continued terrorism and massacres and the chronic poverty problem are no longer in the hands of states.

But in efforts at establishing a Northeast Asian Community, multilateralism is not sufficient. The right perception of history among Korea, Japan and China should be fostered.

History is clearly compared to a master compass which reflects the past once again with a candid mind and future design with in-depth wisdom. The problem is how Korea, Japan and China's contemporary historians can create a common textbook for common education for their people.

Briefly looking back on the recent past, their historians have been faced with more problems than easy-going measures for solutions to the interpretations of big and distorted historical events.

In 2002, Korea and Japan, however, established a common research history team, studying ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary histories.

But this project didn't bring about satisfactory results. Despite this first failure, the two countries restarted the project in 2007, but it has stalled thus far.

The failure is due to the different interpretations of historical events such as the disputes over the Dokdo Islets and the compensation of sex slaves on the one hand, and the Nanjing massacre and the incorporation of Goguryeo history into Chinese history on the other.

When viewed from E.H. Carr's point of history that ``the past historians study is not a simply dead one,'' the past of the three countries may well be, at present, construed as dead.

Thus the dead past in Northeast Asia does not give the people of the three nations any lessons. The people must face their history as it stands so that they can learn the true meaning of it.

Carr still reminds us that ``the facts of history never come to us pure, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.''

With these expressions, he tries to emphasize both the facts of history and the minds of historians. This means that an accurate combination of both alone can show future generations the original significance of history.

Given this softening regional mood, however, their historians' role is not to simply accept existing interpretations of distorted history, but to reinterpret it in accordance with the spirit of the present.

Their role should thus aim to connect the past, present and future. If they fail to do this, they fail to perform their primary mission as historians.

This implies that the historians in the three countries also fail to provide their youths with a right master compass which in turn will shed light on a bright and prosperous future in the 21st century. Accordingly they would probably choose to become slaves to history itself.

As a result, the lack of the innovative concept of history in the three will in no way lead to the road of a Northeast Asian Community. When historians become creators of innovative history, they will lay the foundation for the setting up of a regional community.

In this context, they should not be caught with the easy and biased interpretations of history, leading to individual chauvinism that breeds evil which harms the concept of regional community.

A living history alone, not a dead one, can imbue the people with the ambition and wisdom to be able to move together toward a Northeast Asian Community in the spirit of greater regional unity and cooperation for a better 21st century rather than the past century caught-up in chauvinism.

The New History Study Team consisting of elite Japanese scholars has been pushing ahead with their independent history stand based upon liberal history. The team is aspiring to construe history beyond the traditional perception of it.

In this historical stand, the team has denied the history of Tokyo's Military Judgment and that of the Soviet Union-China's International Judgment. In accordance with its points of view, the team has denied historically distorted big events as pointed out above. It is, of course, a chauvinistic point of view of history.

From a historical point of view, both imperialists and chauvinists were easily plunged into a ``one nation history,'' destroying regional peace first and then world peace. For example, Nazism, Japanese militarism and Pan-Slavism did so. Their assertions caused an untold tragedy to humanity.

Historians of the three nations in the era of multilateralism must pay attention to how the European Community has contributed to integrating the European region; for example, France and Germany succeeded in writing a common history over 17 years, while Germany and Poland finished writing a common history textbook over 30 years.

A new perception of history provided these peoples with an engine capable of pushing toward integration. What the EU is today owes entirely to the fresh concept of history in postwar Europe.

The Northeast Asian Community born from the common education of history is, among other things, aiming toward creating a common market with a customs union. Once a common market operates, it will gradually need its abolition.

As it is abolished, a single market will be eventually created, providing another master compass that can approach integration sector by sector.

One day, sectorial integration will move toward regional integration in Northeast Asia, which will be supported by transnational organizations rather than national ones. Leaders of the three should set up an Asian Monetary Fund, which will be the most solid master compass to strengthen the Northeast Asian Community.

In short, a combination of fresh perception of history, multilateralism, and regionalism will certainly help foster clear and tangible concepts for a Northeast Asian Community. But it must be kept in mind that this will be a long and rocky road to reach the point achieved in post-war Europe.

The writer is a professor emeritus at Pusan National University in Busan. He is also president of the Korea-EU Center. He can be reached at mane398@naver.com.