ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the normal nation discourse became the dominant security discourse in Japan in the 1990s. What enabled this discursive rise to dominance was the major dislocation of the Gulf War in 1990 and 1991. Japan’s response to the Gulf War was framed as a major policy failure due to the country’s inability to provide military personnel for the US-led international coalition fighting Iraqi forces. Despite the fact that it had made significant financial contributions, Japan was severely rebuked by the international community. The chapter argues that, as the Yoshida Doctrine discourse failed to make sense of the virulent criticism of free-riding and checkbook diplomacy, the normal nation discourse used the ‘Gulf War trauma’ to show that the Yoshida Doctrine discourse was based on principles that were untenable in the post-Cold War period. The normal nation discourse succeeded in establishing a consensus that Japan had to begin to make ‘international contributions.’
The second half of the chapter describes the decline in significance of the neutralist discourse. The neutralist discourse suffered a severe blow when the Japan Socialist Party (JSP), its principal proponent, abandoned its policy of ‘unarmed neutrality’ and began to adopt the frames and rhetoric of the normal nation discourse. Its compromises on longstanding principles left the JSP unable to satisfy its old voters but also failed to appeal to new ones. The demise of the JSP relegated the neutralist discourse to insignificance. The chapter roughly spans the 1990s and derives much of its empirical material from the Budget Committee debates of February 1993.
