ABSTRACT
While East Asia has its share of flash-points, from the Korean Peninsula to the South China Sea, the region has been relatively free from large-scale combat in the 1990s. Under these circumstances, two opposing views of the future of East Asian security relations have emerged. The states of East Asia seem still to be in the process of adjusting to the greater unpredictability of post-Cold War international relations. In this new environment, issues of identity can be as crucial as questions of national interest. This chapter analyses the way in which these senses of identity have affected the actions of the key players in East Asia, and assesses future challenges and possibilities in the search for regional security. Japan is often seen as caught between two conflicting identities: Asian and Western. Since the mid-nineteenth century, two competing schools of thought have dominated Japanese views of the outside world: the ‘Asianist’, and the ‘Euro-Americanist’.
