ABSTRACT
Introduction At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Japan became increasingly vocal about the importance of promoting and protecting what Tokyo considers to be fundamental values, such as human rights and democracy, in all parts of the world. It now also explicitly mentions Asia as a priority region – something that it tended to avoid in the 1980s and 1990s.2 At the beginning of the century, Japan, as a major provider of foreign aid, announced that its Official Development Assistance (ODA) would prioritize assistance to developing countries that make active efforts to pursue “democratization, and the protection of human rights” (MOFA 2003, section I-2-1). Japan also imposed upon itself a set of principles regulating eligibility to receive Japanese aid, most notably the “democracy and human rights principle”, to pay full attention to “efforts for promoting democratization . . . and the situation regarding the protection of basic human rights and freedoms in the recipient country” (MOFA 2003, section II-4).3 However, while the turn of the century saw Japan become increasingly comfortable with the idea of human rights and democracy as universally applicable, normative values that should be internalized across Southeast Asia, Japan has also been happy to explicitly link national and strategic interests with foreign aid and development cooperation. In the National Security Strategy of 2013 (MOFA 2013a) and the Development Cooperation Charter adopted in February 2015 (MOFA 2015a), Tokyo called for a more strategic utilization of ODA in order to better serve national interests. Consequently, ODA is being linked with the ability to contribute proactively to peace and security, particularly in East and Southeast Asia. This chapter analyses the potential implications of Japan’s “securitization” of ODA for Tokyo’s increasingly vocal normative ambitions regarding the promotion and protection of democratization and basic human rights processes in Southeast Asia. Japan’s compliance with its self-imposed democracy and human rights principle in Southeast Asia is examined, and the priority given to developing countries’ democratization and human rights protection in the region is assessed. The time frame is ODA between 2004 and 2015. Japan has been criticized for arbitrary implementation of the democracy and human rights principle
since its first appearance in the original ODA Charter of 1992, but few if any studies have measured compliance since the revision of the ODA Charter in 2003. In addition, given the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 and Japan’s new-found and increasing advocacy for the AsiaPacific region to be founded on “universal values of freedom, democracy and human rights” in the twenty-first century, Japan may be expected to be more inclined to comply with its self-imposed ODA principles. With Tokyo’s previous pragmatic implementation of the ODA principles in mind, a logical assumption would be that the securitization of ODA and the growing focus on national interests would have negative implications for the more normative ambitions that Japan has signalled for Southeast Asia. This chapter, however, finds that even though Japan has recently upgraded security and national interests as explicit objectives of Japanese ODA, these “policy shifts” are unlikely to have adverse effects on Japan’s normative ambitions. Since Japan generally refrains from engaging in advocacy of normative values where such values are considered controversial, and instead focuses such ambitions on countries that have already started to commit to these values, nothing stands in the way of Tokyo increasing its advocacy while at the same time continuing to provide ODA that serves its national interests.
