ABSTRACT
Among the numerous received ideas about globalisation, one of the most popular is certainly that national economies must adapt to this exogenous and ‘inevitable’ process, in order to survive pressures of international competition and escape decline. In the case of Japan, we may distinguish two senses of this idea which, implicitly, poses the momentous question of the very survival of Japanese capitalism within a globalised world. During the lost decade, it meant that Japan was represented as a ‘victim’ of globalisation, because its institutions adapted to the new international context too slowly and incompletely. After the lost decade, the original question gradually shifted to another one: could Japanese growth based on the export of manufactured products be sustained, when China had the ambition of becoming the factory of the world? It is true that this question was raised not only in Japan and may be reformulated in a more general way: Can countries such as Japan, Korea, Germany and France maintain comparative advantage in the manufacturing sector in the 21st century without significant negative side effects on their domestic labor markets (Lechevalier, forthcoming)?2 It is striking that this question was not posed in Japan in the 1980s; quite the contrary. In fact, two arguments prevail about the relations between globalisation
and Japanese capitalism.3 They share a concern with the crisis in the latter. According to the first argument, classic Japanese capitalism should change because it was not well adapted to a globalised world; it is this difficulty in adapting that explains the long Japanese crisis. As for the second argument, it assumes that the change in the course of globalisation – principally trade-led in a first stage but later becoming more and more financial and liberal – that precipitated the Japanese crisis (Boyer & Souyri, 2001). One aim of this chapter is to show that these two arguments are both equally unsatisfactory, in that they miss an essential fact: Japan itself has participated in the new course of globalisation given the size of its economy and its own earlier withdrawal from the elaboration of its rules. Indeed, globalisation is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon.4 It is characterised by
growing integration in goods markets, capital markets, labour markets and services markets, associated with a movement of liberalising trade and financial flows at the international level, by a deepening of the international
division of labour (manifested in the internationalisation of production, in which multinational enterprises play a key role) and in pressures for convergence of various norms (e.g. corporate governance). It is also, and above all, an assembly of rules, and a kind of global order able to be modified by the actors themselves in function of certain balance of power. This is why, for example, the dominance of finance has become one of the essential factors in globalisation. By preserving an element of mercantilism within globalisation, based on the goal of being competitive, Japan has participated, by default, in changing the course of globalisation towards a more liberal phase, basically because it was not actively engaged in the definition of rules at the global level, despite its status as the world’s second economic power (until it was overtaken by China). As for Japan’s international involvement – or its ‘international regime’, to
refer to one of the five institutional forms in régulation theory – contrary to a common belief, it has experienced profound changes, as much in terms of opening up the economy to the rest of the world as in terms of the evolution of its trade partners. Up to the beginning of the 1990s, Japan seems to have been one of the main beneficiaries of globalisation, in that its growth was driven by exports from 1980, the United States being its largest trade partner. It is in this context that the lack of opening, as well as asymmetric opening by Japan, attracted sharp criticism. We believe that from the end of the 1990s, the ‘opening’ of Japan could no longer be doubted. It was most clearly manifested in the growth of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Japan, as well as imports from China. In fact, the rise in Chinese (and Korean) competition is more evident in certain sectors, at the very moment when China became the primary trade partner of Japan in 2004, if we include Hong Kong (see Figure 7.1). More generally, this chapter seeks to respond to a double series of ques-
tions. The first group of questions is specifically linked to the nature of Japanese international involvement. How has Japan gone from an international regime dominated by a relationship with the United States to an international regime dominated by a relationship with China? Has Japan gone from the status of a ‘winner’ in globalisation to that of a ‘loser’? A second series of questions comes back to the general issue addressed in this book. Was the classic Japanese model ill-adapted to the new phase of globalisation? What has been the impact of globalisation on institutional change in Japan? What margins of manoeuvre does Japan (the Japanese government) have in today’s globalised world? How has globalisation been used to implement neo-liberal policies in Japan? In order to attempt a response to these questions, this chapter focuses on
the evolution of Japan’s international regime. At the same time, going beyond the economic dimension, it is necessary to take into account the evolution of international relations and Japanese policies in this domain. The image of a closed, protectionist Japan that only reacts to external pressure needs to be challenged. Even if it corresponded to a kind of reality in the 1970s, it has not taken account of a major evolution of the system since then.
