ABSTRACT
UNTAC was a watershed for a number of actors involved. For the UN it was the largest PKO mounted in its history, embracing unprecedentedly ambitious plans for the administration of an entire country. Created by UNSC Resolution 745 on 28 February 1992, UNTAC cost around US$1.7 billion to implement and deployed over 22,000 military and civilian personnel from over forty-four countries joined by about 1000 international polling station officers and over 50,000 Cambodian staff (for a more detailed description of the UNTAC operation, see Akashi 1993). For the Cambodian nation it symbolised the desire to end the institutionalised violence of recent Cambodian history and the hope that the reconstruction of the nation could be promoted. For Japan, it was the first despatch overseas of the SDF since its creation and the first true test of the PKO Law. As will be explored in this chapter, Japan’s contribution to UNTAC was built upon the foundations of the traditional norms of Japanese foreign policy (as outlined in Chapter 2). These norms were not only liberating in that they encouraged and shaped policy as constitutive norms, but also constraining in defining what was acceptable and unacceptable as regulative norms. As seen in Chapter 4, the regulative power of the norm of anti-militarism began to wane during and after the Second Gulf War, losing some of its concordance to the norm of UN internationalism. During the UNTAC operation the antimilitarist norm can be seen to have come into further conflict with the norm of UN internationalism with implications for the resulting policy.
