ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the types of international actors the EU and Japan have become over the past twenty years, by identifying those milestones and experiences which shaped bilateral relations up to 2010. The first half of the chapter assesses the institutional widening and deepening of the EU, in order to illustrate how it has moved from the founding treaty of the 1950s and gained a distinct legal personality within the global trading order, and how the European Commission has come to represent the Union in many areas of negotiation. It also assesses the ways in which discussions over the UK’s planned exit from the EU affected the Union after 2016, as well as considering the ways in which the EU developed as a normative power. The second half then outlines Japan’s foreign policy status from its post-war dependence on the United States to the tumultuous changes to Japan’s domestic economic and political structures throughout the 2000s. It also highlights debates around Japan’s human security agenda and how it faces new challenges with Prime Minister’s Abe’s pursuit of a new constitution.
