Hideaki Asahi (Former Professor, University of Tokyo)
With the launch of this website, I feel both honored and somewhat unsure about being asked to contribute to its inaugural set of columns. The honor is self-evident — yet I also wondered what sort of piece I should write. Since the intention behind this column is to be more of an “essay,” I decided not to adhere too rigidly to the conventional academic format. Instead, I chose a freer approach, drawing on various topics and episodes to shape my reflections.
If this short piece helps spark readers’ interest in the upcoming Owada Chair lectures — and even awakens some curiosity about the fields they touch upon — I will count myself truly fortunate.
The launch of the joint program between the University of Tokyo and Leiden University was repeatedly delayed by the unforeseen circumstances of the pandemic. At long last, however, the first session will finally take place this coming May in Leiden. As someone involved in this endeavor, I can hardly express the depth of my joy.
My modest role in helping to establish this memorial lecture series goes back to two experiences: serving under Hisashi Owada when he was Japan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations during my years in the diplomatic service, and later standing at the lectern myself on the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo, Owada’s alma mater. (When it comes to addressing him, of course, there are many formal titles — Ambassador, Judge, and Professor. Yet ever since I became involved in this academic program, I have been under strict instruction to call him, quite simply, “Owada-san.”
This is an English translation of a piece with the same title, originally written in Japanese on April 8, 2022, and first published in the column of this website.
- Diplomat / Lawyer: Hisashi Owada and Elihu Root
In Owada’s short essay titled “The Purpose of the Owada Chair,” featured at the front of this website (hereafter, “the essay”), one finds the same concerns he had already articulated more sharply in his lead article “International Relations and International Law,” published in August 2021 in the commemorative volume International Relations and the Rule of Law (Tokyo: Shinzansha). There he laid out the guiding principles of this lecture series while also distilling the essence of his life as a diplomat, lawyer, and scholar.
At present, I am absorbed in translating a book, and in doing so I encountered, for the first time, Elihu Root, the former U.S. Secretary of State who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913 for his contributions to the development of international law. Root is, in fact, the very figure Owada has spoken of as his mentor. And indeed, both in thought and in the way Root devoted his life to international law — as well as in his ability to find the best possible diplomatic solutions amid harsh realities shaped by both power and norms — the parallels with Owada are striking.
Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank, has written about Root. America, a model democracy since its founding, has lived under the constant pressure of imperial and authoritarian powers. Yet Root sought not merely to ensure survival in a world of power politics, but also to open the way toward a more stable order under international law. Zoellick’s perspective on Root is sympathetic, and Zoellick himself has written: “American diplomacy cannot — and should not — rely only on power politics.”
I was fortunate enough to contribute to the same commemorative volume, with a piece entitled “Wisdom to Avoid the ‘Thucydides Trap.’” In it I attempted what I called a hasty “theorization of Hisashi Owada,” but beneath that lay the influence of Zoellick. Zoellick and I have been close friends for over fifty years, ever since we were roommates at a liberal arts college on the U.S. East Coast, where I was sent on an overseas in-service training program soon after joining the Foreign Ministry.
Zoellick has also known Owada for many years, and both men sought to bridge the divide between international law and international relations, putting that commitment into practice in diplomacy. Their vision and efforts are clearly visible in the 1992 joint declaration by the Japanese and American leaders, the Tokyo Declaration on the U.S.–Japan Global Partnership, which redefined the bilateral relationship in the context of global governance after the Cold War and significantly advanced Japan’s international role. In the words of Owada’s essay, this was an attempt “to provide a framework for an international order capable of responding to the new, changing realities of the twenty-first century, in which a true global community has emerged.” One can discern in their efforts the shadow of Root, who had labored in much the same spirit a century earlier.
For those interested, I would encourage you to read my contribution mentioned above, which traces this history in more detail. And I would ask you to reflect on why I chose to title it “Wisdom to Avoid the ‘Thucydides Trap’” — and what I hoped to convey by that choice.
- What Can We Learn from the Ukraine Crisis?
For today’s students, graduate students, and research fellows, there is much to be learned from the questions raised by the ongoing war in Ukraine — a conflict that has riveted the world’s attention. Entering the twenty-first century, most assumed that the kinds of wars fought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would no longer occur. Yet in that climate of thought, this war erupted. Even though the information available to us remains limited, the conflict nonetheless offers valuable insights into what a “post-Ukraine international order” might look like.
As Owada’s essay reminds us, much depends on which stage of international society one has in mind, but ultimately the iron law of deterrence — that “power must be met with power” — remains unchanged. At the same time, when the United States and NATO, fearful of nuclear escalation (and mindful of the issue of NATO’s post–Cold War expansion), failed to prevent Russia’s resort to force, one has to wonder whether, while caution was of course necessary, bolder, more skillful judgment and more effective action might not have been possible. On the ground in Ukraine, the reality is tragic: military operations have produced a humanitarian catastrophe, with more than four million Ukrainians forced to flee abroad. Innocent civilians and the vulnerable are, as always, the greatest victims. Reports of war crimes have only deepened the crisis, and despite ongoing ceasefire talks, no resolution is in sight.
Meanwhile, strategists contemplating a “post-Ukraine international order” focus on a weakened Russia, cut off from the U.S.-led global economic and financial system, and debate how that shift will affect the balance of power. History’s warnings — the “tragedy of Versailles” in the case of Germany — are invoked, while attention also turns to India’s willingness to buy cheap Russian oil and to China’s pledge of friendship with Moscow.
In truth, the U.S. and NATO response to Russia has been distinctive for its asymmetrical and largely non-military character. On one side stands a great power wielding nuclear threats and controlling information; on the other, a smaller nation countering with highly effective portable weapons on the battlefield and broadcasting its cause to the world through social media. Economic power, too — rooted in networks of finance, trade, and energy — has emerged as a tool of security policy. In particular, the United States, where resistance to foreign interventions and “endless wars” runs deep, has taken the step of weaponizing finance on an unprecedented scale, building on the dollar’s role as the world’s key currency since 9/11. How far this will go remains to be seen. At the same time, the deliberate disclosure of intelligence to shape global opinion suggests that information warfare has entered a new phase.
The United Nations’ collective security system, built on the veto power of the five permanent members, has been paralyzed in the face of Russia’s invasion — a fact evident even without President Zelensky’s denunciations. As Joseph Nye has observed, the veto was designed to act as a fuse: if the world were to unite in war against a nuclear-armed great power, the “entire house would burn down.” This, unfortunately, remains as true today as it was at the UN’s founding, underscoring
the limits of any universal system of collective security. Beyond the exercise of collective self-defense, there seems to be no substitute — a point Owada’s essay also notes, warning of the danger of slipping back toward the Hobbesian “state of nature,” where man is wolf to man. For students of international relations, this is a profound dilemma.
When the Security Council proved paralyzed, the UN General Assembly held an emergency special session and adopted a resolution condemning Russia by a vote of 141 to 5, with 35 abstentions. This amounted to a two-thirds majority of UN member states, yet by population it represented only about half of humanity — a sobering fact noted in reports. In the Human Rights Council vote that followed to suspend Russia’s membership, support was even weaker. Behind these numbers lies the reality that the priorities of developing countries do not always align with those of advanced economies. The ongoing pandemic, the ballooning debt burdens exacerbated by the war, and the crises in energy and food are exacting a heavy toll on middle- and low-income countries — precisely those economies that had become one of the pillars of global growth in the twenty-first century. When Europeans say “Ukraine is fighting for us,” one has to ask: if that “us” includes only half the world, what then? Development remains a fundamental challenge that must unite the world as a whole.
Finally, Francis Fukuyama has observed that political science lags behind other social sciences in analyzing how actors make decisions. This has left it open to influence from neoclassical economics, with its emphasis on rational utility maximization, and from sociology, with its focus on the unconscious shaping of behavior by society. In his early book Trust, Fukuyama even devoted an intriguing chapter to what he called the “20 percent solution.” These questions tie back to the “internal, external, and normative factors underlying situations” that Owada’s essay highlights, and they are directly relevant to understanding the motivations of autocrats — in this case, President Putin — where geopolitics and psychology are inseparable. Much more research will be needed.
All of these, in one way or another, may well become themes of study for readers drawn to this lecture series.
- Theory and Practice: Learning from History
My first encounter with the social sciences — and with their methods — came after I entered the University of Tokyo, where, as a freshman, I took unforgettable introductory lectures at the Komaba campus from two leading authorities on political science, Professors Jirō Kamishima and Jun’ichi Kyogoku. Since the social sciences lack the laboratory experiments on which the natural sciences rely for verification, I was drawn to the idea of looking to history as a substitute. Mark Twain once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Still, I soon learned that history is full of traps of discontinuity.
That is why, even after moving on to the Hongo campus, I immersed myself in the classics through the Law Faculty’s politics track. I began with Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and in my seminar chose Professor Kan’ichi Fukuda’s reading of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. More than anything else, what I took away was not a theory of conservatism as such, but a deep appreciation of how political order is born from the recurring rhythms of human social life and the accumulated patterns of human action.
The following year, I had hoped to take Professor Masao Maruyama’s lectures on the history of Japanese political thought — and to apply for his seminar as well. But he fell ill during the campus upheavals of the late 1960s and never again offered courses or seminars in the Law Faculty. After the university shut down for a time during the conflict and later reopened with an accelerated “catch-up” curriculum, nearly half of my Komaba classmates chose to repeat a year. I was among them.
It was during that extended year that I made up my mind, studied hard, and passed the foreign service examination, entering the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Later, when I returned to Komaba to teach, I would often cite Joseph Nye when speaking about power: it is not something you define or measure, but something you experience — like love. I came to feel this most keenly when, in actual diplomatic practice, I confronted the very theme of “the divide between international law and international relations,” or, put differently, “the interface between international law and international relations.”
- Theory and Practice: Feeling Power in the Midst of Revolution
From 1980 to 1982, I spent three years in Iran, in the turbulent aftermath of the Khomeini Revolution. The Shah had fled into exile, and the revolution was accomplished with surprisingly little bloodshed. But as soon as that brief thaw — the so-called “Spring of Tehran” — was over, a second struggle began: a bitter contest among the various political forces that had united only around the goal of toppling the Shah’s imperial regime.
What I witnessed then remains seared into my memory: strange and haunting scenes from the midst of revolution. The largest of the armed militias — later to become the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) — set up bunkers across the cities, apparently to protect themselves from urban guerrilla ambushes rather than to maintain public order. These fortified positions, alien to the surrounding landscape, looked like something out of a war zone. Orders circulated requiring cars out at night to drive with their windows rolled down and their interiors lit, to prove that nothing suspicious was hidden inside. I still recall the fright of once forgetting this rule just after my arrival and nearly being caught by warning shots in the dark.
Gun battles in the streets, notices of public executions, bombings, the failed attempt by U.S. special forces to rescue hostages at the American embassy, the ever-watchful eyes of revolutionary authorities who suspected Western diplomats of espionage, the outbreak of war with Iraq, the nightly wail of air-raid sirens, the constant work of evacuating and protecting Japanese nationals — all this made for a life so abnormal that even a week ahead could not be foreseen. Amid that tension, I found myself groping in the dark, asking what others in similar situations in the past had thought and how they had acted. It was then that I recalled my student days reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, as I mentioned earlier. I managed to get hold of a copy — and devoured it.
Through that experience, I came to feel viscerally the immense cost of trying to maintain public order through nothing but raw force. At the same time, I knew the opposite pole as well: stable order built on voluntary consent and allegiance — the kind of order we take for granted in our own societies. Professor Yoshitada Oka’s lectures (especially his Political Science, Iwanami Shinsho) had taught me to think of these as two ends of a spectrum: “situational order” and “institutionalized order.” In the context of world politics, one might translate these as order imposed by power and order sustained by law — or, in the words of Owada’s essay, an Apologia approach and a Utopia approach.
In my own lectures, I often argued that because international society lacks a central authority like the state in domestic society — what Hedley Bull called an “anarchical society” — it must be understood as a political space where these two forms of order coexist in a mottled pattern.
On this point, I often cited the late Professor Masataka Kosaka, author of International Politics (Chuko Shinsho), which I assigned as required reading. He expressed the idea this way — in terms that echo Elihu Root’s own conclusions:
“All order is both a system of power and a system of values. Even within our own nation, order is not merely defined by the reach of central authority. It exists because the people share a basic system of values. Without that, power alone would amount either to despotism or, as Kant warned, to anarchy. It is only when people are bound together by invisible threads of common practices and shared values that institutions such as the state can take shape. Yet even if such a system of values develops, order will not exist without coercion by power. To put it precisely: without the support of coercion by power, there is no common system of values.”
- Conclusion: “The Interface Between International Law and International Relations”
Here I will bring my own reflections and analytical framework to a close. But in his essay, Owada looks further ahead. He reminds us that “we stand at a turning point, moving toward the century of global society,” and through this memorial lecture series he points to what lies beyond. His method, too, is strikingly fresh: he calls for “a precise understanding and analysis of situations, grounded in an interdisciplinary approach and based on a more comprehensive perspective.” Both his intellectual stance and his ambition are remarkable.
Confronted with such a grand perspective — one shaped by decades of scholarship and the practice of diplomacy — I cannot help but feel humbled. Yet I also wish to encourage younger readers to take up the challenge of exploring the theme of “the interface between international law and international relations.”
