Why and How of this Website

Karel van Wolferen — Mon, 28 May 2012 08:48:50 +0000

Authors wish to reach an audience, the larger the better. I am no exception.
    I think and write about political and economic subjects, about history and social institutions, with the aim of discovering unexpected connections. But because a large amount of what I have written was in books and articles aimed at a Japanese audience (having lived for most of my life in East Asia), this remained hidden from most of you.
    From the turn of the century onward I have written a lot about what was happening in the world’s most powerful country and what that might mean for the rest of us. But much of that remained hidden as well through vagaries of the publishing trade.There are things I have thought about that may interest you. I hope that you will find some of my hobby-horses worth your time as well.
    I am intrigued by the phenomenon of power and how that is exercised and experienced in different political cultures. I am interested in what actively limits our gaining knowledge on important matters, on the widespread phenomenon of studied ignorance, and particularly on the ways that all this shapes our political environment. I will try to comment regularly on political and economic -they should always be seen as parts of the same thing – events as they evolve and connect those with earlier writing of myself and the writing of others. A lot of the time I will just be thinking out loud.
    I will, in a rather wandering way, follow the unfolding of events in areas that interest me, with jottings under the customary dateline, and link subjects that come up with relevant bits and pieces in earlier writing with which I will gradually fill up the reservoir. There are a number of themes that I intend to come back to again and again, when I think they are relevant to the questions and dilemmas of twentyfirst century existence. My focus is on American developments and what these mean for the world. And on the vicissitudes of European integration, especially in the context of how a Europe with a voice could play a beneficent role in the world. I am very interested in the institution of the citizen, and in which manner citizenship remains possible on the supranational level of the European Union.
    The subjects will of course grow in number, and can be found in a list of their own. When opened they will also link to those segments of writing I consider relevant, or to articles on the internet that I think deserve attention.
    A further intention is to carry writings of friends and willing strangers whose ideas I think are worth the broadest audience they can get.
    Of course I want people everywhere to read me, and hope that likeminded will discover this site. But I want specifically to address a European public. It is a curious thing that I can write for a Japanese public and be published, I can do the same for a Dutch public and for an American one. But not specifically for the public that exists in the European Union. There is no public sphere in Europe. Although novels written by authors from European countries do get translated and are traded at the Frankfurt and London book fairs, non-fiction books of the kind I write almost invariably must take an Anglo-American route.
    But eventually a European public sphere is bound to emerge. That hope is shaped by the entirely reasonable expectation that at some time in the not too distant future, a threesome of European publishers – in France, Germany and Britain – will see that there is money to be made with potential best-sellers describing the world and Europe in it to Europeans. I very much want to contribute to this effort, and perhaps this website will contribute to such contribution.

Why Japan And The Unites States

Karel van Wolferen — Mon, 28 May 2012 07:51:29 +0000

    You will notice that as far as countries go I appear preoccupied with the United States and Japan. That has a reason. I lived in Japan for all of my career as a foreign correspondent – as a base for journeys to parts of East and South Asia – as well as roughly a decade before and after that. There is no other country that has been more intellectually stimulating to me. Trying to make sense of its political and social life forced me to conceptualize things that otherwise would have remained routine, taken for granted. I concluded some time ago that Japan, when regarded with serious and sympathic curiosity, offers laboratory-like conditions for viewing the human condition. The political culture that developed during centuries of isolation moulded a society that in many respects appears farthest away from social experience based on European and American habits.
    It is, therefore an ideal place to contemplate human institutions and how they interact. Politically it has achieved the major feat of maintaining very orderly communal life while lacking a center where power is held to account. Without that center of political accountability it is yet fairly democratic in the popular sense of the word. I cannot get enough of it. And I can say the same about Japanese economic organization. It remains the world’s second largest economy, and managed to attain that ranking only a couple of decades after a war that had left it with a devastated industrial base. The manner in which it did this, and in which economic activities continue to flourish, has perplexed most economists who took a close look, and provides compelling arguments against prevailing economic doctrine in Europe and the United States. I made an attempt to put that in perspective in a recent talk, which was published and can be found here in pdf form. I will continue to come back to that subject.
     As for the United States, my preoccupation hardly requires explanation. The way in which much of the world with access to TV sets and the Web followed a year-long battle for the presidency may have had something to do with its soap-opera qualities, but probably more important is the general understanding of our planet’s population that it does matter very much who occupies that “most powerful person in the world” position. The first decade of the twentyfirst century, now nearing its close, has shown how much, strategically and financially, the United States can change things in the world.
    Aside from that, the United States is home for a people whom I admire (most of the time), but who to me appear to be in the midst of moral and political crises that can, as yet, shake up the world some more. Almost all my American friends tend to agree. I am fascinated and concerned and want to continue following this closely. I am of course aware that, unlike the Japanese, Americans on the whole do not take too kindly to what foreigners may have to say about them if that leads to negative interpretations. But, so be it. The United States is far too important to be left to Americans to discuss.
     As for the relationship between these two countries, it deserves all our attention; or at least far more than it has so far received. I cannot find anything in history that resembles it. Here we have the world’s first and second largest industrial powers. But for all intents and purposes Japan is a kind of protectorate of the United States, which has allowed it an existence of “being in the world but not of it”. Most things through which a state is internationally recognized as a state have been carried out by American proxy for much of the post-World-War-II period. But American attempts to help determine political and economic realities inside Japan have failed, even in the six years when the United States occupied the country.
     That odd but fascinating nichibei relationship, as it is known in Japan, should be particularly interesting for Europeans thinking about the possibilities of forming a friendly but independent power on the world stage.

Background Archives - Karel van Wolferen

Why and How of this Website

Why Japan And The Unites States