The Withering Sword? Explaining the 21st Century Decline in Japanese Military Expenditures
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In light of a changing security context in the past two decades, Japan has taken several steps towards a more military-oriented foreign policy, especially through a high number of peacekeeping operations and contributions to the war efforts led by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite moves in the direction of a foreign policy in line with realist expectations, Japan’s military expenditures have actually been diminishing since 2002. While some scholars continue to assert that Japan is in fact remilitarizing, its declining defense budget in fact translates into a waning military capability that could undermine its rising international military activities. This paper seeks to answer the question: why has Japan been curtailing its military spending and capabilities in the context of a rising threat environment? To unravel this puzzle, this paper analyzes the decline in military expenditures through three different theoretical lenses—alliance theory, domestic politics, and bureaucratic politics. This paper concludes that a bureaucratic politics model best accounts for the observed decline. The forces pressing for fiscal restraint in the bureaucratic bargaining process, embodied by the Ministry of Finance and the Cabinet Office, gained leverage in the bargaining process once their interests became aligned in 2001. The rise to power of Koizumi, and even more significantly the creation of the Council of Economic and Fiscal Policy facilitated the change of direction seen in the budget. Finally, the last chapter of this thesis explores the policy implications of this paper’s findings for the future of Japanese security policy, particularly in the context of the newly elected DPJ government.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 18, 2010 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | de Koning, Philippe B. |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Lipscy, Phillip |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford University |
|---|---|
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
| Subject | Japan |
| Subject | foreign policy |
| Subject | military expenditures |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- de Koning, Philippe B. (2010). The Withering Sword? Explaining the 21st Century Decline in Japanese Military Expenditures. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/sg762kr0738
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- philippedekoning@gmail.com
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