The Right Stuff

In order to understand the unique value of the political unity that post-Second World War Europe achieved in a short period of time and its appropriateness as a model for the rest of the world, let us start by turning our sights East, to what was going on in the People’s Republic of China in mid-September 2010. Protesters had been gathering for days outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing and Japanese consulates in Shanghai and elsewhere. Tempers were flaring. This was not just because of the anniversary of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in north-east China in 1931. Anti-Japanese feelings, always existing below the surface, saw their flame rekindled after the arrest of Chinese captain Zhan Qixiong, whose fishing boat collided with Japanese coastguard vessels in the waters surrounding a few islands the Japanese call Senkaku and the Chinese call Diaoyu (which mean the same thing, ‘fishing islands’). These barren rocks, a few hundred kilometers west of Okinawa, are the object of territorial claims by both countries as well as by Taiwan. They were annexed by Japan in 1895 just before the end of the first Sino-Japanese war, as the Qing empire ceded Taiwan to Japan,1 a move denounced as illegitimate in China. Chinese fishing boats based in the coastal waters of Fujian province facing Taiwan often operate as convenient substitutes for the Chinese Navy; so the Japanese Navy keeps a close eye on them.