Between “Washington Consensus” and “Asian Way”

Numerous contemporary analyses in the field of international relations have been focusing on the discourses of political-intellectual elites within a state in order to understand and explain foreign policy making. The underlying assumption of those so-called constructivist studies holds that national interests and foreign policies are determined by socially constructed national identities.The Japanese nation offers a fine example of such constructivist reasoning. In fact, Japan's political-intellectual elites have ever since the days of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) engaged in a vigorous discourse on whether Japan belongs—spiritually, economically and politically—to the Eastern or Western hemisphere. Participants in this dispute have attempted to shape Japan's identity along their idealized vision and pushed the country in one of both directions—or opted for a deliberate middle way.By scrutinizing a sample of newspaper commentaries, this article follows the Japanese debate on national identity in the context of the East Asian financial and economic crisis of 1997/1998 which illustrated and extrapolated Japan's East-West dichotomy in a special way. The newspaper authors' notion of national identity and their subsequent quests for political action will be presented and grouped with the goal of identifying potential implications for Japanese foreign policy making.