Japan's Collective Self-Defense: On Arendt, Sovereignty, and Peace

By Kazue Koishikawa

“The famous sovereignty of political bodies has always been an illusion, which, moreover, can be maintained only by the instruments of violence, that is, with essentially nonpolitical means. Under human conditions, which are determined by the fact that not man but men live on the earth, freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously. Where men wish to be sovereign, as individuals or as organized groups, they must submit to the oppression of the will, be this the individual will with which I force myself, or the ‘general will’ of an organized group. If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.”

-- Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

Arendt posits that freedom and sovereignty cannot coexist politically. As she reasons in Between Past and Future, freedom in its essence is highly or even purely political matter. She thinks that freedom is about bringing something new through human action into the world, a new beginning inexplicable by the law of causality governing Nature. Action and what a series of actions can bring about are characterized as it could be otherwise. This can be understood if we can think about the unfulfilled and/or fulfilled socio-political changes in history. As such, the very condition of action is the presence of others who are equal. When action brings something new into the world, a tangible change, it is always because of acting in concert with others. A tyrant can’t act but only conducts violence in order to fulfill his will since he is lonely without fellow persons.

[caption id="attachment_17303" align="alignright" width="300"] Source: Breitbart[/caption]

Arendt points out that when philosophers stopped associating freedom with action in the company of others and instead with (human) freedom of choice, the “ideal of a free will” became the model of freedom and eventually became sovereignty. Freedom found in that free will is purely inner experience of one’s mind without others. As soon as I will something, a counter will emerges. Thus, willing is experienced as a fight between the two wills, each of which tries to wrest power over one’s mind. Arendt thinks that to identify freedom with free will has brought the “most dangerous consequence,” for it allows us either to think that anyone can’t be sovereign and to thus deny human freedom, or to have the "insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic can be purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e., the sovereignty, of all others" (Between Past and Future).

Keeping in mind Arendt's statement about sovereignty, I must point out an irony concerning recent Japanese political developments. Last September, the Japanese legislature passed a series of bills that allows Japan to exercise its right of collective self-defense. Without doubt, those new laws mean more than significant change in Japanese national security policy. Unlike individual self-defense, which allows any nation to defend herself when she is attacked, collective self-defense recognizes an attack on another country of close relation, such as an ally and/or a country of significant importance for her own national security, and thus allows her to act upon the incident as an act of self-defense.

Until last fall, the Japanese government hadn't considered it could pursue a claim to collective self-defense under the Constitution because of the pacifist nature, as declared in its preamble and in particular Article 9: “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international dispute.” In the past, the Supreme Court ruled that Article 9 does not renounce Japan's right of self-defense, but it was nevertheless widely understood as prohibiting collective self-defense.

[caption id="attachment_17305" align="aligncenter" width="530"] Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe makes his case for a controversial move to allow Japan's armed forces to enter battle in defense of allies. (Source: CNBC)[/caption]

But things have now changed. The current administration, which is led by the the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the top, took it upon itself to introduce a rather unorthodox interpretation of Article 9 and present collective self-defense bills for the first time to the Diet. The House has since approved those bills. It is interesting to note, however, that prior to that decision, the LDP called upon three constitutional scholars to present their opinions on whether the bills were unconstitutional at a hearing before the House. Those scholars were selected and recommended by the LDP. Even so, all three stated that the bills were “unconstitutional” and that Article 9 clearly banned Japan from exercising the right to collective self-defense.

The number of voices against the bills rapidly increased in Japan among the general public and in academia, for people started to worry that such legislation could ultimately open a path for Japan to re-engage in war in the future. The Prime Minister and his cabinet denied that possibility and repeatedly insisted that the bills were necessary to guarantee Japan's national security. Though it was perhaps chiefly motivated by unstable geopolitical developments in East Asia, particularly China’s expansion and North Korea's ongoing nuclear tests, the government instead insisted that the bills would allow Japan to have an equal share of peacekeeping activities led by the UN and to play a more active role in the fight against terrorism in the Middle East. Regardless of its true motivation, the government repeated that the bills were necessary to guarantee the safety of Japanese people. It is clear the government meant that the bills were required to secure Japan as a sovereign nation.

Here, the Japanese government contradicted itself twofold. First, it went against the Preamble of its own Constitution, which proclaims that “sovereign power resides with the people.” Second, it disobeyed Article 9, which says that the “Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international dispute.” From the viewpoint of Arendt, it is precisely the latter point that makes the Japanese Constitution so unique. Though the notion of sovereignty may be apolitical due to its inherently suppressive nature, the Japanese Constitution nonetheless renounced war.  The irony that I identified earlier rests with how the Japanese government didn’t see that point and wanted so badly to pass the bills. Indeed, it is no wonder that the officials paid little attention to the people's distrust, which originated at least in part from the dubious strategy that it itself employed in order to pursue its own aims.

Featured image sourced from International Policy Digest.