Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
This talk will consider the rhetoric and logic employed in a rapid and radical change in views about regionalism, using the example of a select number of early postwar Japanese intellectuals in the wake of the defeat of their empire. What happens when a powerful and dominant regionalism, in this case pan-Asianist ideas that served as the ideological foundation of an empire armed with a proclaimed goal of unity and liberation, transitions to a vision for a global federalist approach: the destruction of one often contradictory form of regional federalism, to an equally fraught one of global federalism in the aftermath of the defeat of the Japanese empire. It will argue that in both cases, a major obstacle to regional or global federalist approaches goes beyond the impractical implementations but also lie in the uneasy and sometimes incompatible assumptions about the justification for their establishment.