Abstract
The San Francisco System, constituted by the San Francisco Peace Treaty and its concomitant bilateral security pacts (Besides the Security Treaty with Japan, a tripartite pact with Australia and New Zealand, and a mutual defense pact with the Philippines were concluded in 1951), laid the foundations for the regional political and economic order in Southeast Asia after the Asia–Pacific War. The San Francisco Peace System established a regional order in Southeast Asia under US hegemony which was not fully accepted by either Japan or the Southeast Asian nations in the early post-war period. Japan supported the anti-communist political agenda, but sought to amend the economic configuration in order to realize its economic and political regional aspirations, while mitigating the Southeast Asian nations’ opposition to the San Francisco System.This chapter analyses how Japan in the 1950s, through a series of political initiatives that ran counter to the American regional economic strategy, sought to re-define its regional role in apolitical terms, to re-conceptualize the meaning of the US—Japan alliance, and to establish a regional order of economic integration under Japanese leadership. While Japan’s efforts aimed at the modification of the economic structure of the regional order, they ultimately worked to stabilize the San Francisco System in Southeast Asia.
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Notes
- 1.
Besides the Security Treaty with Japan, a tripartite pact with Australia and New Zealand, and a mutual defense pact with the Philippines were concluded in 1951.
- 2.
The US Asia policy found its most succinct expression in the National Security Council’s “New Asia Policy” (NSC 48/5) of 1951.
- 3.
The economic policy of providing only “minimalist” aid (Shimizu 2001, 198) to Southeast Asia and rejecting regional integration was settled on 21st January 1955 in NSC 5506 (“Future United States Economic Assistance for Asia”).
- 4.
Among the Southeast Asian signatories of the Peace Treaty in 1951, only Pakistan and Ceylon unequivocally supported the system; as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos represented French interests, they cannot be included in the category of Southeast Asian supporters of the San Francisco Agreement (Price 2001, 52). Indonesia refused to ratify the treaty, and the Philippines did so only after it had come into force.
- 5.
For more on these conferences, see Goto (2003, 248ff.).
- 6.
Japan concluded the first agreement of reparations with Burma in 1954. In 1956, it reached a settlement with the Philippines, followed by accords with Indonesia in 1958 and with South Vietnam in 1959.
- 7.
The refusal, by the Japanese delegation, to take a position in political issues was strongly criticized by the contemporary left-wing discourse (Lang 2020, 291).
- 8.
Yoshida’s economic regional policy initiatives in Southeast Asia—the proposals for an Asian Payment Union, and Asian Development Fund, or an Asian Marshall Plan—had already posed a challenge to the US economic bilateralism, and were rejected by the United States (Tomaru 2000, 151).
- 9.
For more on the conceptual continuities between Japan’s pre-war Southeast Asia strategy and its post-war approach during the 1950s in the strategic thinking of leading members of the conservative political elite, see Lang (2020, 345–353).
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Lang, H. (2022). The San Francisco System in Southeast Asia and Japan’s Search for a Regional Order in the 1950s. In: Sugita, Y., Teo, V. (eds) Rethinking the San Francisco System in Indo-Pacific Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1231-3_6
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