The significance of yesterday’s Japanese election results goes beyond a relatively new and untried political party ending half a century of rule by a competing party; if the new leaders turn out to be true leaders and are allowed to carry out their declared intentions, this will fundamentally change the Japanese power system. That power system has in modern times always been averse to genuine political leadership. It has been relatively good at administrative governance, with career officials maintaining policy stability and initiating adjustments to stick to a course set by accident or imagined national expediency before their time. This means that with few exceptions the elected officials – politicians in Japan’s parliament, in the Prime Minister’s office, and ostensibly as heads of government agencies – besides reassuring their own citizens and the outside world that Japan is a democracy, have played a mostly marginal role, as powerbrokers at best. We can actually single out an architect who set it up this way just before the turn of the century before last: Yamagata Aritomo. Rather than here telling the story of this remarkable man, who created Japan’s modern bureaucracy along with its early 20th-century military establishment, I will copy an...

The prevailing intellectual climate is not friendly to the notion that much of the time we do not know what we are doing, in the sense of producing results that diverge widely from what in all sanity we would have wanted to produce. Intellectually we have come a far way from remote ancestors who thought they could make sense of their reality by invoking “fate” or capricious gods who derived pleasure from playing with humanity. Enlightened thought has us acting as conscious agents. All varieties of liberalism – not the “leftism” of American political understanding, but the legacy of Locke, Hume, and John Stuart Mill – hold high the concepts of “agency” and “choice”. Especially in the United States these are taken for granted. American social science is steeped in them. Political thought on the most popular level treats them as given. The way in which our society is put together and how it works is the outcome of collective choice, our lives are lived as directed by conscious human agency; the one assumption contains, of course, the other. The currently influential school in political thought known as “rational choice theory” is an obnoxiously extreme example of this intellectual disposition....

...the investigation that the opposition in parliament has wanted is not what it is getting. During the parliamentary debate in the week that has just ended, the Social Democrats were meek, but the opposition on the left as well as the right side of the Dutch political spectrum was up in arms. What Balkenende has agreed to comes down to a compromise. The opposition wanted a parliamentary investigation, the most effective weapon available to elected representatives to get to the bottom of a questionable political matter. What they are getting is a commission presided over by a former president of the highest court (W.J.M. Davids), which will produce a report in November. Balkenende says that the current financial crisis demands the utmost from his government, and that his commission will settle the questions over Iraq, which will take away the confusion and unrest. The suspicion is widespread that Balkenende is engaged in a cover-up. The commission is a creature of the the prime minister, and it meets and hears witnesses behind closed doors. A parliamentary investigation, by contrast, is public and hears witnesses under oath. The leftist Social Democrats who agreed to silence about the matter in exchange for a...

We should face it: There exists an America Problem. Many Americans have gradually come to that conclusion in the past eight years. Elsewhere in the world, politically attentive people have become aware of it in degrees. But in Europe hesitations born of wishful thinking and fear of the unfamiliar, as well as fear for negative domestic response, have meant that few people come out and say so openly. The America Problem has had some time to develop, but it came into full view for those who cared to notice on the 1st of June in 2002 when the man who by common cliche is known as the most powerful man in the world announced a radical change to his position within it. This drained the meaning from the idea of “The West”. His changed objectives made a peacetime alliance with the United States impossible in all but name. Very few in Europe or elsewhere were prepared for this. In one fell swoop the president of the United States dumped the America Problem in the world’s lap by declaring that he has the right to attack any country that he chooses to name as an enemy. No UN Charter, no treaty,...

...of exceptions to the norm of presidential supervision. The Pentagon and the Federal Reserve are comparable to all Japanese government entities in that crucial aspect of not being answerable to the head of government. (I am leaving out of consideration a third exception, the American judiciary, for the purposes of this jotting.) This deserves our attention, because when institutions need not worry of being held to account they normally are prone to uncontrolled and, sometimes, uncontrollable behavior, unless the power system has developed mechanisms to stem such trends. Japan is a democracy with regular elections in which citizens elect representatives who steer the country with policies these representatives come up with and have implemented by a career bureaucracy. The prime minister is the head of the government, and, if necessary, changes course for Japan. That is the official story, which forms the point of departure for practically all foreign and much Japanese language reporting on what is going on here. It is a story beloved by the bureaucrats, who emphatically assure everyone that truly they do not have any power at all. But the unofficial reality is more interesting. Let me come straight to the point: There is no Japanese...

...a concept that belongs to religious discourse as you grade practical political action? How to evaluate the degree of ‘evil’ represented by roadside bombs with which the Taleban try to make Americans and allies leave their country compared to the wanton wiping out of an entire city – Fallujah – in Iraq? What the Nobel speech did for Obama’s prestige at home was one thing that the rightwing and liberal hawks, as well as quite a number of moderate liberals, could agree on: At least he did not go to Europe to ‘apologize’ for America! I read that several times as I followed the editorial comment at the time. When our thoughts wander to the main motives for the cultivation of an enemy mythology, what immediately comes into view are the material ones. Fortunes and business power are involved in the stimulation of fear and paranoia; huge revenues for weapon makers and the new security industries that directly profit from having enemies. The out-of-control institution of the American military industrial complex keeps it all going. But in the national imagination profit-making does not justify war. America’s warmaking in Afghanistan and Iraq would not have had much merit in the popular...