Marie Söderberg

This introduction outlines the EU-Japan relationship and where it stands at present. At the last summit meeting the two sides decided to start parallel negotiations for (1) a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement or economic partnership agreement; and (2) a binding agreement covering political, security and other areas of global cooperation. Here the factors that have led both the EU and Japan to abandon the former policy of defining the overall relationship with ten-year plans, such as the 1991 Hague Declaration and the 2001 Action Plan, will be analyzed. The present negotiations will be put in historical perspective, and what is new and unique this time will be analyzed. These EU-Japan agreements will be placed in a comparative global perspective relative to other major agreements. Finally, this introduction will also introduce the other articles in this special issue.

East Asia is increasingly becoming a coherent and prominent region in the international system. This book presupposes that the two big powers in the area, China and Japan, will somehow take a leadership role in shaping the region. How they exercise this leadership will have implications for the whole region and is a complex issue, just as the Japanese-Chinese relationship is in itself. Even defining an East Asian regional community is not an easy task. Should it be based on ASEAN Plus Three or the East Asia Summit, which also includes India, Australia, and New Zealand? Here China and Japan have different ideas, and who takes the leadership and how this is done will affect the development of the region.

Peace building and peace preservation are new key concepts in Japanese foreign aid policy. According to the revised ODA Charter of 2003, "Japan aspires for world peace. Actively promoting the aforementioned effort with ODA," which Japan will carry out "even more strategically" in the future. Asia, and especially East Asia, is singled out as a priority region. North Korea, with which Japan has not yet normalized relations, would therefore seem like an important starting point. How come development aid is not extended to that country? The answer is that aid is a very complex issue, and not giving is often regarded as being as effective as giving when it comes to eliciting concessions and bringing about changes in the recipients' policy behaviour. For Japan, the question of North Korea policy is made much more complicated by the nuclear issue and the abductions of Japanese citizens by North Korea. Various domestic opinions and interest groups have to be taken into consideration as well as security interests and foreign pressure. This article uses I. William Zartman's "ripe moment" theory and addresses the question of whether Japanese ODA can be an effective tool for the normalization of relations between Japan and North Korea as well as for helping to generate peace and stability in the Northeast Asia region.