On the 70 th Anniversary of the End of World War II : What Can Northeast Asian Nations Learn from the European Example of Historical Reconciliation ?

This paper represents an attempt to place the debate on history in Northeast Asia in a structural context and to see it as an outcome of tensions in state-civil society organization (CSO) relationships in Japan and South Korea. The paper uses as an analytical tool the work of Lily Gardner Feldman who has focused on the roles of transnational non-state actors (TNAs) in post-World War II reconciliation in Europe. Although Northeast Asian CSOs and European TNAs do not always overlap precisely, most of Gardner Feldman’s TNAs qualify as CSOs according to standard definitions of civil society. This paper argues that geopolitical differences notwithstanding, moves toward reconciliation after World War II in Europe were greatly helped by the presence of legally sanctioned, transnationally active, broad-based CSOs. Conversely, the past suppression of civil society activity in both South Korea and Japan – in the former physically under successive military-backed authoritarian regimes and in the latter as part of the statist philosophy of government imported from Europe in the late nineteenth century – has held in check forces for reconciliation and encouraged the emergence of generally anti-government CSOs which use history as a tool in their struggles against their political elites.