Director ＆ Collaborators' Essey
The Foundations of Diplomacy and Democracy: The Nation as an Imagined Community and Japan’s Four “Openings”, by Toyomi ASANO (in Japanese)
Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University Professor
The nation is a political community that came to be imagined with the advent of modernity. Compared with social relationships grounded in voluntary association, such as business enterprises and marriage, it is distinguished by an inherent element of compulsion, binding legal obligations, and a pronounced political character. In his lecture, “The Foundations of Diplomacy and Democracy: The Nation as an Imagined Community and Japan’s Four ‘Openings,’” Professor Toyomi Asano approaches modern politics as the endeavor to discern and pursue the public good, examining the nation and the sovereign state as the historically constituted agents of that endeavor.
The lecture moves from differences in understandings of the public good to the procedures through which collective choices are made, and ultimately to the historical formation of the nation that makes those choices. This perspective offers a way to understand democracy through both its institutional arrangements and the nature of the community that sustains them. The notion of “the nation as an imagined community,” foregrounded in the title, thus provides a vital point of departure for reconsidering the collective subject at the foundations of diplomacy and democracy, and for situating the sovereign state within history.