Robert Ward
Narrowly measured, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, Abe Shinzo, failed in many of his goals. His signature policy of constitutional reform stalled despite his government’s overwhelming parliamentary dominance. Although Japan’s economy delivered a fair performance during his tenure, two of the three ‘arrows’ of Abe’s ‘Abenomics’ economic reform programme missed their mark.
Despite unprecedented monetary intervention since he returned to office in 2012, deflationary pressures still lurk in Japan’s economy. Fiscal reform, meanwhile, was already faltering even before the COVID-19 crisis. Large-scale government pandemic economic support measures will leave Japan with an eye-watering public debt/GDP ratio of over 250 per cent. The third arrow, structural reform, has also made only limited progress. Nevertheless, Abe is already one of Japan’s most consequential prime ministers since the end of the second world war. His main legacies will be threefold and interrelated.
A more powerful executive
The first is Abe’s significant boosting of power of the office of prime minister. In part, this stemmed from the longevity of his premiership. Tenure among key cabinet allies, notably the Deputy Prime Minister, Aso Taro, and the Chief Cabinet Secretary, Suga Yoshihide, was also stable. But institutional reforms early in his second term in office played a facilitating role.
The most important of these was the establishment in 2013 of Japan’s first inter-agency National Security Council (NSC), which reports to the prime minister on national security issues, followed in 2014 by the setting up of the National Security Secretariat (NSS), with staff also drawn from key ministries, and the creation in 2014 of the Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs (CBPA), which allows the prime minister direct control over the filling of strategically critical positions in the civil service. Defenders of the changes point to increased government efficiency; critics cite greater political interference in and, as a result, a weakening of the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, with the CBPA and the NSC, Abe bequeaths his successor a formidable set of tools for top-down decision making.
A revamped foreign and security policy
The second is Abe’s overhaul of key elements of Japan’s foreign and security policy. Important in this was his early recognition of the increasing link between economic and hard security. The debate in Tokyo on how to deal with this overlap predates Abe’s second term. China’s block in 2010 on exports to Japan of rare earths critical for Tokyo’s high-tech industries (as a bilateral territorial dispute), deteriorated and was a watershed for Japan in this regard.
But Abe was the first to institutionalise the link in policy formation through the creation of the NSC and NSS. The focus was sharpened further in April 2020 through the addition of an economics division to the NSS. The range of tasks assigned to the new unit—including digital currencies, 5G and cyber, standards-setting and even raising Japan’s influence in international institutions—reflects an attempt to improve government effectiveness as well as the ambition for Tokyo to be a global rules shaper.
In the same vein as the Abe administration’s push to build international coalitions to support the increasingly frayed multilateral order and to give smaller countries, particularly those in Asia, support against Chinese encroachment. Abe’s decision to persevere with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) mega trade deal after President Donald Trump pulled the US out in 2017 is one of his leading coalition-building achievements and a key conduit for Japan’s influence in the region. The TPP’s successor, the 11-country Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), launched in 2018, is likely to assume wider geopolitical importance as an alternative for non-Chinese companies to relocate production from China. Other notable examples of Abe’s coalition activism include the EU-Japan Economic and Strategic Partnership Agreements (EPA, SPA) and his courting of India and Australia to boost security in the Indo-Pacific region. The latter is also a good example of the strategic shift of security focus under Abe towards the maritime domain well beyond Japan’s territorial waters.
Lessons for middle powers
Finally, Abe’s administration has helped to redefine the role of middle powers in an environment of increasing Sino-US rivalry. As part of his effort to tack between its key security ally, the US, and its biggest market, China, Abe centred Japanese diplomacy on support for the ‘rules-based order’—witness the EU-Japan quality infrastructure agreement or Abe’s 2016 Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) regional concept with its triple underpin of defending the rule of law, deepening connectivity between countries and maintaining freedom of navigation. FOIP has been a useful organising principle for Tokyo’s coalition-building strategy, as well as for keeping the US focused on economic and security cooperation in Asia.
Abe’s policy towards China also carries lessons for other larger middle powers. Notwithstanding the closeness of bilateral economic ties, Japan has been robust in its identification of and response to the security risks emanating from China—risks that other middle power peers such as Germany are only recently calibrating. Abe’s institutional innovations in Japan show how governments can reorganise to respond strategically to external challenges. While Abe may have had his most obvious successes in foreign relations, he also leaves his successor a full in-tray of foreign policy problems, not least a failure to advance on a territorial dispute with Russia and relations with South Korea that are at their lowest ebb since the 1965 bilateral normalisation treaty.
Similarly, while ‘Abenomics’ may have missed its targets, few would argue with its theoretical underpinning. The CPTPP may also emerge as an important agent of economic structural change in Japan. The failure to achieve explicit constitutional reform should also be set against the far-reaching change implied by the 2015 upgrade to the US-Japan security guidelines, allowing ‘collective self-defence’ in certain circumstances and laying the foundations to enable Japan to work with the US in new domains such as space and cyber.
The 2015 changes were thus a significant change in Japan’s security posture, broadening the US-Japan alliance’s importance to maintaining stability in the region. Like any long-lived administration, Abe’s was, therefore, a full mix of successes and failures. But he leaves Japan both changed and well-positioned to deal with some of the many challenges that the next decade will bring.
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