Global Policy Forum

Japan's failure to play an active role in East Timor will make it harder for the country to secure a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, a London-based think tank said Thursday.

In a report, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Tokyo's inability to send troops for 'peacemaking' operations in East Timor has dented its chances of securing a place on the influential body. The report said the Japanese government was constrained from sending troops to East Timor because present Japanese legislation only allows for troops to be used in peacekeeping and not peacemaking operations. The report also said Japan was reluctant to use its economic clout to encourage more positive action by Indonesia to end hostilities in East Timor.

'Japan wants to gain a U.N. Security Council seat and, although the major barrier to this probably remains the international disputes over the optimal number of council members and whether the veto should be extended to the new ones, Japan's failure to tackle the peacekeeping operation question is another handicap,' it said. 'Unable or unwilling to take up an active role in East Timor, Japan will continue to find it difficult to press its claims for permanent membership effectively when it appears so reluctant to accept the moral imperative of participating in the riskier aspect of U.N. operations,' it said.

It said former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi's preoccupation with economic recovery and political maneuvering 'meant that, if anything, Japan played an even lower-key role in international affairs than in the previous few years.' It said the Group of Eight summit in Okinawa Prefecture 'will mark a significant test of Japan's leadership and of its ability to start the new millennium in a more positive internationalist mode than it ended the last.'

On the domestic front, the institute said that despite recent developments -- such as legal recognition of the national flag and anthem, and the setting up of panels to reexamine the Constitution -- there was little evidence of nationalism. 'Present-day Japanese sentiments may best be described as 'soft nationalism,' it said.

The Japanese have invested a great deal of time and energy in a sociopolitical system and an external posture from which they have drawn considerable advantage by keeping their heads down, it said, adding, 'Popular sentiment and systematic inertia exercise a strong restraint on assertive nationalism even today.' On economic policy, the institute had doubts whether Japan's budget for fiscal 2000 would in fact, as the government states, be its last expansionary budget.

'(Japanese Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's) prospects of weaning Japan away from its reliance on public borrowing, however, were by no means certain, not least because that would mean turning off the taps on government spending and, worse from a vote-gathering perspective, even raising taxes,' it said.