Japan's Economic Involvement in Eastern Europe and Eurasia by Raymond s> Hutchings (review)

Abstract

384 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 of the other, primarily Russian, regions. However when the discussion of transition moves away from its regional aspects, the treatment is less satisfactory.The discussionthroughout the book does not treat the notion of democracy in a satisfactoryway. The discussion of what democracy means does not recognizepopularcontrolover the rulersas a centralprinciple,while the review of Gorbachev's reform programme fails to acknowledge the importance of democratization as a factor in the coming to the fore of the sorts of forces which Smith considers important in the fall of the USSR. Furthermorewhen he talksabout the limitsto Russian democracy,thereis no discussionof thepresidency,theparliamentorpoliticalparties.At a minimum, if one was discussingthe problems with Russian democracy, these should be mentioned. In the discussionof nationalizingregimesand nationalminorities, there is no discussion of the most complex case, that of Ukraine, where the relevant distinction may be less ethnic than linguistic, between on the one hand Ukrainophile Ukrainians and on the other Russians and Russophile Ukrainians.In the discussionof economic liberalization,there is little sense of what the reformsmean, and no discussionof the consequences of (asopposed to the regional approach to) privatization. These are serious deficiencies in the treatment. Despite theseproblems,thisbook is a valuableadditionto the literature.Its treatment of regional aspectsof the transitionis excellent and should be read by all interestedin the field. Sc/hool ofEconomics andPolitical Science GRAEME GILL University ofSydney Hutchings, Raymond. _apan'sEconomic Involvement inEastern Europe andEur-asia. With a Foreword by Michael Kaser. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, and St. Martin's Press, New York, I999. x + I76 pp. Bibliography .Index. ?45.?? ANYONE who knew Raymond Hutchings (I924-98) could only be struckby his encyclopaedic knowledge and the variety of his interests,well beyond his expertise in Soviet (later post-Soviet) and Eastern European economics. His last book, which appeared after his death, is thus quite unusual, not just because few researchers have attempted to elaborate on the relations ofJapan with the former Communist bloc, now the countries in transition. What one would have excepted, not knowing about the author, would have been a standard overview of trade, economic cooperation, foreign investment, and financial assistance, with tables, charts, and comments of past and expected tren1ds.In actual fact, the book is quite idiosyncratic as Michael Kaser remarks (p. vii) in his foreword. The structure of the book is very systematic. Twenty-eight countries are dealt with from the point of view of Japan's involvement at large in their economies. These countries comprise the ten countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the four successor states of Yugoslavia (Slovenia being included in the first group of ten), Albania, and the twelve successor states of the Soviet Union (the Baltic countries being included in the first group). The former GDR is REVIEWS 385 added to the list. In addition, the author studiesrelationswith formerfederal countries that have disintegrated(Soviet Union, Yugoslavia,and Czechoslovakia ). The book is divided into three chapters devoted to Japan and the Russian world (the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation),Japan and the non-Russian successorstatesof the formerSoviet Union, and Japan and Eastern Europe. Within each chapter the order of appearance of each country is alphabetical. Each country section has two subsections: 'Comparisons', and 'Relations'. Some sections are very short (less than ten lines), some are quite long (over twenty pages). One should expect that the length of each section is related to the intensity of Japan's involvement in the given country,but this is not the case. The most extensive section deals as expected with Russian-Japaneserelations (pp. I4-35), but twenty-onepages are devoted toJapan and Albania (pp. 56-76), and twentytwvoto Japan and Romania (pp. 114-35), though relations are very little developed with Albania and hardly more with Romania. The bibliography refers mainly to newspapers and journals, taken mostly from the Abstracts Russian(formerly Soviet) andEastern European Series(ABREES), which the author has been editing for seventeenyears. The book is indeed quite fascinating, not from what one learns about economic relations between Japan and a given country (this information is rather anecdotal and amounts to what you collect and file in the form of clippings),but from the approach itself...