Author: Peter Drysdale

The big news this week was the chaos over the negotiations on climate change in Copenhagen. Will Steffen was there and files this realistic assessment on whether the deal that was eventually done will generate sufficient momentum to continue to build through 2010 towards a much more comprehensive and effective agreement. His conclusion is that the jury is still out.

And this week, we begin the end-of-year, beginning-of-year series by leading analysts from countries around the region on what the year looks like in retrospect and what challenges there are looking at the year ahead. Over the next few weeks, along with our normal posts, we reflect on what has been a year of enormous change in the world and ahead, at a period of immense fluidity in which Asia seems bound to play a peculiarly important role.

We begin with Yoichi Funabashi’s perspective on a year of extraordinary political change in Japan. Funabashi argues that the rise to power of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) after half a century of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) could bring profound changes to Japan. One change is generational: the new leaders, including Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, are the first with little memory of World War II. Another is substantive: the DPJ’s stated objectives suggest significant shifts in both Japan’s domestic policies and its external relations, especially with the US and the rest of Asia. Japan, Funabashi suggests, now stands a better chance of becoming a two-party system, with real political competition, than at any time since its first election in the Meiji period. Although the alliance relationship with America is currently burdened with the problem of the re-location of the Futenma airbase in Okinawa, Funabashi argues that a more vibrant democracy at home allows Japan to become a more active ally to the democracies that have constituted the liberal international order since the end of World War II.