The Return of National Self-Sufficiency? Excavating Autarkic Thought in a De-Globalizing Era

Sanitizing the national body: COVID-19 and the revival of Japan's "Closed Country" strategy

Japan's handling of border control measures during the COVID-19 pandemic has become known as sakoku-approach. Sakoku literally means "closed country" and generally refers to a historic period when the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) kept Japan's borders shut because international contacts were feared to cause public upheaval and political instability. While these times have long passed, contemporary Japan, too, is known for its tight management of immigration avenues. In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of these avenues were cut off, and despite much criticism, have remained largely inaccessible for two years now. In this paper, we build on concepts from authoritarian populism and the performance of crisis to analyze how and why Japan revived its isolationist strategy. We decipher the discursive framings that Prime Minister Abe applied to illustrate the disruptive influence that open borders would have on Japan's public health, social stability and by extension, on the national body itself. We argue that from the onset of the pandemic on, the ethnic others were portrayed as a risk mainly for two intertwined reasons: Firstly, Japan's pandemic management relies on self-constraint rather than rules and sanctions, and the ethnic others' compliance was not fully trusted. Secondly, this exclusionary strategy fed into populist discourses and was presumed to result in favorable support rates for the administration.

Public responses to foreign protectionism: Evidence from the US-China trade war

America's recent turn towards protectionism has raised concerns over the future viability of the liberal international trading system. This study examines how and why public attitudes towards international trade change when one's country is targeted by protectionist measures from abroad. To address this question, we fielded three original survey experiments in the country most affected by US protectionism: China. First, we find consistent evidence that US protectionism reduces support for trade among Chinese citizens. We replicate this finding in parallel experiments on technology cooperation, and provide further external validation with a survey experiment in Argentina. Second, we show that responses to US protectionism reflect both a "direct reciprocity" logic, whereby citizens want to retaliate against the US specifically, as well as a "generalized reciprocity" logic that reduces support for trade on a broader, systemic, basis.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11558-022-09468-y.