Revolution and restoration in post-war East Asia: a Gramscian approach to the ‘history problem’

While tensions over historical issues between Japan and South Korea have long served to impede US strategic goals in East Asia, mainstream International Relations theory has largely been unable to explain the stubborn persistence of such issues. Instead, I interpret East Asia’s post-war history through the lens of Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, thereby situating the ‘history problem’ in the context of the dialectical relations between state (re)formation, geopolitical contestation and transnational capital accumulation in the post-war era. I argue that US intervention in 1945 was a process in which a set of state–society relations was established whereby democratising tendencies from below were repressed through the establishment of US-aligned capitalist regimes. This implied the partial restoration of certain aspects of the pre-1945 regimes in a manner that served to forestall any genuine coming to terms with past colonial history. Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution thus provides a framework for rethinking how bilateral relations between countries can be explained with reference to the broader dynamics of geopolitical contestation, transnational capital accumulation and the dynamics of state–society contestation within national social formations. While existing empirical applications of passive revolution have typically focused on particular national instances of state formation and transformation, I argue that the concept can be utilised to analyse the region-wide processes whereby the US empire was established in the aftermath of the Second World War, and by extension, how supranational processes of passive revolution subsequently generated their own tensions and contradictions as manifested in contested bilateral relations between states.