Japan and Germany as Regional Actors

This important book fills the gap in existing literature by employing an explicitly comparative framework for analyzing and evaluating Germany's and Japan's post-Cold War regional foreign policy trajectories. Through a qualitative content analysis of key foreign policy speeches, this book traces and compares German and Japanese national role conceptions by identifying policymakers' perceived duties and responsibilities of their country. Further, through two case studies on missile defence policies and textbook disputes this study investigates actual foreign policy behaviour in order to question the assertion that post Cold War Germany and Japan are following very different paths.