Japan and the liberal global-order project: a time to stop and stare

Authority and sovereignty disappeared in the West long ago, when power absorbed them both. The effects of this artifice have become particularly noticeable since the fall of the “bipolar” system. The post-political strategy pursued by universalized liberalism has indeed voided local government through an emphasis on global governance, in so endorsing the substitution of politics with administration. This paper argues that Japan is not affected by this totalizing phenomenon notwithstanding the official transplanting of libero-juridical policies and doctrines within its polity. Through a neorealist contextualization of the Japanese “authority-power” dichotomy and comparison between Western and Japanese “output” schemes of legitimation and accountability that will transcend the boundaries of purely cultural or socio-legal accounts, I contend that the reason why Japan is not part of the liberal scheme is that it is politically governed rather than managerially administered.