La Fondation France-Japon de l'EHESS is delighted to invite you to a series of three lectures given by Kenji Hirashima (University of Tokyo), visiting professor to
EHESS:

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kenji HIRASHIMA is Professor of Comparative Politics (European Politics) at the Institute of Social Science (ISS), The University of Tokyo. Among his recent publications, one can quote: The Emergence of European Governance (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004) [in Japanese], European Political History (Tokyo: The Society for the Promotion of The Open University of Japan, 2010) [in Japanese], and Germany and Japan after 1989. Reform Pressures and Political System Dynamics, ISS Research Series No. 33, February 2009, co-edited with Roland Czada.

PROGRAM
June 8th, 5 pm - 7 pm
"East Asian Regionalism in a Comparative Perspective"
EHESS, 105 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris, room 7 (2nd
floor)

New regional organizations and new integration projects have been rapidly expanding in East Asia since the 1990s. Parallel to this development, 'comparative regionalism' has found increasing resonance in EU studies. Yet, integration studies have not fully come to terms with inter-regional comparison. Most often, European regionalism is stylized in a static way as a legalistic model in contrast to Asian informal and non-legalistic approaches. This presentation seeks to enlarge the scope of integration studies by comparing East Asian regionalism with the EU from a dynamic and historical perspective. For this purpose, the presentation will shed new light on the historical processes that created the 'founding settlements' of the EEC. In light of the early European experiences, a series of regional institution-building measures in East Asia involving ASEAN, APT and APEC could be considered as part of an enduring search for a more viable regional integration.

Organizers (EHESS): Sébastien Lechevalier (CRJ), Michael Werner (CRIA) & Bénédicte Zimmermann (CRIA)

n June 16th, 11 am - 1 pm
"Japan in Fiscal Crisis: Explaining the Japanese Exceptionalism"
EHESS, 105 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris, room 7 (2nd
floor)

It is a well-known fact that Japan has an unmanageable public debt problem. The debt is a legacy of massive stimulus spending during the 'lost decade' of the 1990s, as well as a series of pump-priming packages against the recession after the Lehman shock in 2008. It is truly remarkable that Japan has so long relied on conventional policy measures, repeatedly abandoning efforts of fiscal consolidation. Why has consolidation policy not been pursued coherently in Japan? What are the political reasons for this recurrent and deepening fiscal crisis of Japanese exceptionalism? Taking into account such conditions as the hardship specific to Japanese political economy or the past policy legacies, the presentation tries to elucidate the peculiarities of the Japanese state that retard political changes in spite of institutional reforms.

As a part of the collective seminar of Centre de recherches sur le Japon « Histoire du Japon moderne et contemporain : permanences et ruptures » Organizers
(EHESS): Guillaume Carré (CRJ) & Sébastien Lechevalier
(CRJ)

June 21st, 4 pm - 7 pm
Roundtable with Rachel Guyet "Employment Strategy and Labour Markets in Europe: a view from Japan"
CERI, 56 rue Jacob 75006 Paris, room Jean Monnet

Kenji Hirashima "Stalking the Unknown Beast: Policy Change and the EU" What is the European Union? This presentation approaches the EU from the perspective of policy change. While the term 'policy change' is far from unambiguous, the ways major policies are changed should provide an important key to understanding the nature of the polity in which such changes take place.
The major policy change in focus in this presentation will be the 'European Employment Strategy' (EES), which was developed from the employment title newly inserted into the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997).

Rachel Guyet "European Labour Market Institutions:
Resilience to the Crisis?"
The aim of the presentation is to analyze to which extent the European labour market institutions resisted to the crisis. It deserves to be analyzed considering the short term and the long term impacts that the crisis may have brought about in Europe and the changes in paradigm it has resulted in regarding the degree of fragmentation of the European labour markets and the governance of the labour market policies.

Organizers: Rachel Guyet (CERI, CoesioNet) & Sébastien Lechevalier (FFJ, EHESS)

The lectures will be held in English.
The registration to each of these three events is strongly recommended
to: ffj@ehess.fr

Sebastien LECHEVALIER
Fondation France-Japon de l'EHESS
105 bd Raspail 75006 Paris FRANCE
sebastien.lechevalier@ehess.fr
Webpage: http://ffj.ehess.fr/