Reconsidering the Notion of "Public Citizenship" from the Viewpoint of Emerging East Asian Community: Through Our Writing Transnational East Asian History Project

Abstract

This paper has focused on intellectual movement in which I engaged for four years together with multinational students and citizens for writing transnational East Asian modern history project. In the era of globalization, interdependence through exchanging materials such as trade and capital flow has become so remarkable in East Asian region. The countries of the region such as Japan, South Korea and China have strong tendency to form economic integration and mutual relationships among them are becoming very close. However, emerging economic integration does not necessarily bring the people in the region to foster their common or integrated feelings as East Asian citizens. In spite of growing interdependence, spiritual or mental feelings of the nations are so different that the gaps on recognitions often cause conflicts and hostilities among them. One of the hot spots is the differential perceptions on modern history by East Asian nations. This issue is very troublesome in the meaning that it often misleads people to be ultra-nationalists or exclusivists in East Asian nations. The existing alienation between economic, material situation and spiritual, mental feelings of the nations seems to be very big sociopolitical bother in contemporary emerging East Asian Community. Our project in the field of international studies may be one of the small contributions to overcome the difficulties and to have "our common history" as East Asian citizenship.