When do states choose to adopt a penitent stance towards the past? When do they choose to offer apologies for historical misdeeds, offer compensation for their victims, and incorporate the darker sides of history into their textbooks, public monuments, and museums? When do they choose not to do so? And what are the political consequences of how states portray the past? This book pursues these questions by examining how governments in post-1945 Austria, Germany, and Japan have wrestled with the difficult legacy of the Second World War and the impact of their policies on regional politics in Europe and Asia. The book argues that states can reconcile over historical issues, but to do so requires greater political will and imposes greater costs than is commonly realized. At the same time, in an increasingly interdependent world, failure to do so can have a profoundly disruptive effect on regional relations and feed dangerous geopolitical tensions.

When do states choose to adopt a penitent stance towards the past? When do they choose to offer apologies for historical misdeeds, offer compensation for their victims, and incorporate the darker sides of history into their textbooks, public monuments, and museums? When do they choose not to do so? And what are the political consequences of how states portray the past? This book pursues these questions by examining how governments in post-1945 Austria, Germany, and Japan have wrestled with the difficult legacy of the Second World War and the impact of their policies on regional politics in Europe and Asia. The book argues that states can reconcile over historical issues, but to do so requires greater political will and imposes greater costs than is commonly realized. At the same time, in an increasingly interdependent world, failure to do so can have a profoundly disruptive effect on regional relations and feed dangerous geopolitical tensions.

After suffering crushing military defeats in 1945, both Japan and Germany have again achieved positions of economic dominance and political influence. Yet neither seeks to regain its former military power; on the contrary, antimilitarism has become so deeply rooted in the Japanese and German national psyches that even such questions as participation in international peacekeeping forces are met with widespread domestic opposition. In "Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan" Thomas Berger analyzes the complex domestic and international political forces that brought about this unforeseen transformation.