“NEW TOKYO. NEW TOMORROW. (NEW G20).” – HARD POWER, SOFT POWER, SMART POWER?

With reference to the statement of the former US Secretary of State James Baker talking about the new post-Cold-War community of democracies that would “stretch from Vancouver to Vladivostok” Mahbubani [1: 42-43] points out the position of Japan as the first and until then the exclusive Asian member of the “Western club” represented by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the G7. Throughout most of recorded history Asia (embodying the biggest share of the world’s population) has enjoyed the biggest share of the world’s economy, with three of the four largest economies in the world by 2050 (in the respective order: China; USA; India; Japan) envisaged by a Goldman Sachs BRICs study to be Asian, he continues, when claiming that: “Japan surged ahead of the rest of Asia because it understood the message of Western success [brought about by the Industrial Revolution] almost a hundred and fifty years earlier”; the Japanese (Meiji reformers) “were willing to consider Western best practices from any country and were prepared to mix and match policies in an eclectic fashion”; and adding that “the Chinese had learned from Singapore, and Singapore from Japan” [1: 51-52, 77-78]. The so-called “new Asian Great Game” (Mahbubani, 2011 cited in [2: 291]) refers to the “geoeconomics (“traditionally” alias soft power) versus geopolitics (“traditionally” alias hard power)” challenge: “The most severe challenge facing rising powers in Asia in particular is the growing severity of natural resource constraints, especially land and water, which are not easily amenable to technological solutions and which (unlike energy) cannot be augmented by trade” [2: 309]. As formulated by Staněk [3] the current Fourth Industrial Revolution mirrors the society, revealing the (il)logic of today’s architecture of the society; the question, therefore, is if we are willing to accept this fact and if we are aware of the necessity of changes, and as individual civilisation models react differently to the same conditions (namely, differences in languages, history and society affect the implementation as well as impact of technological changes), it is essential to comprehend the mutual impact of the speed of technological changes and the speed of adaptation both of society and individuals. Thus, a “smart power” dimension arises – in the case of Japan represented by its Society 5.0 concept [4: 119-122]. The more inclusive format of G20 (designated since the latest global financial crisis as “the world’s “premier forum” for economic cooperation”) “is playing a mid-field game: facilitating discussion while standing by for (rare) emergencies. This operational model more closely mirrors Asian than Western approaches to governance, and may be a harbinger of change in the global system” as Dobson & Petri [5: 261, 273-274] perceive it. Hence, along with illustration in a comparative case study (Japan and the Slovak Republic) addressing the United Nations SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), we focus on the 28-29 June 2019 G20 Osaka Summit in terms of the prospect of a know-how transfer in the OECD context.