Abstract
East Asian countries have been engaged in disputes over history. While their historical contentions have caused suspicions and frictions among them, I argue that they have also served as a medium of dialogue that helps establish a common understanding about the individual countries’ contemporary reality and future direction. Historical contentions contribute to such a dialogue if and only if regional actors recognize each other as legitimate participants in a dialogue about the salient past and when they contend over the past within a common framework of meaning, can contentions over history contribute to the creation of a regional public sphere. The regional public sphere is a discursive area where regional actors exchange their understandings of the past and their desires for the future, out of which emerge a new focal point for regional issues and a shared understanding of their own and others’ identities. East Asia, through historical contentions in the 1980s and 1990s, produced an embryonic form of a regional public sphere but now stands at a fork between strengthening the regional public sphere and fracturing it into a contentious public sphere.
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