LONDON -- Just as commentators have been writing about a fundamentally new political "setup" in Japan, following Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's overwhelming election victory, so also the same language is being used about British politics.

Admittedly, the two situations are not quite the same. In Japan's case a clear political landslide has taken place, carrying away with it old power blocs and old attitudes about Japan's role and place in the world.

In the British case it is only in the main opposition party, the Conservatives, that the upheaval has taken place, with the arrival of an entirely new generation of young leaders, led by the charismatic and charming David Cameron. His victory within his own party has yet to be translated into an actual change of government and an end to the reign of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his so-called New Labour cohorts.

But in establishing, and giving credibility to a new political setup, Cameron, who is 39, and his chief lieutenant, George Osborne, who is only 34, have to confront exactly the same two facts of 21st century life as those facing Japan.

These are, first, that the needs of a modern society can no longer be met by an all-powerful state that owns and provides everything centrally for its citizens' welfare, and second, that people must feel they live in a nation with a purpose and international status that deserves their loyalty and distinguishes it from the globalized culture that threatens to drain countries of their personality and diversity.

The first task was partly addressed by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with her privatization program, and continued under Blair, much as his socialist comrades disliked it. But neither leader was able to apply these principles to the great creaking and bureaucratic institutions delivering, however inefficiently, the nation's health, welfare and educational services, among others. On the contrary, the dogma remained firmly in place -- and has even grown stronger in recent years -- that the only way to better public services lay through more central government spending and ever higher taxes.

What the new setup has to demonstrate is how feeble and inadequate the results are that follow from pouring ever greater sums of public money into these services, and how new and more diverse patterns of provision can provide better care and welfare, better health provision and better education than anything being achieved under the present dispensation.

The second task, to give Britain back a definable and pride-inducing global role (which the American statesman Dean Acheson woundingly said four decades ago it had lost), is simpler to describe, although not easy to achieve.

It is to show that Britain is neither a lapdog of the United States on the one hand, nor just a midsize, subordinate member of the European Union on the other, but a unique and effective nation with its own role and influence in an interdependent world.

This means that Britain should be seen by its citizens as having the confidence to pursue and project its own foreign policy, and not just sub-contract it to the EU, and that it should seek out its own friends and allies on the global scene, rather than be towed tamely along behind its European partners.

A nation that is confident of its external role in today's troubled world is the most likely to create confidence and social cohesion internally, to satisfy most people's deep need to have a country and to love it. Just as Koizumi is seeking to re-define Japan's role in modern global conditions, so Cameron and his colleagues have to rescue Britain from the uncertain half-world in which it has ended up being both a junior and ignored partner of mighty America, and a marginalized player in the European region.

Both these inglorious roles are relics of the postwar period and the mood of defeatism that engulfed Britain in those years. But now that Britain has the highest per-capita income among the larger nations in Europe, and now that the center of wealth and power in the world is anyway moving away from the West, Britain's unique reach and experience in India, in the rest of the Commonwealth, and in Central and East Asia makes these connections its most valuable asset -- and ones that its leaders should exploit, rather than continue to ignore in favor of either Washington or Brussels.

This Britain, with a separate purpose and role in a globalized world, is the one that the new young Conservative leaders must somehow present to a skeptical public that is now deeply wary (and weary) of politicians and their visions. The message has to be that Britain is a distinctive nation with a distinctive world role, that is worth working for and deserving of the loyalty and devotion of all its many minorities -- and that it is also a modern responsible society that has grown up beyond the "nanny state."

That message appears not very different from the one Koizumi is teaching Japan -- that giant state institutions like the post office must now be unraveled and that Japan must alter its Constitution, and the underlying mind-set that goes with it, in favor of a wider global role.

It is in the interests of the world as a whole that both should succeed.