I should be frank in stating from the outset that I do not believe that the most important distinctions among nationalisms "in the past, today or in the near future " run along East-West lines. The oldest nationalisms in Asia -- here I am thinking of India, the Philippines and Japan -- are much older than many of those in Europe and Europe Overseas -- Corsica, Scotland, New Zealand, Estonia, Australia, Euskadi (Basque Country) and so forth. Philippine nationalism in its origins looks, for obvious reasons, very similar to those in Cuba and continental Latin America; Meiji nationalism has obvious similarities to the late 19th century official nationalisms we find in Ottoman Turkey, Tsarist Russia and imperial Great Britain; Indian nationalism is morphologically analogous to what one finds in Ireland and in Egypt.
One should also add that what people have considered to be "East" and "West" has varied substantially over time. For well over a century, Ottoman Turkey was commonly referred to in English as "the sick man of Europe," in spite of the Islamic religious orientation of its population, and today Turkey is still trying hard to enter the European Community. In Europe itself, which used to regard itself as entirely Christian -- forgetting about Muslim Albania -- the numbers of Muslims are growing rapidly by the day. Russia was long regarded as largely an "Asiatic" power and there are still plenty of people in Europe who think this way. One could add that in Japan itself, there are some people who regard themselves as a kind of "white." And where does the "East" begin and end?
Egypt is in Africa, but it used to be part of the Near East and has now, with the end of the Near East, become part of the "Middle East." Papua New Guinea is just as "Far East" from Europe as is Japan, but does not think of itself this way. The brave new little state of East Timor is trying to decide whether it will be part of Southeast Asia, or of an Oceania, which from some standpoints -- e.g. Lima and Los Angeles -- could be regarded as the Far West.
Mass Migrations
These problems have been further confounded by massive migrations of populations across the supposedly fixed boundaries of Europe and Asia. From the "opening" of the treaty ports in China in 1840, millions of people from the Celestial Kingdom started moving overseas -- to Southeast Asia, Australia, California -- later all over the world. Imperialism took Indians to Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean, Javanese to Latin America, South Africa and Oceania; Irish to Australia. Japanese went to Brazil, Filipinos to Spain and so on.
The Cold War and its aftermath accelerated the flow, now including Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Thais, Malaysians, Tamils and so forth. Churches in Korea, China and Japan; mosques in Manchester, Marseilles and Washington; Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh temples in Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Dakar.
Everything about contemporary communications suggests that these flows will continue and even accelerate: even once "closed" Japan has more foreign residents than ever before in its history and its demographic profile will make still more immigrants essential if its development and prosperity are to continue.
What will come out of these migrations, what identities are being and will be produced, are hugely complex and largely still unanswerable questions.
Looks are deceiving
About four years ago I taught a graduate seminar at Yale University on nationalism, and at the outset I asked every student to state their national identity, even if only provisionally. There were three students in the class who, to my eyes, seemed to be "Chinese" from their facial features and skin color. Their answers surprised me and everyone else in the room. The first, speaking with an absolutely West Coast American accent, firmly said he was "Chinese," though it turned out he was born in the US and had never been to China. The second quietly said he was "trying to be Taiwanese." He came from a KMT family that had moved to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in 1949, but was born in Taiwan and identified there: so, NOT "Chinese." The third said angrily, "I'm a Singaporean, dammit. I'm so tired of Americans thinking I'm Chinese, I'm not!" So it turned out the only Chinese was the American.
If, as I have argued, the distinctions between East and West, Europe and Asia, are not the most realistic or interesting axes along which to think about nationalism, then what perhaps might be more fruitful alternatives?
One of the central arguments of my book Imagined Communities -- just now beautifully translated and published in Taipei -- is that nationalisms of all varieties can not be understood without reflecting on the older political forms out of which they emerged: kingdoms, and especially empires of the premodern and early modern sorts.
The earliest form of nationalism -- one that I have called "creole nationalism" -- arose out of the vast expansion of some of these empires overseas, often, but not always, very far away. They were pioneered by settler populations from the Old Country, who shared religion, language and customs with the parent state but increasingly felt oppressed and alienated from it.
The US and the various state of Latin America which became independent between 1776 and 1830, are the famous examples of this type of nationalism. One of the justifications, sooner or later, for these creole nationalisms was also their distinctive history and especially their demographic blending of settler and indigenous peoples, to say nothing of local traditions, geographies, climates and so forth.
Such creole nationalisms are still very much alive and one could say are even spreading. French-settler nationalism in Quebec has been on the rise since the late 1950s and still teeters on the brink of separation from Canada. In my country, Ireland, the "settler" question in the North is still a burning one and has prevented the full integration of the country up to now. In the South, some of the earliest nationalists, the Young Irelanders of the rebellion of 1798, came from settler families or, like my own family, which participated in that rebellion, of mixed settler and indigenous Celtic-Catholic origins.
Australians and New Zealanders are currently busy with creolized nationalisms, attempting to distinguish themselves from the United Kingdom by incorporating elements of Aborigine and Maori traditions and symbolisms. So far, so West, it might seem.
Race and Nationalism
At the risk, however, of giving some offense, I would like to suggest that some features of Taiwanese nationalism are also clearly creole, as, in a somewhat different vein, are some features of Singaporean nationalism.
The core constituencies for these nationalisms are "overseas" settlers from the Southeastern coastal regions of the Celestial Kingdom, some escaping from the imperial state, some sent over by that state. These settlers imposed themselves, sometimes peacefully and integratively, sometimes by violence, on the pre-existing populations, in a manner that reminds us of New Zealand and Brazil, Venezuela and Boer South Africa.
Sharing, to various degrees, religion, culture and language, with the metropole, these creole countries nonetheless over time developed distinct traditions, symbolisms, historical experiences and eventually moved towards political independence when they felt the imperial center too oppressive or too remote.
One should I think not allow oneself to overemphasize the unique significance of Taiwan's 50-years under Japanese imperialist rule. After all, the French settlers in Quebec suffered almost 200 years under British imperial rule and the Dutch in South Africa the same for a half-century. Nor is it easy to argue that Japanese imperialist culture was significantly more alien from overseas "Chinese" culture, than British imperial culture was from overseas "French" and "Dutch" culture. Nor can one claim any easy distinction between racist European or Western creoles and the rest. The US, South Africa and Argentina were extremely racist, but it would be hard to say that the Quebecois were any more racist than the Southeast China emigres to Taiwan or the Japanese emigres to Brazil.
If this argument is right, then we have a creole form of nationalism that crops up in the 18th, 19th and 20th, surely also the 21st century, in the Americas, in Europe, in Africa, in the Antipodes, as well as in Asia. A global phenomenon. With one unexpected side-effect: there are many nations today that share (with their own variations) Spanish, French, English and Portuguese, without any one of them imagining that they "own" this language. It is nice to think about "Chinese" soon following in their wake.
A second form of nationalism, extensively discussed in Imagined Communities and which seems relevant here, is what I have called, following Hugh Seton-Watson, "official nationalism." This form of nationalism arose historically as a reactionary response to popular nationalisms from below, directed against rulers, aristocrats and imperial centers.
The most famous example is provided by Imperial Russia, where the Tsars ruled over hundreds of ethnic groups, many religious communities and so on and in their own circles spoke French -- a sign of their civilized "difference" from their subjects. It was as if only "peasants" spoke Russian. But as popular nationalisms spread through the empire in the 19th century (Ukrainian, Finnish, Georgian and so on), the Tsars finally decided they were "national Russians" after all, and in the 1880s -- only 120 years ago -- embarked on a fatal policy of Russification of their subjects, so to speak making Tsars and their subjects "the same people" -- which was exactly what was avoided before.
Imperial politics
In the same way, London tried to Anglicize Ireland (with substantial success), Imperial Germany tried to Germanify its share of Poland (with very little success), Imperial France imposed French on Italian-speaking Corsica (partial success) and the Ottoman Empire Turkish on the Arab world (with no success). In every case, to quote myself, there was a major effort to "stretch the short, tight skin of the nation over the vast body of the old empire."
Can one say that this form of nationalism was uniquely Western or European? I do not think this is possible. We can, for example, consider the strange case of Japan, recently discussed in a remarkable book by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. She illustrates the abrupt transformation that came with the Meiji Restoration in the way that the Ainu and the Ryukyu islanders were regarded and handled.
It had long been the policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate to forbid the Ainu to dress as Tokugawa-Japanese and to adopt Tokugawa-Japanese customs and traditions; similarly envoys from the Ryukyus bringing tribute to Edo were instructed to dress as exotically "Chinese" as possible. In both instances, the basic idea was to separate these peripheral (Barbarian) peoples as far as possible from the imperial center. But with the rise of Meiji official nationalism, there was a complete reverse of policy, Ainu and Ryukyu were now regarded as primitive and ancient types of the same Japanese "race" as the Meiji oligarchs themselves. Every effort, persuasive and more often coercive, was taken to Japanify them (with variable success).
It could be argued that later imperial policy in Korea and Taiwan followed the same logic. Koreans were to take Japanese names and speak Japanese, and Taiwanese, as "younger brothers" were perhaps to follow suit. They would eventually become Japanese, it was thought, even if second-class Japanese. Just like the Irish in the UK till 1923, and the Poles in Germany till 1920.
Nationalism in China
However, far the most spectacular and ironical case is provided by the Celestial Empire, ruled from 1644 till its collapse, less than 90 years ago, by a Manchu (and also Manchu-speaking dynasty). (There is nothing odd about this. There has not been an English dynasty in Great Britain since the 11th century. The first two rulers of the present royal family, the Germans George I and II, spoke almost no English, and no one cared!).
It is a significant sign of the recentness of "Chinese nationalism" that this curious situation bothered very few people until about 110 years ago. There was no attempt to "Manchufy" the population or even the mandarinate, because the prestige of the rulers rested, as elsewhere, on "difference" not similarity. The Dowager Empress tried at the very end to exploit popular hostility to the Western imperialists in the name of "Chinese tradition" but it was too late and the dynasty vanished in 1911, and to some extent the Manchus with them. The most popular writer in China today, Wang Shuo, is a Manchu, but he does not advertise this fact.
When Chinese nationalism did finally arise, it was rather late in world-historical time. This was what permitted the wonderful Li Ta-chao to write a famous article about China in its spring-time, something entirely young and new. But it arose in a very peculiar situation, for which there are few world-comparisons. It was deeply penetrated by the various imperialisms of the age, including Japan, but it was not actually colonized. There were too many competing imperialisms by then, and even Great Britain, which was having trouble swallowing India, blanched at the thought of swallowing even vaster imperial China. (The nearest comparison is perhaps imperial Ethiopia).
Furthermore, insofar as imperial China had real borders, it shared these with a weak Russifying Tsarism that was already on its last legs. (The Japanese naval victory over the Tsarist fleet occurred only six years before the Manchu dynasty collapsed and 11 years before Tsarism came to a bloody end).
All this encouraged most first generation nationalists in China to imagine that the Empire could, without too much trouble, be turned into a nation. (This was the dream also of Enver Pasha in Istanbul in the same era, of Colonel Mengistu Mariam in Addis Ababa three generations later and Vladimir Putin in Moscow today).
They thus combined, without much thought, the popular nationalism of the world-wide anti-imperialist movement, with the official nationalism of the late 19th century: and we know that this latter was a nationalism which emanated from the state, not the people, and thought in terms of territorial control, not popular liberation. Hence the bizarre spectacle of people like Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), a genuine popular nationalist, also making absurd claims to territories in various parts of Southeast and Central Asia, based on real or fanciful territorial conquests of dynastic rulers, many of them non-Chinese, against whom his popular nationalism was supposed to fight.
Part two of this lecture will run tomorrow. Benedict Anderson is a professor of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies at Cornell University. The lecture was prepared for the International Conference on World Civilizations in the New Century: Trends and Challenges held by the INPR (
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