WESTERN NATIONALISM AND EASTERN NATIONALISM
(BENEDICT ANDERSON)
Is there a difference that matters?
Mercifully, we no
longer hear a great deal about Asian Values. These ‘values’ were too
brazenly rhetorical, as euphemisms of certain state leaders to justify
authoritarian rule, nepotism and corruption. The 1997 financial crisis,
anyway, dealt a harsh blow to their claims to have found a fast-track
road to permanent economic growth and prosperity. But the idea that
there is a distinctively Asian form of nationalism is not only very much
still with us, but has roots going back more than a century. [1]
It is fairly clear that its ultimate origins lie in the notorious
insistence of a racist European imperialism that ‘East is East, and West
is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ But this insistence on an
irremediable racial dichotomy began to be used, early in the twentieth
century, by a number of nationalists in different parts of Asia to
mobilize popular resistance against a now-utterly-alien domination. Is
such a radical dichotomy really justifiable, either theoretically or
empirically?
I myself 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 older than many of those in Europe and Europe
Overseas—Corsica, Scotland, New Zealand, Estonia, Australia, Euskadi,
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
nineteenth-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,
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.
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 1842, 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. Thus, churches in Korea, China
and Japan; mosques in Manchester, Marseilles and Washington DC;
Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh temples in Los Angeles, Toronto, London and
Dakar. Everything about contemporary communications suggests that these
flows will continue and perhaps 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. It may amuse
you if, on this subject, I insert a short personal anecdote. 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 colour. 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
America 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 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.
Creole nationalisms
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 is
that nationalisms of all varieties cannot be understood without
reflecting on the older political forms out of which they emerged:
kingdoms, and especially empires of the pre-modern 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. It was pioneered by
settler populations from the Old Country, who shared religion, language
and customs with the metropole but increasingly felt oppressed by and
alienated from it. The United States and the various states 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 own 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 ancestors, who participated in that rebellion, from
families 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. At the risk, however, of
giving some offence, I would like to suggest that some features of
Taiwanese nationalism are also clearly creole, as, in a somewhat
different vein, are those 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 centre too
oppressive or too remote. One should not allow oneself to overemphasize
the unique significance of Taiwan’s fifty 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 demi-century. Nor is it easy to argue that
Japanese imperialist culture was significantly more alien from overseas
‘Chinese’ culture than British imperialist culture was from overseas
‘French’ and ‘Dutch’.
Nor can one claim any
easy distinction between racist European or Western creoles and the
rest. The United States, South Africa and Argentina were extremely
racist, but it would be hard to say that the Québecois were any more
racist than the Southeast China émigrés to Taiwan or the Japanese
émigrés to Brazil. If this argument is right, then we have a creole form
of nationalism that crops up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth
and, surely, also the twenty-first 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 or 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 centres. The
most famous example is provided by Imperial Russia, where the Tsars
ruled over hundreds of ethnic groups and many religious communities, 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 nineteenth 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. 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. [2]
She illustrates in wonderful detail 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 or
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 centre. But with the rise of Meiji official nationalism,
there was a complete reversal 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 made 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 United Kingdom till 1923, and the
Poles in Germany till 1920.
However, by 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, of course, nothing
odd about this. There has not been an English dynasty in Great Britain
since the eleventh 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; the dynasty
vanished in 1911 and, to some extent, the Manchus as well. 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 springtime, something entirely young and
new. But it arose in a very peculiar situation, for which there are few
world comparisons. China was deeply penetrated by the various
imperialisms of the age, including Japanese, but it was not actually
colonized. There were too many competing imperialisms by then, and even
Great Britain, which was having trouble swallowing vast 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 6 years before the Manchu dynasty
collapsed, and 12 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 of
Colonel Putin in Moscow today. They thus combined, without much thought,
the popular nationalism of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement with
the official nationalism of the late nineteenth 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 someone like Sun Yat-sen, a
genuine popular nationalist, also making absurd claims to territories in
various parts of Southeast Asia 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.
Both the KMT and the CCP later took over this inheritance, in various
proportions at various times.
At the same time, the
former Celestial Empire was not quite as unique as I have just made out.
To various extents its inheritors came, at different times, to accept
the kinds of boundaries and new states that imperialism and anticolonial
nationalism were forging, at least at the periphery: Mongolia, Korea,
Vietnam, Burma, India and Pakistan. This acceptance also came from the
new idea that the Chinese were a nation, and as such, in basic respects,
just like dozens of other nations represented in the United Nations
and its predecessor, the League. Taiwanese historians have also shown
that at various times between 1895 and 1945 the ruling groups on the
mainland effectively accepted the status of Taiwan as a Japanese colony,
and supported the struggle of the Taiwanese people for independence
from Japan, as they sometimes did for the people of Korea. The
contradictions between popular nationalism and official nationalism,
which are so strikingly evident on the mainland today, are, as I have
said earlier, not unique. One can find them in other parts of the world.
But they are especially important today because of China’s sheer size,
vast population, and a government, which, having effectively abandoned
the socialism that once justified its dictatorship, shows every sign of
turning to official nationalism for renewed legitimation of its rule.
Spectacles of the Past and Future
There is one more
feature of official nationalism which, across the planet, tends to
distinguish it from other forms of nationalism. It is probably fair to
say that all organized societies in former times depended (in part) for
their cohesion on visions of the past which were not too antagonistic to
one another. These visions were transmitted by oral tradition, folk
poetry, religious teachings, court chronicles, and so forth. What is
extremely hard to find in such visions is intense concern about the
Future. When nationalism entered the world late in the eighteenth
century, however, all this changed fundamentally. The accelerating speed
with which social, cultural, economic and political change took hold,
motored by the industrial revolution and modern communications systems,
made the nation the first political–moral form which based itself firmly
on the idea of progress. This is also why the concept of genocide was
only recently invented, though old records indicate the names of
thousands of groups that have quietly disappeared over the ages with
hardly anyone really noticing or being concerned. The speed of change
and the power of the Future also had the effect of fundamentally
altering people’s ideas about the past.
In Imagined Communities,
I tried to illuminate the nature of this change by comparing it to the
difficulties we face when we are shown photographs of ourselves taken as
babies. These are difficulties which only industrial memory, in the
shape of photographs, produces. Our parents assure us that these babies
are us, but we ourselves have no memory of being photographed, cannot
imagine what it was like to be ourselves at one year old, and would not
recognize ourselves without our parents’ assistance. What has happened
in effect is that though there are countless traces of the past around
us—monuments, temples, written records, tombs, artefacts, and so on—this
past is increasingly inaccessible, external to us. At the same time,
for all kinds of reasons, we feel we need it, if only as some sort of
anchor. But this means that our relationship to the past is today far
more political, ideological, contested, fragmentary, and even
opportunistic than in ages gone by.
This is a worldwide
phenomenon, basic to nationalism. But mainland China again offers us
most interesting examples, and will continue to do so. Once a year, the
government stages a huge television spectacular, which goes on for many
hours and is extremely popular, showing the various peoples that make up
the population of the PRC. What is very noticeable in this long display
is a sharp distinction between the Great Han people and the various
minorities. The minorities are made to appear in their most colourful
traditional costumes, and indeed make a splendid sight. The Han
themselves, however, cannot appear in traditional clothing, even though
we know from paintings and other historical records just how colourful
and beautiful these actually were. So the men, for example, appear in
business suits, derived from Italian and French models, about which
there is nothing Han at all. The Han thus manifest themselves as the
Future, and the minorities as the Past, in a tableau which is utterly
political, even if not entirely consciously so. This Past, of which the
minorities are the visible sign, is also part of a Big Past through
which the Chinese state’s territorial stretch is legitimized. It is, of
course, therefore a Chinese past.
Naturally, in this
line of official discourse, the older the Past the better. One can get a
curious sidelong look at this phenomenon if we consider aspects of the
archaeology that the state sponsors. One especially odd aspect has
emerged in the reaction to the widely accepted theory that the
distinctively human species emerged most likely in what is today eastern
Africa. Evidently it is not a pleasant thought in official circles that
the ultimate ancestors of the Great Han people, as of all other
peoples, lived in Africa, not China, and can hardly be described as
Chinese. So considerable funds have been made available in the search
for some physical remains, within the borders of today’s China, that are
both older than, and entirely distinct from, anything in Africa. My
intention here is not to ridicule Peking, though that is easy enough to
do, but to stress its comparability. The easiest way to show this is to
tell you that when I was very young, growing up in Ireland, my mother
found for me, in a second-hand bookshop, a fat volume, written for
children, called a History of English Literature. It was
originally published at the end of the nineteenth century when Ireland
was still a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The
long opening chapter shows London searching for a Very Ancient Past in
exactly the same manner as Peking. This chapter discusses an oral epic
in the Gælic language, called the Book of the Dun (or Brown) Cow,
written down in the eleventh century AD, when the English language as we
know it did not yet exist. When I was grown up, I found by accident a
later edition of the same book, published in the 1930s. By then most of
Ireland had become independent, so you will not be surprised that the
chapter on the Brown Cow had disappeared, as if it had never existed.
Battle of the tongues
Let me finally turn to
another form of nationalism, which, so far as I can tell, is clearly
European in origin, and ask whether it can be said still to be Western
in any useful sense. This form I call linguistic nationalism; it began
to appear at the start of the nineteenth century in the dynastic empires
of Europe, and had its philosophical origins in the theories of Herder
and Rousseau. The underlying belief was that each true nation was marked
off by its own peculiar language and literary culture, which together
expressed that people’s historical genius. Hence enormous energy came to
be devoted to the construction of dictionaries for many languages which
did not have them at that point—Czech, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Serbian,
Polish, Norwegian, and so on. Oral literary traditions were written down
and disseminated through print as popular literacy slowly began to
increase. These productions were used to fight against the domination of
the big languages of the dynastic empires, such as Ottoman, High
German, Parisian French, the King’s English and eventually Muscovite
Russian, too. Sometimes these campaigns were successful, and sometimes
they were not, in each case the outcome being determined politically.
The successes are very well known and need not detain us here. The
failures are less well known and very interesting. In the nineteenth
century, for example, Paris succeeded, through control of the school
system and most publishing, in reducing the many languages actually
spoken in France to the status of dialects or patois. Less successful
was Madrid in turning the many languages spoken in Spain (e.g. Catalan
and Galician) into mere dialects of Castilian. London came very close to
completely eliminating Gælic as a living language, but today it is
making a considerable comeback.
If we turn to Asia, we
find an enormous variety of attempts at linguistic nationalism which
are very valuable for comparative study. The variety itself underlines
the difficulty of arguing for a single Asian form of nationalism. The
Meiji rulers followed the example of Paris, imposing the speech of Tokyo
on the rest of the country, and reducing all other forms to the
marginal status of dialects—at a time when the spoken language of Kyushu
was unintelligible in Honshu, and even more so the language of the
Ryukyus. We are familiar with the process whereby Cantonese, Hokkien,
Hakka, and so on, which are clearly languages in their own right—and as
loosely connected as Romanian, Italian and Spanish—were reduced to
dialects under the new national language of Mandarin. In Thailand,
Bangkok Thai came to dominate what it called the dialects of the North,
Northeast and South of the country—which Bangkokians usually do not
understand.
Two
remarkable hybrid cases are offered by Vietnam and Indonesia. In the
first case, the French colonialists were determined to break the
mandarinate’s Chinese-style culture, by forcing the romanization of
Vietnamese in the schools and publishing houses that it sponsored. In
the 1920s and 1930s Vietnamese nationalists increasingly accepted this
revolution, and extended it further, creating the basis for mass
literacy in Vietnamese, but at the same time cutting off substantive
direct contact with the Sinified character-based literary tradition of
previous centuries. In the Dutch East Indies, the colonial
government, too uncertain of the world-value of Dutch, and too miserly
to spend the money needed to spread Dutch through the huge archipelago,
worked through a standardized form of the islands’ old lingua franca,
Malay. By the late 1920s, Indonesian nationalists had decided that this
language, now to be called Indonesian, was the true national language;
after that many big languages like Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese and
Buginese were turned into mere regional languages, though they are
mostly older than Malay, and some have literary traditions much more
impressive than Malay’s.
Both India and the
Philippines have failed—if that is the right word—to create a generally
accepted national language. The colonial language—English and
American—remains the effective language of the state and of the national
elite. A vigorous English-language—and nationalist—literary culture
exists in both places, and has accommodated itself to no less vigorous
Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Tagalog and Cebuano cultures. Old Pakistan broke
into two separate nations partly because of Karachi’s suppression of the
Bengali language, which then became the motor for a linguistic
nationalism in Bangladesh that looks very similar to earlier linguistic
nationalisms in Greece, Norway and Old Czechoslovakia. The newest
nation-state in Asia, East Timor, which, in spite of its small size,
contains over twenty ethnolinguistic groups, has opted for Portuguese as
its language of state, and a simple lingua franca (Tetun) as the
language of national unity.
It would be very
difficult to say that today Indian nationalism is less serious than
Chinese, East Timorese than Thai, Indonesian than Japanese, or Taiwanese
than Korean. If one asks why this should be so, especially today, an
explanation is impossible without thinking about the role of the
electronic media, which for most people now exercise an even more
powerful influence than print, the original mother of nationalism.
Television makes it possible to communicate instantaneously the same
images and symbols through different languages, even to the barely
literate and the very young. More and more people, moreover, are
becoming accustomed to using, with differing levels of skill, different
languages in different contexts, without this seriously changing their
national identification.
One could even argue,
as I have done in another context, that electronic communications,
combined with the huge migrations created by the present world-economic
system, are creating a virulent new form of nationalism, which I call
long-distance nationalism: a nationalism that no longer depends as it
once did on territorial location in a home country. Some of the most
vehement Sikh nationalists are Australians, Croatian nationalists,
Canadians; Algerian nationalists, French; and Chinese, Americans. The
internet, electronic banking and cheap international travel are allowing
such people to have a powerful influence on the politics of their
country of origin, even if they have no intention any longer of living
there. This is one of the main ironic consequences of the processes
popularly called globalization; it is yet another reason to believe that
any sharp and unequivocal distinction between Asian and European
nationalism lacks all validity.
[1] Text of an address delivered in Taipei, April 2000.
[2] Re-Inventing Japan: Time, Space, Nation, Armonk, NY 1998.
