Ben Anderson

Department of Anthropology

Cornell University

I don't believe in the reality of "Asian Nationalism," or even "Asian" nationalisms except as a geographical descriptor, i.e. nationalism in the atlas area we call Asia. See my article on this theme in the New Left Review of May/June 2001. Hence I do not believe in any "rise" of Asian nationalism/s. So what are better ways of thinking about the contemporary events sketched out in the Project Description? There are two, in my view, which are connected in complicated ways. The first is the new prominence of what I have called "long-distance nationalism." This is the curious nationalism of groups from different countries in Asia (and Africa, and Europe, and the Middle East) who have ended up as residents or citizens of rich and powerful "Western" countries, especially the US, Canada, France, the UK, and Germany, but also Australia, Sweden, Italy, and so on. Their location, their safety, their wealth, their access to Western political centres, to electronic communications systems, to financial markets are allowing them to play an increasingly significant role in the politics of their "homelands," and this role, aside from being typically unaccountable, is very often based on reactionary fantasies about those different places. I have discussed this phenomenon in chapter 3 of The Spectre of Comparisons, and will not repeat what I have said there, except in passing. The second is the consequence of the "failure of incorporation," which marks a great many nation-states these days. In Europe the modal early case was Hohenzollern Prussia-Germany, which, having seized a large part of Old Poland at the end of the pre-nationalist 18th century, and later, hugely impressed by the absorptive capacity of the French Revolution and 19th century France (which absorbed proportionately more immigrants than did the faous US of A), tried coercively to Germanize these Poles ultimately without success. Resentment at this gradually turned into the racist idea that the failure simply showed that the Germans were by blood unique and superior. Ultimately this transformation helped make Nazism possible. The contemporary Japanese mania for Nihonjinron is also a reaction to the defeat of 1945, but also the failure to incorporate Taiwan and Korea, and Manchuria, in the prewar period, when many Japanese thinkers thought exactly that being Japanese was expandable, and worked hard to make it so. But, "It didn't work, and it couldn't have work, because we are so very special." The bloody secession of my own Ireland from the UK shows the same process at work, even though most of the best writers in "English" - Swift, Burke, Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, O'Casey, and Joyce were Irish.

Nationalist movements in the colonial world were, simply in order to develop any power, widely incorporating -- Gandhi-Nehru, early Mao, Sukarno, Aung San, Ho Chi Minh exemplify this partly ideological partly practical stance. Dalits yes, Tai minorities yes, Christian Ambonese yes, Chins and Karens yes, Cambodians yes. But after coming to power in the 1940s and 1950s, the struggle for control of the new (and some old) states came into deep conflict with the original incorporating thrust, because the terms of trade had changed, and the central elites no longer needed to act as they had done in the colonial era. These elites almost everywhere came to think more in terms of territory than of people. Perhaps the perfect exemplar of this tendency was the Suharto regime in Indonesia which increasingly made it clear that it was much more concerned about the resources of Atjeh and Papua than the people living there, who, in effect, could go to hell. Where early postcolonial incorporating policies (rigidly standard education, laws, doctrines, culture) were thought to have failed, Prussian logic argued that they had failed because they had to fail. The answer was taken to demand: further de-clusion, and more coercive standardization, leading to deeper authoritarianism, narrower ruling circles, and, inevitably "Irish' insurrections. One laughable outcome of all this comparable failure was "Asian Values," now, fortunately, nearly dead. The Filipino state became more aggressively "Christian"; the Burmese more "Buddhist," the Indian more "Hindu," the Communist state more "Han," and even the Indonesian state more "Islamic," though also residually more "Javanese," Hence all the rebellions that we observe Uighur, Tibetan, Karen, Atjehnese, Moro, Tamil, and many others. In this process, notionally national citizens get turned into scarcely-national "subjects," in a way that reminds us that the border between empire and nation is much less sharp than once was imagined, and that the career of Bismarck should be more widely studied by people of good will in "Asia."