The recent joint American–Japanese declaration of common concern over ‘security’ in the Taiwan Strait, marking the resolve of Tokyo to return to the scene of former colonial operations in the South China Sea, has drawn international attention to the future of Taiwan once again. Many fear that a major military conflict between China and the United States—perhaps now joined by Japan—may break out over this issue in the coming years. Political developments within the island itself have attracted much less discussion, though last year’s presidential and legislative elections were followed more closely than such contests in the past. The presidential poll saw a narrow victory by the incumbent leader from the Democratic Progressive Party, Chen Shui-bian, for the Green camp; in the subsequent legislative elections, the Blue camp of the old Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang and its allies, prevailed. The recent round-table in nlr, in which distinguished Taiwanese artists and intellectuals reflected critically on the current scene,footnote1 is a hopeful sign that the rich debates within Taiwan may become more widely known abroad, where perceptions have tended to be shaped mainly by commentaries centred on the positions of the us and China, not the island itself.
Moving in the other direction, foreign scholars and their ideas have begun to play a part in local discussions about the past and future of Taiwan. A notable example has been Benedict Anderson’s address—given in Taipei in 2000, and published in nlr the following year—which offered a broad comparative framework for understanding the rise of Taiwanese nationalism. Developing out of his famous work Imagined Communities, this was an analysis that raised the question of whether the Taiwanese should be regarded as a classic ‘creole’ community.footnote2 The forthcoming work on the historical origins of Taiwanese nationalism under Japanese imperial rule by Rwei-Ren Wu, a landmark in the field, is a major response, also set in a comparative perspective that includes Korea, Okinawa and the Kuriles, as well as East European experiences.footnote3
In these debates, mainland scholars have hitherto played little part. Political conditions there have made independent contributions to thinking about Taiwan scarcely audible amid the high-pitched volume of official ideology, though eventually serious interlocutors are likely to emerge, as they have done on Tibet.footnote4 The sooner this happens, the better for the communities on both sides of the Strait. In England an attempt to look at the problem of Taiwan in bi-focal fashion, taking considerations in both Beijing and Taipei into account, was made by Perry Anderson in an article written soon after the controversy over the results of the presidential election last year.footnote5 Since then, however, the politics of the island have moved on. The year-end legislative elections saw, alongside the retention by the Blue camp of its parliamentary majority, a sharp drop in voter turnout, from slightly above 80 per cent in March to under 60 per cent in December: a low-water mark in Taiwan’s short history of democracy, indicating a measure of disillusionment with the quality of domestic politics. But the tide of Taiwanese nationalism shows no sign of ebbing.footnote6
How should we view these historical phenomena? A good starting-point is Benedict Anderson’s address on Asian nationalism. In it he argues that Taiwanese nationalism can be viewed as a contemporary manifestation of a familiar form of overseas settler nationalism, which nurtures a distinctive self-identity and seeks separation from the metropolitan empire, as the Thirteen Colonies did from England in the eighteenth century, the Latin American nations from Spain and Portugal in the early nineteenth century, and the Dominions from Britain in the late nineteenth century. The legitimacy of this kind of nationalism, he argues, did not in the past require any claims of ethnic or linguistic difference, and need not do so today. If Taiwanese identity is a late twentieth-century variant of the same pattern, what then of Chinese nationalism? From the time of Sun Yat-sen onwards, he suggests, it combined the impulses of a ‘popular nationalism’, resisting Western and Japanese penetration of the mainland, with strands of an ‘official nationalism’ derived from the claims of the Qing state, itself an inland empire. The former emerged within a set of worldwide anti-imperialist movements that fought to liberate subjugated peoples, inspiring them to create a vision of their own independent future. The latter aimed at control of territory and restoration of power in the name of pre-modern traditions and past conquests, like the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire.footnote7 In the history of the twentieth century, he points out, these two forms of nationalism have often overlapped and coexisted within a single nation, but he believes it essential to be vigilant and not to confuse them.
We can also, however, look more closely at the ways in which discourses of national legitimacy have varied according to different world-historical conditions. For these do not come in homogeneous packages. They typically form a combination, in which differing appeals acquire different weights in successive ideological constructions. Democratic, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, social or economic appeals gain priority, or become subordinate, in contrasting rank-orders according to the period in question. The following is a rough sketch of the main sequence of these.
First, there was settler nationalism, entering world history with the American Revolution and targeting the existing order of colonial imperialism, as famously shown in Imagined Communities. For this type of nationalism, vigorous construction of local identity tended to be mainly based on demands for proto-democratic rights, which then lent powerful support to economic and other political rights. The priority order would be: proto-democratic claims (‘no taxation without representation’), and then political and economic rights to sovereignty. Ethnic claims did not feature at all. Second came romantic nationalism, appealing to ethnic and linguistic particularities, which emerged as dynastic states such as the Habsburg or Ottoman empires started to break down. In direct contrast to the old order in these states, cultural similarity between rulers and ruled now became a requirement of political legitimacy, as many authors have stressed. Democratic demands as such were less salient among the movements fighting for national unity or independence in this period. The rank-order now became: ethnicity, language, culture, followed by political rights—usually conceived in a more collective than individual way—or social reforms.
If this romantic nationalism originated in Europe, its themes had spread well beyond it by the time of the First World War. In the next phase, Wilsonian doctrine married its legacy to conceptions derived from American experience, taking the United States as the ideal society for global imitation, proclaiming national self-determination and democracy as interlinked principles. In practice, however, the new states created in Central and Eastern Europe after 1918 were rarely democratic, and self-determination was granted little sufferance outside Europe. The Versailles Treaty even extended Western colonialism into the Middle East, and had no time for the national protests of March First in Korea or May Fourth in China, in keeping with Wilson’s own practices in the Caribbean and Latin America. ‘Wilsonian’ discourse thus had severe limitations. It was uneven and evasive in application, for the most part gave only lip-service to democracy, and had no hesitation in repressing people’s rights to revolution. Its rank-order was: first, sovereignty, based—selectively—on ethnic, linguistic and cultural criteria, and a long way after that, talk of political democracy.