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.footnote1 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.
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’.