Share this story!            

PURPLE PATCH: Eastern and Western Nationalism —Benedict Anderson

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. 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... 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... 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...

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.

Benedict Anderson teaches at Cornell University and his major work on nationalism, “Imagined Communities” is one of the most cited works in the field. This excerpt is from his essay titles “Western Nationalism And Eastern Nationalism” that appeared in the New Left Review.

Home | Editorial

Share this story!