'Eastern' and 'Western' nationalisms.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Anderson, Benedict
• Date: 01 January 2001

I should be frank in stating from the outset that I 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 much older than many of those in Europe and Europe Overseas--Corsica, Scotland, New Zealand, Estonia, Australia, Euskadi, to name a few. *

Philippine nationalism in its origins looks, for obvious reasons, very similar to the nationalisms of 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 as 'Far East' from Europe as is Japan, but does not think of itself in 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--for example, 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 1840, millions of people from the Celestial Kingdom started moving overseas--to South-east Asia, Australia, California and, later, all over the world. Imperialism took Indians to Africa, South-east Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean; Javanese to Latin America, South Africa, and Oceania; Irish to Australia; Japanese to Brazil; Filipinos to Spain. The Cold War and its aftermath accelerated the flow, which now included Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Thais, Malaysians, Tamils. 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 even 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? These 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 on nationalism at Yale University, 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 did not consider himself '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 long which to think about nationalism, then what perhaps might be more fruitful alternatives?

One of the central arguments of my book Imagined Communities, just now beautifully translated and published in Taipei (but in what language, exactly?), 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 premodern 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. They were pioneered by settler populations from the Old Country, who shared religion, language and customs with the metropole but increasingly felt oppressed and alienated from it. The United States and the various states of Latin America that became independent between 1776 and 1830, are 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 and climates.

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 Quebec...