From Developmental Nationalism to Cultural Nationalism in Asia?
The State of the Question
A Statement from the Organisers
For Distribution to all Contributors
A number of questions were raised at Workshop One about the project
hypothesis. We have written about many of these (posted here as separate
conferences) to reflect on our pre-conference statement, "From Developmental
Nationalism to Cultural Nationalism in Asia?", in light of the discussion during
three stimulating days of the workshop, and our subsequent reflections on setting
a common framework for discussion of Asian nationalisms. In light of your further
comments, we will attempt to further refine what we hope will be a point of
reference to authors as they write. At the same time, we hope the explanations,
and the further process of thinking, will give the Contributions and our general
deliberations at Workshop II a greater coherence although agreement on this
among Contributors is not necessary and their suggestions for improvements,
particularly of the admittedly problematic labels, will be welcome. Of course, we
may not have thought of all relevant questions and you can always raise new
ones.
1. Can we divide nationalisms – at different times and places – into
categories at all?
We accept that there is some validity in answering ‘no’. After all, as Tom
Nairn pointed out, ‘nationalism is the modern form of community’ and in this
sense, all nations manifest it in more or less similar forms. Nevertheless, this
distinction is made mainly in order to stress the political significance of the
differences within nationalist thought and practice. This had also been Lenin’s
purpose when he attempted to analyse nations and nationalisms in terms of
class analysis and imperialism. He thus identified many third world nationalisms
as progressive because, he wagered, rightly or wrongly, the bourgeoisies of
these countries shared an interest in opposing imperialism. Not all of us would
agree that Lenin was right then, or now. However, we might all agree that
nationalisms can be inflected to the right or to the left. In Canada, for example,
we speak of ‘left nationalism’ roughly in the same sense in which Delia Augilar
made her plea for the continuing relevance of nationalism at the workshop. None
of us imagine that by this she means the sort of chauvinistic nationalism
represented by Ishihara in Japan or Vajpayee in India, though some may fear
that nationalism by its very nature, even a nationalism of the most progressive
sort, may open the door to a host of problems of chauvinism.
So the distinction between the two types of nationalism, which we also
suggested were successive phases in most cases, was made with a view to
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highlighting the changing politics – including the class, gender and cultural
politics– involved in the evolution of nationalisms in Asia. Nationalisms may
‘interpellate’ all members of the nation, asking them all to subscribe to its sense
of community, but, it usually, we’d say often, articulates the interests of some of
its members much better than others: for example even the most ‘developmental’
of nationalisms may well articulate the interests of a largely male capitalist class
from the dominant community better than that of the workers or the peasantry or
women, though they may still be better included in its overall projects as
participants and beneficiaries in this than in many forms of chauvinistic
nationalism. In general, the narrower and more exclusively defined the group
benefiting, the more right wing the nationalism.
It is the thrust of the above hypothesis that in most countries, and most
Asian countries, nationalisms of the immediate post-war and post independence
eras were more progressive if for no other reason than that they flowed from
greater national mobilization in the struggles of the time - in, Gramsci’s words,
‘major political undertaking[s] for which [the ruling class or leading forces had]
requested or forcibly extracted the consent of the broad masses’ (SPN, p. 210).
Indeed, the hypothesis also attempts to struggle with this question: what is the
relationship between these 'progressive' or anti-colonial nationalisms and the
more or less chauvinistic nationalisms that have tended to emerge after these
struggles were spent? Today, the nationalisms of popular demobilization (though
in many cases they rest on a high degree of mobilization among small segments
of the population), and greater apathy, are more right-wing.
2. Has there been a transition in nationalisms in Asia over recent decades?
There is a broad consensus that a global transition in politics and political
economy has occurred since the late 1960s. This is true of most Asian countries
as well. Normally, this transition is conceived in terms of terms of globalization,
the end of the Cold War and Communism, and the acceleration of
commodification both in terms of its geographical spread and its penetration to
previously un-commodified parts of social life. As some writers have pointed out,
these shifts constitute a massive change in the balance of class forces in favour
of capital. Politically, the transition has generally taken the form of a shift to the
right.
The most fundamental element of the story behind this political shift has
been the expansion in the absolute numbers of the propertied in the world and to
a greater or lesser extent in each nation (barring some exceptions undergoing
severe economic dislocation or war), as the gap between rich and poor has
expanded. The ‘rising’ classes that have been the backbone of the shift to the
right have naturally had an important impact on nationalist movements. The
articulation of most countries’ national identity and role in the world has shifted to
the right: the ‘people’ are no longer the common masses; the national purpose no
longer productivity and equality so as to benefit them, even in rhetoric.
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Maximizing profits and projecting military power abroad are more easily
contemplated. This is a major change. While this change does not fully explain
the transitions in the political character of Asian nationalisms, we suggest that it
is a part of any general explanation.
3. Are Developmental Nationalism and Cultural Nationalism the appropriate
terms for our hypothesis?
It is true that some idea of both national development and national culture
informs all nationalisms. I think Sumit Sarkar put the matter well when he saw it
as a matter of ‘shifting proportions’ with the developmental element
predominating in the one phase and the cultural in the other. Romila Thapar
similarly suggested that we think of the matter as changing conceptions of
national culture correlating with changing conceptions of national development.
This is particularly inviting because it gives equal weight to political economy and
culture while focussing on the content of each and retaining the notion that the
two stand in a relationship, complex and shifting, to each other.
A related question that arose in the workshop is whether the hypothesis implies
that culture is always politically regressive (or progressive)? Absolutely not. The
organisers took it for granted that there are both progressive and regressive
forms of culture. Rather it can be both and it is important to understand that. The
cultural complement of developmental nationalism has in various temporalities
and localities been an open, egalitarian (some would say populist or demotic)
and, at the best of times, experimental, conception of culture. Moreover, it was
not, in most cases, entirely subject to the rule of the market and commodification
(on which more anon….)
But these remarks lead us back to the basic terms of the hypothesis, which we
must now consider in their turn.
4. What is Developmental Nationalism?
Radhika originally conceived ‘developmental nationalism’ in broadly
Leninist terms which she found to have some utility to understanding
nationalisms of the middle of the 20th century and to throwing light on the
transitions in nationalisms since. From a broadly Leninist point of view, popular,
usually Communist-led national struggles were, of course, quite
unproblematically anti-imperialist, but others too, led by a “national bourgeoisie”
whose interests were expected to be opposed to those of metropolitan capital
and could therefore be expected to be anti-imperialist, were to be supported by
the Left. In addition to seeking autonomy internationally, these nationalisms were
also expected to be conducive to greater equality - civic and economic - and
productivity, domestically than could be expected in the shadow of imperialism
and unregulated capitalist development.’
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During the workshop, several problems were raised regarding the
significance of ‘development’ in relation to Asian nationalism. We will ourselves
to focussing here on just two, namely, the problem of how development relates to
capitalism, and the problem of economism.
We fully realise that the word ‘development’ has, for many of us, a
negative connotation as a US-, IMF-, World Bank- and MNC-dominated process.
But, we are also acutely aware that, for many people in the four decades after
1945, ’development’ had a quite different, often anti-free market connotation.
Notions of social and economic development (a.k.a. progress) and of
developmental planning were integral to Communist, social-democratic and
‘radical nationalist’ visions of society that aimed explicitly either to limit or to
supplant capitalism. Such notions were central to projects for national
construction in the Soviet Union (including the Central Asian Republics) from the
1920s, in the PRC from 1949, in Nehru’s India until the 1970s, in Mossadeq’s
Iran and Daoud’s Afghanistan, in the socialist Vietnam and Korea from the mid1950s, in Sukarno’s Indonesia until the 1965 blood bath, in the Baathist republics
from the 1960s, etc., etc. One thing common to such approaches was that they
shared a strong measure of state regulation to ensure that the rewards of
economic growth were more widely distributed than if capitalist development
were left to its own devices.
It was largely to counter the attractions of such models of development
that Black, Levy, Rostow and other U.S. ‘modernization theorists’ enunciated
what came to be known as ‘development theory’ in their various ‘anti-Communist
manifestoes’. Such was the gravity of the popular aspirations which backed the
various national developmental projects that in doing this, these American
theorists often ended up subscribing to a notion of state intervention, within the
Keynesian framework dominant in the West from the 1940s to the 1960s. Ben
Anderson introduced the matter of the future orientation of nationalisms and the
implication was that what we are calling developmental nationalism, this
orientation was a positive one for the ordinary people. Later, after the transition to
cultural nationalism though it too has a future orientation, as it must, for the vast
majority of the members of the nation, it was bleak.
These considerations raise several questions: how did such a state
interventionist approach in countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore,
Taiwan, etc. go hand in hand with their more obviously pro-capitalist politics
when compared to other Asian countries? How, despite this, did they yield not
only more productivist capitalisms but also, in comparison to most other
capitalisms of Asia, more egalitarian ones? How did it inflect the evolution of
nationalism in these societies? Further, how did the experience of communist
and social-democratic developmentalist policies contribute to and/or facilitate the
process of capitalist development in other societies? Such ‘developmental
nationalisms’ were often derided from the right as ‘socialist’ and from farther to
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the left as ‘populist’. Indeed, in general, whatever their declared intentions,
developmental nationalisms laid the foundation of further, and in some cases
accelerated capitalist development, though in some cases, there were also
violent ruptures which came out of the tension between rhetorics and realities:
Iran, Afghanistan and Indonesia are three very different cases of this.
Are similar patterns evident elsewhere? Or should we be thinking along
other lines? For example, to what extent did the various East Asian examples of
land reform (Chinese and Vietnamese, but also Japanese and Taiwanese)
provide models to the rest of Asia in regard to either egalitarianism or
productivism? Or then again, to what extent, if at all, did the various forms of
‘developmentalist’ ideology lead various states to provide the poor (‘in the
‘national interest’) with welfarist material benefits greater than those now
available? To what extent did welfarist policies, where they existed, set the stage
for later deregulation? And with what results for the popular quality of life?
In short, we use the term ‘developemental nationalism’ is a broad way:
development and developmentalism were projects for expanding the productive
forces and expanding material bases and incomes, especially per capita
incomes, and making them more equal. The circumstances in which these were
usually born were those of fairly broad popular mobilizations. Of course, they
were not entirely unproblematic: despite their rhetorics or even intentions, their
results were often contradictory: greatly expanding the production of wealth went
with a polarization of incomes and accentuation of inequalities of various kinds,
for example. Moreover, they were not entirely free of national chauvinism and all
which that meant for ethnicity, class, gender, religion. They could make for social
peace or be harnessed to the engines of chauvinism and war.
A second question that emerged implicitly, and as much between sessions
as within them, was whether the conference hypothesis betrays an underlying
economistic bias. Perhaps this is something that needs to be opened out to
further discussion. For the time being, however, our inclination is to think ‘not
necessarily’, on the understanding that each phase of nationalism features
complex social, cultural and political conflicts as well as economic relations. But
much no doubt turns on the question of what we mean by ‘cultural nationalism’.
5. What is Cultural Nationalism?
This seems to be the question that generated the most controversy among
us, and it seems trickier to define adequately -- but that is part of the challenge of
the project. We realize that distinctive “cultural elements” are considered a
criterion of nationhood in virtually all theories of nationality and nationalism.
Perhaps something like ‘Identity-oriented Nationalism’ would therefore have been
a better term for us to choose, though that seems awkward, as does
‘identitarianism’, once suggested by Anouar Abdel-Malek. One reason for not
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choosing these terms is because the old distinction between ‘civic’ nationalisms
and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms was used in an orientalist fashion to differentiate
between Western nationalisms, deemed acceptable, and third world nationalisms
(and Eastern European and Balkan) which, being ‘ethnic’, could not be expected
to be progressive. In fact, in our view, nationalisms of both sorts can be identified
in all countries, though the latter sort seems to have come to dominate in recent
times: hence not only the distinction between the two but the hypothesis about a
transition from the one to the other.
What the conference team meant ‘cultural nationalism’ to refer to is that
set of nationalist movements focused on organizing political power around some
purportedly crucial axis of common cultural identity which is said to distinguish
‘the nation’. That axis might be religious, philosophical (e.g. ‘Asian vaules’), or
something else still. The paradigmatic cases for this analysis are political Islam in
West (and now Central) Asia, Hindutva in South Asia and Nihonjinron in Japan.
In East Asia, there seemed to be a grooming of Confucianism along these lines
in the 1970s and 1980s, though that has perhaps ebbed.
What we need is a definition broad enough to cover a variety of cases, but
sharp enough to let us distinguish it from other forms of nationalism, in particular,
developmental nationalism, and to determine empirically whether a particular
social-political formation fits the category or not. While this is a theoretical
question, we would stress that the overall aim of the project is to help us come to
terms with pressing issues of contemporary politics. In some cases, it is likely
the case that the culture of the dominant classes, along with its hierarchical
ordering of the culture of the rest of the nation, has more or less continuously
been at the cultural core of the “national culture” as defined by a nationalist
movement, even in phases when an egalitarian future was celebrated as the
movement’s aim. In other cases, particularly where a radical social-political
revolution has occurred, it might be that new cultural traits have emerged, or
‘traditional’ ones been resculpted, as part of an overall transformation in the
society. How such trajectories of cultural and political change affect ordinary
people as well as the elite is a major issue for us to explore. Prima facie, one
would expect developmentalist nationalism to have been more egalitarian in
character. What evidence is there that this expectation is borne out in the actual
experience of various countries?
Cultural nationalism is generally viewed as culturally intolerant and
aggressively homogenising against cultural minorities within nations. The attacks
on minorities in many countries, such as India, where cultural nationalism of a
particularly virulent sort has emerged, are horrific reminders. But aren’t such
perceptions insufficiently complex? For instance, cultural nationalism need not
always mean homogenization. The politics of cultural nationalism will remain
obscure until it is recognised that cultural nationalism may also openly embraced
diversity, multiculturalism etc., and that such embrace may itself facilitate the
management of the gross inequalities produced by the new miserly and punitive
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political economy in so far as these inequalities are rearticulated as ‘cultural
differences’. In all countries various degrees and varieties of inclusion and
othering of culturally redefined subordinate groups, which is the primary function
and effect of cultural nationalism, have been employed in the attempt to create
viable coalitions of support, whether electorally or not. Although ‘multiculturalism’
in many instances may have appeared less the weapon of the ruling classes than
the outcome of popular protest/social movements from below, movements which
also open the system political to minorities, they are equally if not more often
platforms from which the inclusion of previously marginalised but newly rich
sections of the society into the dominant conception of the national community. It
is an ongoing process of negotiation. For their part, the dominant groups build,
out of these ‘diverse’ groups, coalitions of support which are structured such that
the proportion of economic to merely “cultural” or “psychological” rewards
decreases as one goes down the economic ladder, and from the centre to the
periphery of the dominant coalition of interests. Elements within the cultural
nationalist formation which appear to be the most homogenizing in their
impulses, and the organizations of shock troops which have accompanied
cultural nationalism in many countries, are in fact the policemen of the outer
limits of these coalitions, inflicting discipline on those outside who may have the
potential and/or effrontery to object to such a politics and its political economy.
To what extent, then, has cultural nationalism incorporated “diversity” as
central to its political management of the gross inequalities produced by this new
political economy? Among the more well-established, not to mention “miracle”
bourgeois states of South, South East and East Asia, cultural nationalisms
sometimes take the form not of homogenizing discourses but a form which, in
some semblance of “multi-culturalism”, claims to respect and value diversity
while at the same time claiming that this respect is so intrinsic to the national
culture that it does not have to be proved by any actions of policies, thus
exempting the governments concerned from any requirement to demonstrate
their claims. And this also lends a mask of respectability shown to the
“international community”. At the same time, to what extent are the more virulent
kinds of cultural nationalisms, which stand in significant contrast to sage and
portly ‘multi-cultural nationalisms’ of the more established bourgeoisies, even in
the Asian third world, are to be found among those countries whose integration
into this global capitalist economy is uncertain.
There is a final twist in our conception of cultural nationalism: much of the
lore (fake and folk) of the nation derived from the experience of rural life and the
accelerated destruction of this specific mode of human experience over the last
50 years, during which, the peasantry has become progressively smaller and the
rural migrants to the cities of the third world only a generation away from deculturation, also undermines nations, their cultural continuities and stabilities.
Cultural nationalism today is generated in structures of cultural production which
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are specifically capitalist and deeply commoditized. In this context, the form
cultural nationalism can now take is to older eyes, inauthentic - cultural
nationalist pop, rock and punk songs, videos, and other cultural commodities
(usually seen as the opposite of culture). Their effect on the culture they claim to
express can only be actually to mine and undermine it. They must both use the
material – textual, visual and phonic – to fashion cultural commodities. These, in
turn, as commodities are subject to endemic ephemerality within ‘post-fordist’ or
‘consumerist’ capitalism. This process is now greatly accelerated because
paradoxically, in a system of commoditized culture and culturalised commodity
production, the stakes of ever greater sections of the capitalist classes in the
“national culture” have increased. They have thus become both the material and
the sites for capital accumulation. Culture not only offers then opportunities for
employment and entrepreneurship, economic activity itself depends on the
generation of culture, necessarily in an age where other forms of community
have been historically surpassed, national. The climate of late capitalism also,
however, makes the life of a given cultural product short and therefore this
cultural nationalism moves along on shifting bases and ground, appears very
changeable and probably contributes to the very anxiety about loss of identity
and culture and need for belonging which further fuels it.
6. Are there other relevant categories which can be used to categorise
nationalisms?
Several important distinctions arose in the discussion. One can categorise
nationalisms according to the period in which they arose. In the workshop most
of us focussed on the 20th century and particularly its latter half. In the
background to our discussions are the imperialistic nationalisms found in the late
19th and early 20th centuries in European countries, the US and Japan, as well
as the collaborative structures within the European colonial framework, that
involved, for example, Indian princes and other partners in ‘indirect rule’ who
were not averse to promoting certain notions of ‘national’ aristocratic grandeur
themselves. Clearly, the main focus of our deliberations, however, is provided by
the most recent phases of nationalist development. The timing of these phases
differs, however, in different parts of Asia, with the anti-imperial phase of struggle
ending in many countries in the 1940s, but lasting into the 1970s in Vietnam and
continuing elsewhere to the present.
7. Is Asian Nationalism a category?
No, and Ben Anderson has argued why in print and in his abstract. But
Asian nationalisms in the plural may be quite another matter. Basil Davidson
wrote a book about African nationalisms and his critics have not disagreed with
him on subject matter, only on the specifics of the argument. There is the
problem of orientalism: the claim that first world nationalisms are civic and third
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world, ethnic, or some such twaddle. That is for all of us out of the question. But
this is not the end of the discussion. In my view, inspired by a reading of Ben
Anderson’s Spectre of Comparisons, we can make a start at recognising the
specificity of Asian nationalisms as follows.
Attempts to distinguish Asian nationalisms from European ones on the
basis of the higher prominence of “primordial” elements, such as ethnicity,
religion, or race, usually turn out to be exercises in what Samir Amin calls
Eurocentrism, a “culturalist phenomenon” which posits “irreducibly distinct
cultural invariants” on the basis of which it denies the possibility of genuinely
“general laws of human evolution” except to claim, that “imitation of the Western
model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time” . In this
manner, all non-Western “cultures”, including Asian ones, are negatively
subordinated to Western ones which are assumed to be more liberal, tolerant
and “civic”. These attempts all fail: Asian nation states are rarely ethnically
homogenous. Asian nationalisms remain state centric and the management of
minorities, ranging from state repression to varying degrees of incorporation,
within such states differs as much among Asian states as between any of them
and states in other parts of the world.
Where Asian nationalisms at least until the 1970s, perhaps excepting
Japan, may be considered different in quality from those of the metropoles, is the
centrality of the resistance to imperialism. It may also be said that this resistance
differs in degree and specificity from nationalisms in other imperialised parts of
the world because of the wide reach of Communism in Asia in the 20th century,
the importance of Asia among the theatres of the Cold War and, finally, the wider
currency of non-alignment.
It is for this reason that understanding Asian nationalisms involves dealing
with (a) the long-standing opposition between nation and class; (b) with the
judgement that failure to understand nationalism was, in the words of one
scholar, Marxism’s “great historical failure”; and finally (c) with the actual
historical experiences in which nationalism has been pitted against socialist
politics, the most horrific culmination of which hitherto has been Nazism, but
other examples are not lacking. Most contemporary Asian states have been
marked not only by nationalism but also, deeply, by Communism. Asia also
contains some of the most important instances of states where nationalism and
Communism have been combined: China and Vietnam in particular. These
original combinations, progressive and effective as they were, must be weighed
against the unique horrors of Khmer Cambodia. The interaction of Communism
and nationalism has also shaped Asia’s destiny in the 20th century in other
countries in a quite contrary way. Whether in Indonesia or India, Thailand or the
Philippines, the containment of Communism was a (capitalist) national project
with all that this also entailed in terms of Superpower interventions, non-aligned
balancing acts and internal accommodations between the needs of accumulation
and legitimation. Isn’t a settling of accounts, both conceptual and historical,
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regarding this interaction between nationalism and Communism, nation and
class: close, conflictual, creative, and destructive as it has been, then crucial to
our project?
Much more will need to be said about the specificity of Asian nationalisms
in the introduction of the volume to come out of this project and it will depend in
good part on what the Contributors have to say about it.
8. Is nationalism modern?
Most theoreticans of nationalism seem to think so, including Gellner, Hobsbawm,
Nairn, and Ben Anderson. And most people seem to subscribe to some version
of this view. However, two contributions – those of Tim Brook and Jayant Lele
raised another possibility. Jayant Lele, for example, spoke of what he
considered a non-modern nation. The example is highly suggestive and his
challenge can hardly be answered by simply asserting that the Maratha
nationalism, built under Shivaji was not a nationalism. Rather, the key issue may
lie in what is considered modern. In the context of India, is everything precolonial also pre-modern? Some of the recent literature on 18th century India
indicates there are good reasons for answering in the negative; e.g. Burton Stein
and Frank Perlin have uncovered nascent developments toward the formation of
absolutist states in many parts of India – among not only the Marathas but also
the Sikhs and in the South under Hyder and Tipu. These states came into being
under the pressures of increasing trade and commercialization of a recognizably
capitalist kind. Such work suggests that India’s modernity should be dated
roughly from the disintegration of the Mughal Empire after the death of
Aurangzeb (1707).
For the rest, the modernity of the nation, the corresponding abstractness
of its conception of community, its (surely ‘modernist’) orientation towards the
future, emphasised by Ben Anderson in particular, are important aspects of the
understanding of nationalism to retain.
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