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 Lenins 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

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, wed 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, Gramscis 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.

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.

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 Nehrus India until the 1970s, in Mossadeqs Iran and Daouds Afghanistan, in the socialist Vietnam and Korea from the mid1950s, in Sukarnos 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

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

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 movements 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 arent 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

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

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

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 Andersons 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, Marxisms 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 Asias 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. Isnt a settling of accounts, both conceptual and historical,

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 Indias 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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