Nationhood, Nationalism and Global Citizenship

This second seminar in the 2010 series, ‘States in Change: National Identity in the UK and Japan’, explored the historical development of national identity in modern Japan, situating the Japanese experience in a wider comparative framework with particular reference to Germany and Italy. What were the sources of national identity in these countries? How important were ‘wars’ and shifting boundaries in the construction of national identity? How did pre-1945 circumstances influence the post-war sense of ‘nationhood’?

Summary

Dr Shimazu provided the rationale to the seminar, relating that members of Birkbeck’s history department had embarked on a collaborative study of Japanese, German and Italian history between 1860 and 1919 in an attempt to discern the roots and key themes of these countries’ slide towards Fascism, looking at concepts such as civil society, the military, citizenship and nationalism. This period, a turning point for these nations, heralded the unification of Germany and of Italy, as well as the emergence of the new Japanese nation state in 1868.

 

Dr Rueger, focusing on German nation-building and identity, began by saying that the concept of the ‘nation’ intensified in the region which came to be known as Germany in the 19th century. The patchwork of allegiances in this area prior to unification persisted post-unification as the different states within the new federal system maintained their regional identity, pre-federal heads of states and regional governments. These elements, along with the Protestant-Catholic division, posed an obstacle to real unification prior to 1914.

 

During this first period of global trade, exchange and travel, those busy with nation-building were, for the first time, able to formulate ideas on how to modernise vis-à-vis other countries. Germany shifted its attention from France towards Britain in the 1890s and began acknowledging Asia. Japan, on the other hand, was seen to share so many German structural aspects in the way its state, army, empire and civil society were conceived, that it came to be known as the ‘Prussia of the East’.

 

War, stated Rueger, was a major ingredient in the ideology of the new Germany, being this nation’s raison d’être. The bitter memory of the Napoleonic Wars lingered in the new state’s collective consciousness and the Prussian-led German state could only have resulted as a consequence of having quashed the fighting between its constituent regions. Rueger concluded by saying that the Second World War and its aftermath, however, were to bring an end to the possibility of Germany being able to refer to itself positively in terms of war and empire; these notions were to be radicalised and brought into disrepute by the Nazis in their quest for Lebensraum.

 

The second speaker, Professor Riall, focused on the relationship between nation and war, nation and empire and the creation of Italian identity in the 19th century and began by saying that prior to 1860, Italians had a ‘cultural’ rather than a political identity. Nationalism was not a unifying force in the 19th century; that unification succeeded at all was surprising, given the Church’s antipathy towards unification; that the moderates feared and were set against the revolutionaries represented by Garibaldi and that Italy, much like Germany, was comprised of a patchwork of regions, and unification was the result of revolutionaries like Garibaldi and external factors, including the wars of 1859-1860, 1866 and 1877.

 

Italy’s often negative self-perception, Riall went on to say, was created in part by outsiders, in particular the British and French visitors of the 18th and 19th centuries. Those who went on the Grand Tour in the 19th century were, of course, exposed to Italy’s immeasurable greatness, a result of its stature as a cradle of learning and the arts but were less impressed by its associations with Roman Catholicism and the apparent effeminacy and deviancy of the priests. These negative responses affected the overall perception of Italy as a whole. In any case, said Riall, southern people in general were regarded as indolent, lazy and corrupted by too much sunshine in contrast to the industry and martial virility apparently prized in 19th century France and Britain. Internalising these perceptions, Italian nationalists looked to the Risorgimento as a means of redeeming themselves.

 

19th-century Italian nationalists regarded the notion of empire with dislike, said Riall, as a result of Napoleon’s antics and their association of the Roman Empire with tyranny and oppression. Perhaps, therefore, it is not surprising that the age of imperialism, between 1880 and the First World War, was not a success in Italy. It suffered a major defeat in Ethiopia and Libya was not the walkover it had anticipated. The First World War, far from providing proof of Italian martial spirit, resulted, on the contrary, in military and political defeat. Militaristically weak, war did not act as a unifier in Italy as it had and did in Britain.

 

Concluding her talk, Riall remarked that Italians dealt with the fallout of their disastrous Second World War in three focal ways. Firstly, in an attempt to revive and recreate the Risorgimento as a moment of triumph, the 1950s and 1960s in Italy saw a tremendous rise in the number of museums and history books dedicated to the Risorgimento, often romantically linked to the War’s resistance movement; a process of re-emerging as unwarlike humanitarians ensued as Italians made an attempt to forget the war and its associated violence; and lastly, the Italians embarked on a selective and regionally-focused process of remembering.

 

The third speaker, Dr Shimazu, examined sources of national identity in Japan, focusing on the external and the roles of both war and empire in understanding the concept of Japanese national identity. She began by referring to Japan and its identity in terms of its relation with the ‘other’. Japan’s understanding of world order was much influenced by the Sino-centric world order. China has traditionally being the hegemonic power within this world view and, as a result, Japan’s sense of the ‘Other’ had been historically premised on having China as the dominant ‘Other’. In the mid-nineteenth century, with the arrival of Commodore Perry, the West emerged as an alternative and competing source of the ‘Other’ for Japan.

 

The shift in the emphasis can be seen in the seminal piece by Fukuzawa Yukichi, ‘Escape Asia Theory’ (Datsu-A ron) in 1885. Henceforth, Japan reinvented itself in an attempt to catch up with the West or refashion itself as a Western-styled power. Unsurprisingly, an excessive leaning to the West through the rapid programme of modernisation produced a backlash response. The rise of pan-Asianism in the 1890s can be seen in this light, as an attempt to reclaim Japan as part of Asia.

 

Shimazu finished by saying that war and empire had helped sharpen Japanese perceptions of itself. During the Second World War Japan possessed a wide-spanning and multiethnic South East Asian empire, belying the often quoted myth of the purity of the Japanese race and of the homogeneous nation. Moreover, an argument popularised in the years leading up to the war, legitimised colonialism by suggesting that being (originally) heterogeneous, in fact, had enabled Japan to build up an empire in the first case.

 

The Chair, Lord Howell of Guildford thanked the speakers for their fascinating discussions, before encouraging questions from the audience.

 

The questions and comments which followed the seminar were lively and covered all manner of issues ranging from discussions on whether nationalism rose in parallel with scientific racism culminating in the Second World War, the distinction between racism and race thinking, whether post-war Italy, Japan and Germany saw themselves as subordinate to the USA and in what ways; the possible co-existence of strong nation states and globalisation, the fact that Italians seem to share a strong identity despite their politically divided country and the paradox of a nation feeling a sense of decadence or humiliation when it is in fact the strongest in the world as was the case with Edwardian Britain, to name just a few elements.

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