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Including contributions from an international team of leading experts, this volume examines state making from a uniquely Asian perspective and reveals some of the misunderstandings that arise when states and state making are judged solely on the basis of Western history. The contributors argue that if we are to understand states in Asia then we must first recognize the particular combination of institution and ideologies embedded in Asian state making and their distinctiveness from the Western experience. Presenting new empirical and conceptual material based on original research, the book provides a unique theoretical reflection of the state through a thorough comparison of East Asian nations and, as such, will be a valuable resource to scholars of Asian politics and international relations.
The book addresses questions such as: how should historians treat the earlier pasts of each country and the nationalism that guided the nation-building tasks? Where did political culture come in, especially when dealing with modern challenges of class, secularism and ethnicity? What part do external or regional pressures play when the nations are still being built? The authors have thought deeply about the issues of writing nation-building histories and have tried to put them not only in the perspective of Southeast Asian developments of the past five decades, but also the larger areas of historiography today.
The general tendency among theorists in nationalism and national identity has been to assume that the modernization process in Asia and Africa is a kind of distorted reflection of a Western precedent; Asian forms of the nation have rarely been seen as independent, alternative models. Among today's leading theoreticians, there is a growing tendency to take Asia seriously, and to include Asian examples in the general discussion. The aim of the present collection is to build on and reinforce this tendency. It does not postulate any specifically Asian form of the nation, as opposed to a Western one. Rather, it seeks to demonstrate that in Asia, as well as in Europe, each nation forms a unique amalgam which can be compared fruitfully with others. History, culture and geography have posed various kinds of limits to what can be imagined (as Benedict Anderson puts it). The relationship between geographical space and national construction is explored in depth here.