I WAS IN the middle of a research project on Japanese pan-Asianism when the events of September 11 sparked an unprecedented scholarly and nonscholarly discussion about Muslim rage against the West. What surprised me, as a student of modern Japanese intellectual history, was that the issues covered in historical materials about Japanese-Western relations from 1905 to 1945 seemed very similar to what journalists and news program editors were discussing with regard to the contemporary relationship between the Muslim world and the West. Both before and after the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, almost half a century before September 11, there were similar questions about anti-Westernism in Japan, with equally similar arguments among both Japanese and Western intellectuals. As a historian with specializations in both Middle Eastern and Japanese studies, I could not help thinking about anti-Westernism in the Muslim and non-Muslim parts of Asia in a comparative context and about the implications of such a comparison for understanding and responding to the questions of today. Thus the idea for this book was born as a quest to understand the significance of anti-Western ideologies in modern international history.
A historical comparison between Japanese and Muslim critiques of the West is significant beyond the peculiarities of my academic training because it reveals the paradoxes of contemporary controversies about anti-Westernism. While a politically influential paradigm argues that the Muslim revolt against the West derives either from Muslims’ inability to harmonize their religion with Western modernity or from their primordial conservative reaction to a Christian-dominated globalization process, a counternarrative emphasizes that this rage was and still is a natural response to Western imperialism and hegemony.1 Yet this polarized literature on the roots of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West raises more questions than it answers. If anti-Western critiques in the Muslim world had something to do the with the eternal conflict between the religious traditions of Islam and Christianity, why do we see equally strong traditions of anti-Western critiques in the non-Muslim societies of Asia, such as China and Japan?2 Similarly, if modern anti-Western critiques were a natural response to Western colonialism, why did they not fade away in the postcolonial period?3 Why did noncolonized parts of Asia, such as Ottoman Turkey and Japan, also develop strong traditions of anti-Western critique? If anti-Western ideologies were correlated to religious revivalism, why did so many secular and humanist thinkers formulate some of the most articulate critiques of the West?4 More important, how can we explain the fact that many of the themes of anti-Western critiques were simultaneously formulated and expressed by European and American intellectuals as well?5
Existing scholarly literature on anti-Western critiques in Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese histories demonstrate that anti-Western ideologies can neither be seen simply as derivative of the anticolonial struggles nor explained solely as conservative and religious reactions to global modernity.6 Yet both religious traditions and the legacy of Western colonialism were nonetheless highly relevant for the formation of anti-Western images, discourses, and ideologies. It is thus necessary to examine historically how various religious traditions and the experience of European colonialism interacted with peculiar Muslim or non-Muslim discontent with globalization, the international order, and modernization to produce shared anti-Western discourses in the twentieth century.
With a comparative focus on Ottoman and Japanese histories, this book offers a global history perspective on modern anti-Western critiques in order to understand their genesis, content, and political significance in international history. It challenges the exceptionalist writings on the critiques of the West in the Muslim world, which have underlined the historical memory of the conflicts between Muslim and Christian political entities. This focus has led to an overemphasis of the role of confrontations between essentialized geographies of the Muslim world and the Christian West in the interpretation of anti-Western emotions and ideas at the expense of the modern global context of Muslim discourses on the West.7 It has also led to a neglect of the largely secular critiques of the West in Middle Eastern history, because of the depiction of a misleading dichotomy between pro-Western secularists versus anti-Western religious revivalists in the Middle East when in fact in the long history of decolonization many humanist and modernist thinkers in Asia, some of them followers of Enlightenment thought, such as Namik Kemal, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Okukara Tenshin, Celal Nuri, Ahmed Riza, and Sun Yat-sen, formulated sharp critiques of what they considered to be the West.
It is largely due to the lack of attention to the international politics behind positive or critical images of the West that we still lack any sophisticated comparison of anti-Western thought in the Muslim world and non-Muslim Asia. The existence of a rich and diverse tradition of anti-Western critiques in the non-Muslim societies of Asia, especially in highly modern and capitalist Japan, indicates that anti-Western ideas in the Muslim world cannot and should not be reduced to the dynamics of a relationship between the followers of two interrelated faith traditions, Islam and Christianity.8 There is a growing awareness of the need for an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to both critiques of the West and anti-Western ideologies that will take the global circulation of Western-originated anti-Western ideas into account as well.9
The histories of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order provide excellent case studies for understanding the appeal and impact of anti-Western ideas in global history. Both pan-Islamic and pan-Asian ideas emerged around the same time, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and contained a strong element of anti-Westernism in their assessment of modernity, cultural Westernization, and the international order. Pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought not only became very influential in the formative periods of Asian nationalisms, they were also part of the wartime ideologies of the Ottoman Empire and imperial Japan during both WWI and WWII. The literature on Western, Islamic, and Asian civilizations, as well as various political projects involving their solidarity and encounter, has always been intimately related to the debates on the normative values and power relations of a globalizing international order. Case studies of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought can help us explore the interrelationship of cultural debates on civilizational and racial identities, on the one hand, with diplomatic and international developments, on the other. How can we explain the rise of anti-Western ideas, emotions, and trends in Asia parallel to the globalization and Westernization of world cultures from the 1880s to the 1940s? Are anti-Western critiques a reflection of discontent with the international order or a nativist rejection of Western-originated universal modernity? What has been the impact of anti-Western ideas in modern international history?
Study of pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism necessarily involves a methodology that gives serious consideration to the role of transnational imagination and identity in international history. Since Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking work, the powerful influence of nationalist imagination has been given due attention in the study of international history.10 Imaginations of race, religion, and civilization, however, also represent a significant force in modern world history, even though they have often been overshadowed by the emphasis on nationalism. For example, from the early Meiji period on, changing conceptions of Asia became a powerful cultural-geographical representation in relation to which the character and mission of the Japanese nation were defined and redefined.11 Similarly, the Muslim world as a geographical civilizational entity, not simply denoting a shared religious identity, emerged during the 1860s in relation to the evolution of the notion of the West. It is necessary to understand why the civilizational identities of Asia and the Islamic world, together with the omnipresent concept of the West, came to exist as essential components of the invention of national identity.
As a matter of fact, the predisposition to identify with an entity larger than the nation, be it a civilization, religion, or race, seems paradoxical for a historical period retrospectively characterized as the age of rising nationalism.12 The ideals of pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism were only two of the numerous similar political and intellectual trends, including pan-Slavism, pan-Europeanism, and pan-Africanism. The transnational identity of being Asian, Muslim, African, or European was also significant in defining the nature of nationalism and international politics even when these were not formulated into a systematic ideology of regional, religious, or racial solidarity.13 Moreover, these transnational identity constructions influenced international relations, as can be observed in the complex relationship between pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist ideology, on the one hand, and the foreign policies of two non-Western empires of the twentieth century, the Ottoman and Japanese empires, on the other.
Although there exists a rich literature on pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism, especially in the historical writings on the late Ottoman and the Japanese empires, scholarship on these questions contains several conflicting and competing interpretations with regard to two major questions. The first question relates to the ideological significance of the anti-Westernism associated with these two non-Western visions of world order. Given that Japan was the most Westernized and industrialized nation in Asia, with close diplomatic and cultural ties to Europe and America, how can we account for the strong current of anti-Western thought that historically characterized Japanese intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century? Some postwar scholars have offered a sympathetic view of the Asianist critiques of the West, perceiving in Japan’s prewar Asianist thinkers a desire to overcome the problems of Western modernity that resembled the attempts of such esteemed humanist figures as Tagore, Gandhi, and Lu Xun.14 Another group of scholars, however, has pointed out that anti-Westernism in Japan not only undermined democratic values and party politics domestically but also encouraged the rejection of liberal international norms associated with the West, especially Wilsonian internationalism.
A similar division in historiography exists in the literature on pan-Islamism. Initially, pan-Islamism was seen as a reactionary “Islamic” response to the challenge of global modernity and Western civilization as it was usually identified with international visions of Islamist individuals, whether Sultan Abdulhamid II or the Young Turkera Islamists. It was also associated with the propaganda discourse of the Ottoman government during WWI. The existence of a larger group of secular and nationalist figures who advocated a pan-Islamic policy for the Ottoman state illustrates, however, that pan-Islamism cannot be reduced to the utopian and expansionist world order vision of some Islamist thinkers. The relationship between Turkish nationalism and pan-Islamism is much more complex, given the fact that many Ottoman intellectuals who were categorized as secular nationalists expressed pan-Islamic sympathies, ideas, and world order visions around the years of WWI. In fact, the consensus on pan-Islamic notions of solidarity among various segments of the Ottoman intellectual elite before WWI is a reminder that at one point pan-Islamism was seen not as a reactionary idea but as a realist policy option available for Muslim societies. After all, it was the Ottoman government elite, which had avoided military confrontations with the leading Western powers since the 1840s through its famous realist balance-of-power diplomacy, that ended up declaring a pan-Islamic jihad against the British, French, and Russian empires during WWI. Interpreting the official Ottoman endorsement of the anti-Western discourse of pan-Islamism during WWI as a natural response to Western imperialism is also an insufficient explanation, as the expansion of Western powers in the Muslim world had been ongoing since the 1830s. Why was there no pan-Islamism at the time of the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 or during the mutiny of Muslim soldiers against British rule in India in 1857? Why did the rise of pan-Islamism occur after the 1880s?
The second significant historical aspect of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism is the role they played in the history of decolonization while at the same time offering justifications for the Japanese and Ottoman leaderships and their domination over East Asia and the Middle Eastern Islamic world, respectively.15 The anti-imperialist credentials of pan-Islamism have been emphasized in the literature. After all, even Hindu nationalists such as Gandhi joined the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement of India to show solidarity with the Muslim struggles against Western imperialism. The Ottoman government also used pan-Islamism, both to call for the unity of all Muslim subjects of the empire against the nationalist demands of its Christian subjects and to assert Ottoman leadership in the Muslim world as leverage in its relationship with the European powers. During WWI, pan-Islamism was not only part of the propaganda rhetoric of the Ottoman state but also a tool used by the German Empire in its great-power competition with the British, French, and Russian empires.
Similarly, an emphasis on the anti-imperialist aspects of pan-Asianism has been part of the scholarly literature since Marius Jansen’s study on the collaboration between Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen and Japanese Asianists, which demonstrated that many Japanese supporters of Sun Yatsen acted under an idealistic anticolonial vision of solidarity between Japan and China. There is an especially rich literature on the anticolonial motivations of the Japanese who worked with Subhas Chandra Bose in the Indian National Army campaign against the British Empire during WWII. As Prasenjit Duara has suggested, during the late 1930s, pan-Asianism continued to inspire idealist individuals, groups, and religious movements with liberationist, anticolonial, and redemptive agendas even at a time when these same ideas were being utilized in the grand scheme of Japanese imperialism.16 Yet the fact that pan-Asianism also came to be an ideological tool used in the Japanese occupation to suppress Chinese nationalism has been accepted by virtually all scholars. How do these two conflicting aspects of pan-Asianism relate to each other?17 This question continues to be the subject of scholarly and public controversy, particularly in the context of the discussions provoked by the textbook revision movement of some Japanese groups who insist on the decolonizing legacy of Japan’s wartime expansion in East and Southeast Asia, a claim that naturally attracted harsh protests from East Asian nations.18
These questions point up the fact that it is necessary to examine the changes in the legitimacy and inclusiveness of the Eurocentric international order, as well as transformations in the relationship between the Western center and the non-Western peripheries, to grasp better the genesis and appeal of the alternative visions of world order embodied in the anti-Western discourses of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought. This book argues that it was the legitimacy crisis of a single, globalized, international system that produced pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order. The content of both these alternative visions of world order was shaped by the peculiar challenge to the intellectual justifications of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, especially through discourses of Orientalism and racism. In terms of their political projects, trajectories of pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism were intertwined with the major turning points in international history that altered both the power configuration and legitimacy claims of the world order, such as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, WWI, and Japan’s occupation of Manchuria. As pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism contributed to the decolonization process and influenced the foreign policies of both the Ottoman and the Japanese governments, they also left a long-lasting legacy that influenced nationalist thought and the international relations of the post-WWII period.
This book approaches the histories of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism in their chronological stages within the global narrative of one single Eurocentric international order in order to resolve the historiographic debates outlined above, and thus the following chapters are organized around historical turning points.
The next chapter discusses why there was no systematic anti-Westernism in Asia until the 1870s, despite the reactions to European expansion, and explains this absence by the reformist non-Western elite’s ambivalent acceptance of a civilizationist worldview as legitimizing the new Eurocentric international order. The chapter discusses the emergence of the notion of a universal West, beyond the Christian and white race identity of Europeans, in the minds of Asian intellectuals and reformers. Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals during the nineteenth century attributed a quality of universality to Western civilization and constructed an abstract image of the West that became a central pillar in their visions of world order and their assessments of intensifying global interactions. Their acceptance of the normativity of the Eurocentric civilization of the nineteenth century derived from the decoupling of the narratives of European and American progress from any association with religion, race, and geography. Non-Western elite’s gradually became familiar not only with Enlightenment thought but also with various exceptionalist European explanations of their superiority over the rest of the world, such as those found in the writings of Montesquieu, Guizot, and Buckle. In this process, the reformist intellectuals and leaders of Japan and the Ottoman state formulated a more inclusive notion of global civilization and international order, believing that they should encounter no religious, cultural, or racial obstacle to being as civilized as the Europeans. They insisted that upon achieving a certain set of “civilized” reforms, their societies could attain not only prosperity and might but also security and equality in the emerging world order.
The appeal of membership in a secure and prosperous international society, centered in Europe and transforming the world through globalization, had been a major component of the idea of the West among non-Western elite’s during the nineteenth century. The reformist elite’s in Asia faced unequal treaties, colonial tutelage, and even some forms of discrimination by Western political entities, yet they believed that these would be temporary, disappearing once non-Western societies successfully completed the necessary civilized reforms. In other words, they imagined a potentially more inclusive international society than the one existing in the mid-nineteenth century.
The third chapter discusses the emergence of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist ideas during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order emerged during the late 1870s in response to the perceived rejection by the European center of its own claims to the universality of modern civilization and inclusiveness of the world order. The main critique of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought was directed against the “uncivilized” acts of European imperialism, which created obstacles in the process of self-civilizing reforms of non-Western societies. Thus it was a corrective critique of the world order, asking for the fulfillment of the promises of the global civilization process and the universalization of modernity.
Following the turn to formal imperialism in Europe’s relationship with Asia and Africa, well observed in the scramble for Africa in the aftermath of the invasion of Egypt in 1882, Asian intellectuals became more concerned with the transnational power of the new European discourses on the Orient, race, and empire. Just when the reform projects of the Ottoman and Japanese elite’s were being tied to the idea of a universal West, highly rigid interpretations of civilizational and racial hierarchies that identified progress with the white race or the culture of Christianity became the dominant explanations for Western hegemony and superiority in Europe and America. This led to a crucial contradiction in the legitimacy of the Eurocentric world order: the universalist tones of the Enlightenment image of the West, well established in Asian thought until the 1880s and in many ways continuing afterward, contradicted the exclusion of the Muslim world and Asia from the liberal promises of the Enlightenment in the ideologies of the permanent racial and civilizational superiority of the West over Muslims and “yellow race” Asians.
The seeming failures of the economic and political reforms in the Ottoman state, Egypt, and China formed only part of the reasons for inspiring the thesis “the East will never be the West” and for strengthening Western discourses that coupled progress and civilization with Christianity or the white race. Although there were anti-imperialist and inclusive intellectual projects in Europe, the popularization of the cultures of imperialism in Europe strengthened the exclusion of “yellow race” and Muslim claims to equality and dignity in the world community. More important, the imperialist competition among the European powers, which initiated a period of colonization for the sake of colonization beyond the arguments of “civilizing mission,” increased the sense of insecurity in the rest of the world. Yet Orientalist and race discourses were not a simple derivation of uneven power relations, as they survived beyond the power hierarchy in global relations between various societies. It is in this global context that Asian intellectuals first developed an alternative discourse of civilization and race, which continued to uphold the idea of a universal modernity while aiming to delegitimize the imperial power structures in the world order. Both Ottoman and Japanese intellectuals engaged in intense debates about notions of empire, race, civilization, progress, and humanity. Parallel to these intellectual efforts, some of them developed visions of world order springing from notions of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian solidarities in opposition to imperialist international order. Yet neither of these two anti-Western internationalisms envisioned a return to the previous isolated regional systems or deglobalization. On the contrary, pan-Islamic and pan-Asian alternatives aimed at a reunified global order divided into complementary and equal regional blocks, in which the West would be forced to abide by its own proclaimed standards in cooperation with a free and modern Islamic world and Asia. The notion of a clash between the Islamic and Christian worlds, as well as the idea of a conflict between the white and yellow races, emerged in this period. Pan-Islamic and pan-Asian intellectuals emphasized clash-of-civilization or race theories as a diagnosis and critique of European policies, not as a prescription for their vision of world order. This era also gave birth to the main argument of anti-Western discourse, namely, that the West was applying a double standard in its international relations by violating the very principles of civilized behavior that Western public opinion proclaimed.
In the fourth chapter, the emphasis is on the impact of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 on the content and politics of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thought. Contemporary commentators characterized the period from 1905 to 1914 as the era of the “awakening” of the East against the Western hegemony, a slogan that became the symbol of an intellectual decolonization that preceded the political one. Worldwide responses to the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 show how a globally interconnected public sphere interpreted the historical significance of the Japanese victory through shared notions of East-West civilizational relations and the balance of power between the white and colored races. This chapter emphasizes that the Russo-Japanese War became the key historical reference in resolving the tensions between the universalization of Eurocentric modernity, through the agency of non-Western elite’s, and late-nineteenth-century Orientalist and racist discourses that justified the Eurocentric imperial world order.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 empowered the claims of non-Western intellectuals in the debates about race, the Orient, and progress. It became the strongest evidence against the discourse of the white race’s permanent and eternal superiority over the colored races. After 1905 no scholarly or nonscholarly discussion of racism and innate civilizational hierarchies in world politics could ignore the example of Japan. Anticolonial intellectuals could and did use the Japanese success to invalidate the discourse of the white man’s superiority and his burden to civilize Asia. The Japanese example was similarly used in the critiques of European Orientalism, as it proved that Orientals were not inferior and the Orientalist discourse of Western superiority over other civilizations was not necessarily true. If the Japanese could achieve progress and development without colonialism, other colonized Oriental nations could do the same. The slogans about the awakening of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, against the charges of the decline of these faith traditions, became part of the self-consciousness of this era. Beyond proving the equality of the colored races and Oriental People’s, the Japanese success helped Asian intellectuals to assert that the existing backwardness of Asian societies was not a result of deterministic factors, conditioned by race, culture, geography, climate, and religion. They emphasized that this underdevelopment was just a temporary delay in progress that could be altered by a set of reforms, such as the ones Meiji Japan had implemented in just three decades. Parallel to the widespread critics of the discourse of race and Orientalism as a challenge to the intellectual and moral justifications of the then-existing world order, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War both pan-Asian and pan-Islamic ideas entered journalistic and scholarly writings on international affairs, signifying the revolt of rising Asia against the imperialist West and further strengthening their appeal among Asian nationalists.
The fifth chapter discusses the experience and transformation of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist visions during WWI. Both pan-Asianist and pan-Islamist critiques of the West included an effort to define Japan’s or the Ottoman state’s national interest and international mission in a way that would appeal to the realist policy makers in those non-Western empires. These efforts gained special policy relevance during the crucial deliberations leading to the Ottoman Empire’s decision to enter WWI. The chapter describes the triumph of pan-Islamic ideas among the Ottoman elite both as a repository of anti-Western emotions and as a new realist thinking about the Ottoman response to the geopolitics of world affairs. It argues that the pan-Islamic diagnosis of international relations as an encirclement of the Muslim world by Christian imperial powers and the fear of further isolation of the Ottoman state as a Muslim political entity created the conditions for the Ottoman decision to ally with Germany in WWI, paradoxically to express the desire to belong to European international society while fighting against the three big Western empires.
From the early 1880s to 1912, pan-Islamism was an important topic in Muslim intellectual networks and European writings on the rising nationalism and modernization movements in the Muslim world. But during this period it did not become an officially endorsed Ottoman policy, despite the fact that the Ottoman state and the caliphate institution remained a central focus of pan-Islamic imagination. The Ottoman state elite’s approach to pan-Islamism gradually changed during the crisis of Ottoman international isolation initiated by the Italian invasion of Tripoli in 1911 and the Balkan wars of 1912–1913, when the Western great powers all supported Christian states in violation of their legal and diplomatic obligations. Believing that it was primal Christian solidarity, not civilization and international law, that led France, England, and Russia to support Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia, louder voices in Ottoman public opinion debates argued for the adoption of a pan-Islamic foreign policy as the only viable response. The appropriation of pan-Islamic solidarity as a grand vision of Ottoman foreign policy during WWI shows to what extent this anti-Western vision of world order began to appeal to the realist elite’s in the context of the legitimacy crisis of the international system during the 1905–1914 period.
The chapter also examines how Japanese pan-Asianists redefined Asianist thought by combining a new confident discourse on the superiority of Asia/ Eastern civilization with a realist policy vision of Japanese leadership in Asian awakening against the declining West. Japanese Asianists successfully campaigned for the idea that it was better for Japan to be the leader of a future free Asia than a yellow race partner discriminated against in the club of white great powers. It was during WWI that pan-Asianists sharpened their anti-Western discourse and extended the boundaries of Japan’s Sinocentric vision of Asia to include India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The chapter emphasizes the political conflicts between pro-British Japanese diplomacy and anti-British Asianist policy visions. While their efforts did not affect Japan’s alliance with the British Empire during WWI, pan-Asianists nevertheless managed to influence Japanese public opinion, contributing to the Japanese government’s decision to propose a race equality clause at the Paris Peace Conference. WWI experiences shed light on the often-overlooked roles played by pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism in the collapse of the imperial world order.
The sixth chapter emphasizes that the influence of WWI on anti-Western thought and visions of world order was paradoxical: on the one hand, the image of the decline of Western civilization eroded the political and cultural prestige of Western hegemony in Asia, strengthening the alternative civilizational discourse of pan-Asianist and pan-Islamic thought. On the other, the international appeal of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist ideas was undermined by two powerful alternatives to the imperial world order, symbolized by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Wilsonian principles. In a sense, socialism and Wilsonianism inspired anticolonial nationalist movements by offering two Western solutions to the globally acknowledged crisis of international order. As a new world order emerged, pan-Islamist and pan-Asianist ideas were rearticulated and asserted in relation to Wilsonianism, socialism, and rising nationalist movements, allowing their visions of world order and discourse of civilization to remain relevant even though their political appeal and support diminished during the 1920s. During this process, there was a temporary alliance between the Wilsonian challenge to the imperial world order and pan-Islamic visions of solidarity in the Khilafat movement established in support of the Turkish national movement. Similarly, there were also early alliances between the anti-Western challenge to the imperial world order and socialist internationalism. Yet by 1924 both pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order had established a distinct mode of critiques and tradition in relation to the League of Nations-based liberal internationalism and socialist internationalism supported by the Soviet Union.
During the interwar period, anti-Western ideas of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist trends relied on the failures of the League of Nations system, while intellectually utilizing the Occidentalist dichotomy of the moral East and the materialist West. Thus, even though activism in the name of Asian or Islamic solidarity did not have much influence on international politics, many non-Western intellectuals, including pro-Western liberals, began to share both a discourse of East-West civilization and a diagnosis regarding the conflict between the two.
Chapter 7 examines the nature of the revival and reinvention of pan-Asianism in Japan during the late 1930s as an official vision of international order in East Asia. The policy path the Japanese government took after its withdrawal from the League of Nations appears to have been a triumph for pan-Asianist ideas. The chapter discusses why the Japanese ruling elite’s, which had a long tradition of cooperation with Western powers, decided that it was rational realpolitik to embrace a pan-Asian notion of Japan-led East Asian solidarity. It was pan-Asianism’s ability to justify projects of unity and assimilation within the multiethnic Japanese Empire, especially against the Chinese nationalist movement, that seemed attractive to the Japanese elite’s, which benefited from the anti-Western and anticolonial aspects of Asianism to solve their own crisis of imperialism in East Asia. The Japanese Empire thus could utilize the universalist and anticolonial aspects of the pan-Asian tradition of critique of the Eurocentric world order when that empire itself faced a crisis both from nationalist challenges and with regard to getting recognition from Western/ white empires. It was the power of the Asianist discourse of East-West civilizational difference and the racial injustice of whites against the colored People’s that facilitated a general conversion among Japan’s liberal and socialist figures to a pan-Asianist vision of world order during the 1930s, making their ideas very similar to those advocated by the pan-Asianists of the 1905–1914 period. Despite its contamination with Japanese imperial ideologies and strategies, the legacy of Asian internationalism shaped Japan’s foreign policy in the era of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere and contributed to the decolonization of Asia by forcing the Allied Powers to respond to pan-Asian propaganda with a promise of a more inclusive and nonracial new world order in the aftermath of WWII.
By treating the parallel histories of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism as a topic of international history and by situating them in their proper global context, this study aims to contribute to existing historiographic debates in both Ottoman and Japanese studies. The comparative analysis of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought will illustrate that certain aspects of these two alternative visions of world order should be understood beyond monocultural analysis of the Muslim or Japanese context, as products of a global constellation of ideas, power relations, and international problems. More important, this historical reassessment of the politics of anti-Western thought in Asia can hold valuable lessons for current debates on the role of cultural identity in both justifying and criticizing the existing power relations in the international order. By identifying the past achievements and obstacles in the globalization of world order from the 1880s to 1945, this historical study may also help in the current struggles to establish normative universal values for a new international order that is both legitimate and inclusive.