COMPETING VISIONS TO reconstruct the ambivalent post-WWI international system shaped the political and intellectual trajectory of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought. The British and French empires had won the war and were thus able to try to implement their imperials designs, some of which were specified in secret treaties such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.1 Imperial Russia, a member of the Entente alliance, was transformed by a revolution, however. The new revolutionary government in Russia not only repudiated imperial diplomacy but also proclaimed its support for anticolonial national liberation movements. Moreover, some of the war aims proclaimed by American president Woodrow Wilson, especially the principle of “national self-determination,” raised the expectations of nationalist movements all over the world that a new League of Nations could be supportive of their anticolonial demands.2 In terms of the cultural basis of the world order, the unexpectedly long war shattered the image of Western civilization, an image that was crucial for the “civilizing mission” ideology of the imperial world order.3
Both pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism participated in the worldwide reflections on the new world order and its justifications through ideologies of race, civilization, and nation. Despite their effective responses to Wilsonianism and socialism and the empowerment arising from new doubts about Western civilization, however, pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order seemed to lose their realpolitik appeal by the late 1920s.
THE WILSONIAN MOMENT AND PAN-ISLAMISM
Wilson’s reference to the principle of national self-determination as a way to resolve the conflicts in the post-WWI period was welcomed by non-Western nationalists as an abandonment of the “standard of civilization” ideology of imperial diplomacy. Muslim and non-Muslim Asians living under the imperial control of the British and French empires could now claim national self-determination and appeal to the legitimacy of their natural rights. As such, this ideal invalidated the arguments that the inferiority of their faith, civilization, or race would prevent Asian societies from having full political autonomy and equality in the international sphere.4 In reality, imperial powers would keep the notion of standards of civilization in the newly established mandate system, but national self-determination would soon become the most prominent anticolonial argument.
Despite the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman elite found the new world trends favorable to their interests. They hoped that the twelfth point in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” would allow the Ottoman Muslims to establish secure and recognized state boundaries in areas where they were a majority, even if they had to lose the Arab-majority provinces of the Ottoman state.5 When the Ottoman government signed the armistice at Mondros on October 30, 1918, Ottoman public opinion carried an air of relief and optimism. The heavy conditions of the armistice were counterbalanced by the belief that the idea of national self-determination as the organizing principle of the new world order could finally allow the acceptance of a new Ottoman state into the international community as an equal member. Leading Ottoman intellectuals urged the Ottoman government to create a favorable peace based on the Wilsonian principles. Many of them believed that, with a fair implementation of the Wilsonian principles by the League of Nations and with the support of a liberal British Empire, the Ottoman leaders could try to negotiate a caliphate ruling over a politically independent Ottoman state in Anatolia that had a Muslim majority, be it Turkish, Arab, or Kurdish Muslims.6
This new Ottoman expectation could be seen as an abandonment of the previous realpolitik pan-Islamism, which was identified with the CUP government and the defeat. Before WWI, the Western powers seemed to be a monolithic bloc, and there were no international institutions from which to demand justice based on normative principles true for all races and cultures, especially non-Western ones. By 1914 the imperial policies of the Western powers led the Ottoman elite to see the collective cooperation of Muslims or Asian nations against the Western powers as the most logical strategy for survival and self-strengthening. Given this pre-WWI background, postwar Ottoman Wilsonianism was largely an optimist vision that embraced the promises of a new world order as a way out of the restrictions, limitations, and problems the Ottoman state had faced during the high age of imperialism (1882–1914). Similarly, Muslim nationalist leaders in the Arab world could also make use of the new normative principles in their struggle against the British and French empires.7
It is not surprising to see that most articulate advocate of realist pan-Islamism before WWI, Celal Nuri, become a strong advocate of Wilsonianism. Celal Nuri was one of the founders of the Wilsonian Principles Society, established in Istanbul on December 4, 1918. The other founders of the society included the editors of the major newspapers and leading public intellectuals of the time, such as the famous female novelist Halide Edip Adivar (1884–1964), as well as prominent journalists like Ahmet Emin (Yalman) (1888–1972) and Yunus Nadi (Abalioğlu) (1880–1945). The society sent a telegram to Woodrow Wilson, asking him to mediate between the Ottoman government and the Entente powers for a just peace. The content of the telegram also included a request for the United States to protect Ottoman Turkey from new assaults and to offer economic assistance to facilitate domestic development and the establishment of a new regime.8 Some even suggested that the United States should assume a mandate over Ottoman Turkey during the transition to its full independence, with the belief that such a mandate would be preferable to direct administration by the British or French empires.
In his pre-WWI writings on international law, Celal Nuri had emphasized a natural rights theory for equal treatment of each recognized state entity in the international community. Thus the twelfth Wilsonian principle, interpreted as the natural right of each nationality to self-determination, seemed very familiar and acceptable to him. The Wilsonian notion of national self-determination, however, rendered ethnicity, not the state, a legitimate entity in claiming rights and equality from the imagined international community. In that sense, there was already a potential problem with presenting Ottoman Muslims, composed of Turkish, Kurdish, and Arab ethnicities, as a single ethnic nation, rather than a religious community.
The Ottoman Muslim leaders were aware of the alternative claims to the right to national self-determination over the territories of Ottoman Turkey. Armenian nationalists claimed that Eastern Anatolia and many other cities in the Cilicia region belonged to their national homeland even if Armenians had lost their population in the area as a result of wartime massacres and Ottoman policies of forced emigration. Their claim of self-determination to a historic homeland had the support of U.S. public opinion and even Woodrow Wilson. Mean-while, some Kurdish nationalists claimed national rule in the same territories that the Armenians wanted as a homeland. Ex-Ottoman ambassador to Stockholm, Şerif Paşa, went to the Paris Peace Conference to represent the Kurdish national claims. On March 22, 1919, the Kurdish Progress Society (Kürt Teali Cemiyeti) was established in Istanbul to advance the claims for Kurdish autonomy. More important, the Greek president Eleftherios Venizelos presented a demand to the Paris Peace Conference on December 30, 1918, claiming that the majority of Western Anatolia was Greek and thus should be given to Greece according to the principle of national self-determination.
The power to interpret what national self-determination meant for Ottoman Turkey belonged to the four European powers at the Paris Peace Conference: Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. Italy had already been promised areas in Anatolia during the secret treaties of WWI, and it took unilateral action by invading portions of Anatolia. Following this Italian invasion, Britain, France, and the United States agreed to give Western Anatolia to Greece as a mandate. The beginning of the Greek invasion of Anatolia on May 15, 1919, mobilized Turkish public opinion.
The Greeks were not the majority in Western Anatolia. The great powers at the Paris Peace Conference, however, authorized the Greek request partly based on the predominant discourse that the Turks were not capable of ruling a multiethnic and multireligious society in a civilized manner and thus the Greeks were better suited to the task. In response to the occupation of Anatolia by Greece and Italy, the Muslim populations of Anatolia and Thrace mobilized in various organizations, all of which appropriated the Wilsonian principles as the main basis of moral legitimacy in their appeal to international public opinion and in political attempts to negotiate a favorable peace treaty. In fact, most of the organizations established by Muslims against the occupation of Anatolia carried the name of Müdafaai Hukuk Cemiyeti, the “Society for the Defense of the Rights” (of the Muslim-Turkish population to national-self-determination), emphasizing legal rights and self-determination. The very idea of the “defense of the rights” assumed an international community and international legality as the constitutive principles of the new world order. Some of the mass demonstrations were followed by a ceremonial telegraph message to Woodrow Wilson, reminding him of the principle he had declared as defining the United States’ war aims and the conditions under which his country entered WWI. Muslim leaders asked for the implementation of a plebiscite to determine whose self-determination would decide the future of an area. Meanwhile, Ottoman intellectuals urged the government to send an Ottoman delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.9 In short, the Muslim-Ottoman vision of a world order and Turkey’s place in it remained within the discourse and framework of the Wilsonian principles, and the primary emphasis was not on pan-Islamic solidarity.
When the Ottoman government finally received a belated invitation to the Paris Peace Conference on May 30, 1919, its official memorandum, unsurprisingly, asked for a peace based on the Wilsonian principles.10 The memorandum still carried traces of the discourse of civilization in the sense that it affirmed the civilized character of the Muslim Ottomans, which necessitated their equal membership in the international community. The main argument, however, revolved around a natural rights theory supported by the norm of national self-determination, which was interpreted as a guarantee for a homeland for the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly, the memorandum refuted the perception that there was any anti-Westernism among the Ottoman Muslims. Indicating the emerging post-WWI revisionism, the memorandum attributed the Ottoman decision to enter into WWI to the conspiracy of a small group of Young Turk leaders. According to this theory, the Ottoman Muslims, who were closely linked to Western civilization, had become victims of the clique in the Union and Progress Party and should hence not be punished. The memorandum accused the same Union and Progress Party leadership of being responsible for the atrocities against the Armenians, while emphasizing that this policy was an imitation of the ethnic cleansing policy perpetuated by the Christian Balkan states against their Muslim populations during the Balkan wars. It also noted that there had been no massacres against the Greek citizens of the Ottoman state during the war (202).
The fourth item of the Ottoman memorandum to the Paris Peace Conference noted that the Ottoman state was now deprived of its means for self-defense but that it trusted the justice of the civilized world and expected the fair implementation of Wilson’s moral principles. While requesting that Muslim-majority areas should fall under Ottoman rule, it suggested that, in some mixed-population areas, a population exchange policy be implemented to eliminate future problems and to solve the age-old Eastern question forever. The reference to “Peace in the East” implicitly linked the Paris Peace Conference and the Wilsonian principles as the only way to overcome the diplomacy of frequent European interventions in Ottoman domestic politics with the proclaimed aims of protecting the rights and privileges of its Christian populations. With regard to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman state (Syria, Iraq, Hijaz, and Yemen), the memorandum again called for the implementation of the twelfth point of the Wilsonian principles, national self-determination, but mentioned that, because of Muslim bonds with the institution of the caliphate, these areas could still have political ties with Ottoman Turkey. The memorandum also insisted that Ottoman rule over a sovereign territory would represent the rule of the contemporary civilization of the West. Finally, it asked for the elimination of unequal treaties and capitulations with the demand that all the civilized (international) laws of the West be fully applied to Turkey in international relations. In return, the Ottoman government would promise to shoulder its share of the Ottoman debts of the pre-WWI period and keep the Bosporus open to all. At the end, the Ottoman government reiterated its protest against the occupation of Western Anatolia and its territories on the Mediterranean shore. With these conditions, the Ottoman government expressed the wish that an independent Turkey be part of the League of Nations and stated that, for this, it would always be grateful to the great-civilized powers of the West (205).
In response to this Ottoman memorandum, Entente powers produced a harsh statement on June 28, 1919, reminding the Ottoman government that it had entered the war on the German side without any provocation, and, as a defeated party, it had to accept the conditions imposed by the victors. The response also included a statement regarding the civilizational inferiority of the Turks, indicating that the Muslim Turks had not been very good at ruling other nations and religions. The response also hinted at the Ottoman claim to leadership in the Muslim world against the Western imperial powers during WWI, suggesting that the Turkish-Muslim government in Istanbul should become a good model for other Muslims, which “they were not for many decades.” The Turkish delegation was then asked to leave the Paris Peace Conference on June 28 to await decisions about the Ottoman state.11
It is in the context of the Ottoman demands at the Paris Peace Conference that post-WWI pan-Islamic visions were revived. The main focus of this campaign was the continuation of a seemingly Christian hostility toward the Muslim world at the Paris Peace Conference. The arguments of this pan-Islamism differed from the pre-WWI form, however, in the sense that it merged with the legitimacy of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination and focused on the independence of the Muslim-majority areas of the Ottoman state rather than the broader challenge to Western imperialism in the Muslim world during WWI.
A prominent pan-Islamist of the earlier era and a leading Indian nationalist of the time, Shaikh Mushir Hosain Kidwai (1878–1937),12 wrote two books in English to formulate the new pan-Islamism critical of the Paris Peace Conference.13 Kidwai’s arguments included a synthesis of the pre-WWI idea of a caliphate-centered geopolitical pan-Islamism and the new notions of national self-determination. In The Future of the Muslim Empire: Turkey, he argued for the recognition of Ottoman territorial sovereignty over multireligious and multiethnic populations on two grounds. First was the national self-determination principle, as Muslims were the majority. The second was an argument that the Ottoman government, with a caliph at the top, would be more civilized in its treatment of subjects that were not of the same religion and ethnicity than the imperial powers of Britain and France had been. Clearly refuting the British and French depiction of Ottoman rule as Muslim despotism, Kidwai argued that the British Empire refused to give civilized rights to Catholic Ireland and Hindu-Muslim India, hence it had no legitimacy to criticize the Ottoman treatment of Christians, who had representatives in the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul.
Kidwai’s second book on the same issue was written within a couple of months of the first but carried a more pessimist and anti-British tone because of the harsh response given to the Ottoman demands at the Paris Peace Conference. Lamenting that the “materialistic Europe respects the sword alone” and “force alone can cure her of her pride,” Kidwai resorted to the pre-WWI perception of European policies as deriving from their Christian biases and the mentality of the Crusades. He thus condemned the European statesmen who had gathered in Paris as continuing the old imperial policies, violating the promises of the Wilsonian principles, and laying the foundations for new wars.14 Kidwai’s book became an articulate expression of both the early pan-Islamic embrace of Wilsonianism and pan-Islamic disillusionment with the Paris Peace Conference.15 Kidwai’s and other Indian leaders’ campaign for the national self-determination of the Muslims in Ottoman Turkey through letters to British officials reveals, however, a Wilsonian dilemma in the sense that it was the Indian Muslim subjects of the British Empire who were demanding the national self-determination of Ottoman Muslims on behalf of a transnational Muslim solidarity with the caliph at its head. It was also mixed with the politics of Indian resistance against the legitimacy of the British Empire.
Muslim mobilization around the demands of Turkish Muslim leaders led to a more popular India-based pan-Islamic organization. Various Indian Muslim organizations first met in a Khilafat conference in November 1919, during the full-scale expansion of the British-supported Greek armies in Anatolia.16 The Khilafat movement aimed at pressuring the British government to change its attitude toward Turkey; other goals were the protection of Islam’s holy places and financial assistance to the national struggle in Anatolia. It was joined not only by the Sunni Muslims but also by Shi’a Muslims and even Hindu nationalists such as Mahatma Gandhi, who saw in the Khilafat Congress a just cause for India’s Muslims.
In the early 1920s, the prominent leaders of the Khilafat movement, chief among them Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, visited London to pressure the British government and garner public opinion support for Ottoman Turkey. Both during their interviews with prominent British politicians and in their speeches and writings aimed at influencing European public opinion, the leaders of the Khilafat movement emphasized a realpolitik argument, in addition to the then commonplace Wilsonianism, to the effect that Britain needed a friendly Turkey and the support of the Muslim world against a potential alliance between Russia and Germany. This realist suggestion for a rapprochement between the British Empire and Ottoman Turkey to create a balance of power with Germany and Bolshevik Russia was especially striking given some of Indian Muslim leaders’ sympathies for both Russia and Germany. Similarly, Muhammad Ali warned that if Muslim majorities were not given self-determination but ruled by Christian minorities, India’s Muslims might refuse to fight for the British Empire in future wars.17
Even when the pan-Islamic network was mobilized in support of the demands of Ottoman Turkey in 1920, both the last Ottoman parliament and the rising nationalist movement in Anatolia clarified Ottoman Muslim demands for national self-determination in a more detailed and realistic document called the National Pact. The Ottoman National Pact of February 17, 1920, envisioned a Muslim nation composed of Turks, Arabs, and Kurds living in Anatolia, thus avoiding the question of national self-determination for the Kurdish people. It also aimed to minimize the number of Christian populations in future Ottoman Turkey through border adjustment and population transfers to eliminate the legacy of the “Eastern question” and thus the potential for further European interventions. After asserting the right to independence for Ottoman Turkey within the parameters of the armistice, the Ottoman National Pact abandoned any claims of sovereignty over the Arab-majority provinces of the Ottoman Empire lost during WWI. While the definition of a more limited boundary for Ottoman Turkey partially meant the abandonment of Turkey’s claim to leadership in the Muslim world, the pact described Istanbul as the seat of the caliphate and thus implied the continuation of this institution.
Worried about the rise of the nationalist movement in Anatolia embodied in the unanimous support for the National Pact in the Ottoman parliament, the Entente powers, under the leadership of Britain, occupied Istanbul on March 16, 1920. In the context of the occupation of Istanbul by the Entente powers, the notion of pan-Islamic solidarity as a basis of alternative international support for Turkey grew even stronger. The editor of the journal İzmir’e Doğru succinctly formulated this new conception: “Now the whole world is convinced that only naked force is regulating international affairs. Turks and Muslims agreed to surrender because they trusted the principles proclaimed by the honorable representatives of the great American nation. If that same American nation is now keeping quiet in the face of this horrendous event [the occupation of Istanbul], then the only solution for the Turks is to ask for help from the Muslim world with all its power and capacity.”18
The Entente powers finalized their conditions for peace at the San Remo Conference (April 18–26, 1920). It was agreed that Ottoman Turkey would not only recognize the political entities of Kurds and Armenians but also accept a Greek-ruled political entity in Western Anatolia. The Entente conditions for peace required the continuation of the Ottoman capitulations to the Western powers, hence protecting the unequal treaty system of the era of imperialism.19 All these conditions were expressed in the Sèvres Peace Treaty (August 10, 1920) that the Istanbul government finally signed, but the national government in Ankara never recognized the treaty. The Ankara government initiated not only a military campaign against the Greek forces and other occupying powers in Anatolia but also promoted a public opinion campaign in European capitals to explain the cause of Ottoman Turkey through the language of the Wilsonian principles and the understanding between Eastern and Western civilizations. Parallel to that, the national liberation movement in Turkey utilized both the sympathies of the Bolshevik government in Russia and pan-Islamic sensibilities in the Muslim world to its advantage.
Pan-Islamic ideas and networks had several benefits for the Ankara government: First of all, they could bolster the idea of a Muslim nation composed of Turks, Kurds, Arabs, and other ethnicities. Second, the general support of the Muslim world, especially the Indian Muslims, would strengthen Turkey’s position against the British and French empires. It is in this context that one can understand the interest of Mustafa Kemal Paşa in the pan-Islamic movement and its important figures. It was Mustafa Kemal Paşa who asked an Islamist, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, to organize a pan-Islamic conference in Ankara, while inviting a reputed Muslim leader of North Africa, Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi (1873–1933), to join the Independence War in Anatolia. Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi was the third grand master of the Sanusiyya Order in Libya. As a reputed fighter for Muslims against Italian, French, and British colonialism in Africa, he was well received in Istanbul when he arrived in the city in a German submarine in August 1918. He was given the honor of officiating at the ceremonial girding of Caliph Omar’s sword for the new Ottoman sultan-caliph Vahdettin. When al-Sanusi was in Bursa, a representative of the Ankara government asked him to support the national movement in Ankara against the religious condemnation of the caliph-sultan. Al-Sanusi decided to support the movement led by Mustafa Kemal and worked for its propaganda in Anatolia until he left Turkey in 1924. When he went to Ankara, Mustafa Kemal received him with a banquet in his honor, praising his importance in the pan-Islamic movement. In early 1921, al-Sanusi presided over a Muslim congress in Sivas (not the same as the Sivas Congress).20 The text of Ahmad al-Sharif s khutba (Friday sermon) in Sivas was published in the influential Islamist journal Sebilürreşad on March 31, 1921.21 Not much more international activity came out of this Islamic congress in Sivas, but it shows that the Ankara government kept its options open with regard to using a transnational Muslim network in its struggle against foreign invasions and a British-French-led new world order.
The Ankara government remained in full contact with the Khilafat movement in India. It is important to emphasize that the national government in Ankara received the bulk of the Khilafat movement’s financial and political support, overshadowing the Istanbul government of the caliph the movement tried to save. During this period, the Ankara government itself separated the institution of the caliphate from its critique of the policies of the Istanbul government under the tutelage of foreign military occupation.
While the core of the public opinion campaign of the pan-Islamic Movement in support of the Turkish national movement focused on Britain, there were attempts to influence French and Italian public opinion. The Khilafat committee visited these countries and supported a French-language journal, Echos de l’Islam, to express the opinions of Muslims regarding the new world order.22 Mustafa Kemal asked Ahmed Riza,23 a prominent Young Turk leader who had spent long years in Paris as an exile during the Abdulhamid II period, to go to Paris to solicit backing from his international network of contacts and to write in support of the cause of the Turkish national movement. In the immediate aftermath of WWI, Riza was one of the advocates of Wilsonianism as a normative principle of the new world order, expressing the hope that a well-defined limited American mandate could help to save Ottoman Turkey from the unfriendly intentions of British and French empires.24 Until the signing of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923, Ahmed Riza carried out a campaign of lectures, articles, and letters in the French press.25
Riza’s arguments in support of the Turkish national movement primarily focused on the idea of national self-determination, the Turkish ambition to have a nation similar to that of the French. Yet he also focused on the anti-Muslim prejudices evident in European public opinion and tried to emphasize that Western biases against Muslims and other Eastern People’s constituted one of the major obstacles to a just world order. His most famous work, La faillite morale de la politique occidentale en Orient (The moral bankruptcy of Western policy toward the East), was written in Paris during this period and published in 1922.26 This book also emphasized that the anti-Western emotions in the Muslim world were largely a product of the moral hypocrisy of Western policies toward the East. In fact, even Mustafa Kemal, in an interview with a French newspaper at the beginning stages of the Turkish war for independence, emphasized that it was the policies of France and Great Britain that had pushed the Ottoman Muslims away and led them to take the enemy side in the Great War.27
The Ottoman Muslims’ national movement, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, benefited from the material and moral support of the pan-Islamic movement in its final success. Once the Turkish national movement in Ankara achieved a series of military and diplomatic victories, expelling the Greek army from Anatolia and signing separate diplomatic treaties with Bolshevik Russia and France, the British Empire had to abandon the Sèvres Treaty and make a new peace with Turkey at Lausanne. The Lausanne Treaty, signed in July 1923, gave the Turkish boundaries international recognition. Though the borders agreed to in Lausanne did not include all the territories declared part of Turkey in the Turkish National Pact, the compromises that the Entente powers made were significant: National self-determination for Anatolia was to be for the Muslims, not the Greeks. Moreover, the Turkish and Greek governments agreed in Lausanne to a comprehensive population exchange involving most of the Christians in Turkey and the majority of the Muslims living in Greece. Supervised by the League of Nations, this population exchange was welcomed by the Ottoman Muslim elite as a way to solve not only communal tensions but one of the major causes of European political interests in Turkey for about a century, namely, the perceived need to protect “civilized” Christians from the oppressive rule of Muslims.
For the Muslim leaders of Turkey, the Lausanne Treaty represented the triumph of the natural rights theory of the Wilsonian principles, as it finally gave full equality in the international system to a Muslim-majority area without any reference to the discourse of civilization. Yet the confirmation of this national self-determination was partly achieved by the military preparation and victories of the Ankara government rather than implementation of the Wilsonian principles by the League of Nations. The leader of the Turkish national movement, Mustafa Kemal, described this in the following way: “I was certain that we would achieve a positive result. . . . What we demanded from the [Lausanne] Conference was nothing more than the confirmation in a proper manner of what we had already gained. We only claimed our well-known and natural rights. In addition, we had the power to preserve and protect these rights.”28
The achievements of Turkish Muslims in gaining full international recognition without the stigma of unequal treaties and colonial interventions made the leaders of the Ankara government heroes in the eyes of the Muslim world, which was already energized by the campaign of the pan-Islamic movements. In fact, the Khilafat congress in India bestowed the title “the Sword of Islam” on Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the Ankara government and the famous Muslim poet and pan-Islamic thinker of India, Muhammad Iqbal, was inspired to write poems in praise of Mustafa Kemal and Turkish national movement.29
In the aftermath of the Lausanne Treaty, however, Muslim leaders of new Turkish Republic decided to abandon pan-Islamic networks and visions in favor of a negotiated Wilsonian truce with the Eurocentric world order. The abolition of the Ottoman caliphate by the Turkish National Assembly on March 3, 1924, came as a shock to many pan-Islamic supporters of Turkey and shaped the destiny of pan-Islamic thought during the interwar era.30 A complete analysis of the domestic reasons and legal arguments for the abolition of the institution of the caliphate is beyond the scope of this study. It was partly related to the vision of a secular modern state in the mind of President Mustafa Kemal. It is important to note three aspects of this event from the perspective of the history of pan-Islamic thought and activism.
First of all, the caliphate was abolished at the peak of its popularity and in two stages. In the first, the Turkish national assembly abolished only the sultanate and declared a republic. When the new republic asked the last sultan-caliph, Vahdettin, to leave the country, it named the eldest member of the Ottoman royal family, Abdülmecid Efendi, as caliph only, to serve as the spiritual leader of the Muslim world without any political power in domestic and international politics. Predictably, various Muslim public-opinion leaders opposed the separation of the sultanate from the caliphate. Even so, Muslim organizations from nations as diverse as Albania, China, Russia, and Romania sent letters and telegraphs of support to the new spiritual caliph in Istanbul. For example, in a meeting held during the week of December 21–27, 1922, the Indian Caliphate Congress recognized the new spiritual caliph, Abdulmecid Efendi, in Istanbul. In many ways, the Indian Caliphate Congress was between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, if it accepted the abolishment of the sultanate and spiritualization of the caliphate institution, it was retreating from one of its main claims against the British authorities: namely, that the caliphate was a universal Muslim institution with both religious and political powers. On the other hand, if it did not accept but rather openly opposed the decision of the Turkish national assembly, it would weaken Turkish national movement. It was at this critical conjuncture that many Muslim leaders, from Palestine and Arabia to India, wrote letters to Mustafa Kemal or the Ankara government, urging them not to separate the political and spiritual powers of the caliphate, with implicit or explicit threats to pick another caliph outside of Turkey if their requests were not taken seriously. The national government in Ankara was, however, aware of the acceptance of the caliph in Istanbul from reports that his name had already been mentioned in Friday prayers all over the Islamic world, with even the ulama at al-Azhar University of Cairo proclaiming their allegiance to the new caliph.31
A second important aspect of the process that led to the abolishment of the caliphate was the realpolitik calculation as to whether keeping it would be a burden or an opportunity in terms of both challenging British colonialism and asserting Turkey’s transnational power and influence. It should not be forgotten that there were strong voices among the Muslim Turkish elite to keep this institution, from both religious and secular perspectives, in order to gain prestige and influence in the Islamic world and leverage in relations with European powers.32 Yet negotiations with the British Empire during the framing of the Lausanne Treaty already indicated problems with any transnational claim of the caliphate in an age of rising nationalism. In various clauses of the Lausanne Treaty, the new Turkish national government legally declared that it withdrew all its rights and privileges in Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and other lost territories of the Ottoman Empire. The new international arrangements accepted by Turkey thus gave little legal space for the caliph in Istanbul to intervene in Muslim societies outside Turkey. With the conclusion of the Lausanne agreement and with the confidence of gaining recognition from European powers as a national entity, Turkish leaders began to raise concerns about the international responsibility of the caliphate institution for the new Turkish nation. As Mustafa Kemal later noted, the paradoxical fact was that Egypt and India had much crowded Muslim populations than Turkey had. He commented on how unreasonable it was for the eight million Muslims of Turkey to host an internationally significant caliphate, capable of interfering in the affairs of British colonial domains in India and Egypt to protect the more than eighty million Muslims living there.
A third important aspect of the abolition of the caliphate was the inability of the colonial Muslim world to institute a new elected caliphate. The immediate international response to news of the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate demonstrates the legacy of the 1910s, in the sense that many sides commented on the decision from realpolitik perspectives, measuring who gained and who lost and even conjecturing whether the French Empire would try to institute a new caliphate under its control in North Africa. Muslim leaders from India to Egypt and from Mecca to Berlin protested the decision and immediately searched for an international gathering to establish a new caliphate. The destiny of the alternatives to the abolished Ottoman caliphate demonstrated the problems of pan-Islamic solidarity in the ambivalent era of the interwar years. Just two days after Turkish national assembly’s decision, on March 5, Sherif Hussein of Mecca proclaimed his status as the new caliph but did not receive much support in the Islamic world. The Egyptian ulama, on March 10, declared that there needed to be a congress to discuss the issue of the caliphate. The deposed caliph, Abdülmecid Efendi, also supported this idea of a congress. Meanwhile, Sherif Hussein organized a caliphate congress in Mecca in July 1924, without much success of getting his claim to be approved. Although Sherif Hussein was planning another caliphate congress in Mecca, coinciding with the pilgrimage season of 1925, Mecca came under the control of the Saudis. Meanwhile, Egypt’s King Fuad sponsored a different caliphate congress in Cairo in May 1926, ending with a similar failure to forge an agreement. In the same year, the Saudi family organized a Muslim congress in Mecca, but, as Wahhabis, they had even less chance than Sherif Hussein of getting larger Muslim support for the idea of a new caliphate.
In many ways, the leaders of republican Turkey contributed to the broader transition from the era of imperial world order to a new international order based on the legitimacy of nation-states by abolishing the caliphate and ending a high moment of pan-Islamic solidarity. Yet this did not eliminate identity of belonging to an Islamic civilization or future efforts to create transnational Islamic solidarity. As an attempt to secure Muslim liberation for one national state, the Turkish experience did offer a model for other nationalist movements in the Muslim world. Moreover, despite their contributions to the legitimacy of the League of Nations, the Muslim leaders of Ottoman Turkey kept a detached attitude toward the new league, which they saw as an instrument of British and French imperial interests. An editorial in the Turkish newspaper Vakit in on December 22, 1922, stated that European intrigues had done much harm to the League of Nations, which had first appeared on the world scene as an organ with considerable powers.33 After all, Lord Balfour, from his chair at the league, had described the Turkish Muslim nation as a collection of “brigands.” Turkish public opinion perceived the league’s interest in Turkey as one-sided and very pro-Christian.
The League of Nation’s decision on the status of the Mosul provinces became another reason why Turkey did not become a member of the league even after the peace treaty at Lausanne.34 A three-member League of Nations commission report (September 1925) decided that the Mosul province belonged to Iraq and extended the British mandate over Iraq for twenty-five years. Despite strong protests, Turkey finally signed an agreement with England on June 5, 1925, accepting the cession of Mosul to Iraq. Since Turkey did not join the league, during the 1920s, the League of Nations had only two Muslim members, Iran and Albania. The absence of representatives from the Muslim world made the league relatively irrelevant for the expression of discontents in the Muslim world.
Most of the Ottoman intellectuals who were famous for their anti-Western critiques perceived the new league as a confirmation of the British and French colonial schemes under a different guise. For example, Ahmed Riza found the league insufficient as a new institutional setting because of its Eurocentric leadership and bias. His solution was a radical internationalism that would try to eliminate religious and cultural prejudices in the global community as a precondition for a just implementation of international law. He wrote: “Real disarmament should be based on moral principles and be preceded by the disarmament of public opinion. The public must be properly informed and convinced by observed and demonstrated facts. Politicians do not usually help the people of goodwill in this regard. They make no attempt to dispel the memories of religious hatred and to weaken racial prejudice, the real sources of antagonism and war.”35
For Riza, the main problem of the international order was still the issue of mutual understanding between the East and the West. According to him, “the experience of ten centuries has made it inevitable that the East should mistrust and distrust the West” (210–211). His concrete suggestion was to create an institution of intellectual and cultural exchange, a sort of world cultural-exchange-and-dialogue association, that would complement other institutions’ work in creating a fair and just world order. The emphasis on Western “misperceptions” of the East and the Muslims as an impediment to justice in the new international order was also mentioned by Halil Halid, who warned that, given the rising power of the United States, Americans’ Christian prejudices toward the Muslim world could constitute a new problem. Thus he urged Turkish Muslims to act preemptively to change American misperceptions about Turks and Muslims.36
THE WILSONIAN MOMENT AND PAN-ASIANISM
As post-WWI pan-Islamism relied on the perceived Christian and imperial bias of the Paris Peace Conference as exemplified in its failure to give justice to the Muslims, post-WWI pan-Asianism in Japan perceived “white supremacy” solidarity among Western powers in their rejection of Japan’s “racial equality proposal” (jinshu sabetsu teppai) at the same conference. Although Japanese pan-Asianists saw the Wilsonian principles as a moral intervention aimed at creating a just and equitable international order,37 the rejection of Japan’s proposal for “racial equality” at the Paris Peace Conference became a test case used by them to formulate an Asianist critique of the League of Nations.38
Complex diplomatic and political motivations lay behind the Japanese proposal for racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference.39 For the purposes of this book, it is important to mention that the Japanese proposal reflected partly the idealism of the Wilsonian moment and partly a sense of Japanese national mission.40 Japan benefited immensely from its wartime alliance with the British Empire by capturing German colonies in the Pacific, invading the German-leased territories in the Shandong Province of China, and improving its economy.41 Yet the Japanese public and parts of the elite had perceived that racial discrimination, an integral part of the then-existing international order, could stand as an impediment to the achievement of Japan’s full membership in the club of great powers. Meanwhile, Japanese diplomats began to worry about changes in the balance of power in Asia as the United States, which had an anti-Japanese immigration movement, emerged from the Great War as the most powerful nation in the world. In this context, the Japanese delegates in Paris proposed the racial equality clause, hoping to quell the fear of global racial conflict by demonstrating the possibility of cooperation with white Western powers within the new framework of the League of Nations. The incorporation of racial equality as a founding principle of the League of Nation would also provide an international legal framework for resolving the problem of discrimination against Japanese immigrants in the United States.
When the racial equality proposal was rejected, all of Japan’s Asianists took this as an opportunity to call for an end to the pro-Western diplomatic frame-work and to condemn the League of Nations as devoid of moral legitimacy. While the cause of the failure of the proposal was much more complex, Japanese public opinion attributed it to the intransigence of white Western powers bent on continuing their discrimination against the colored races. Thus the rejection of the proposal became a great symbolic event especially from the pan-Asianist point of view, used throughout the 1920s to argue that the League of Nations had not solved the problem of racial discrimination against nonwhite races in international relations.42
For example, pan-Asianist thinker Ôkawa Shûmei wrote articles to agitate the Japanese public against Japan’s participation in the League of Nations, arguing that the league was simply a neocolonial institution benefiting Anglo-American strategic and economic interests and affirming white supremacy in the world.43 Subsequent pan-Asianist critiques of the League of Nations focused on the continuing relevance of racial discrimination and civilizational hierarchy. This was best summarized in an editorial in the Asian Review, published by Japan’s Asianists. The editorial starts with an optimistic view of the league, suggesting that it would be “a real blessing to humanity, in that it will do much to prevent future wars.” It goes on, however, to enumerate the reasons to be skeptical of the leagues chances at success. The main reason is the defeat of President Wilson by “the forces of reaction,” namely, the European diplomats, which managed to smother the hopes and aspirations of Asians in order to perpetuate “white domination” in Asia. Highly interesting in this article is the use of quotations from Norman Angell, the author of The Great Illusion (1909) and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Price in 1933, to demonstrate that even “a respected scholar and known pacifist” could still harbor a surprising adherence to white supremacist beliefs. As quoted in the Asian Review, Angell said the following in an interview on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference:
We have been led to give great emphasis to the fact that this is a war for democracy, for equality of right; that is, for all men. That emphasis has not been lost upon the non-European races. The Japanese, the Chinese, some of the populations of India, to say nothing of certain African People’s have been welcomed as Allies. . . . Imagine the possibilities of the development of such a situation if Japanese, Chinese, Indians and other Asiatics were to interpret our ideals of democracy as entitling them to a real equality of treatment. . . . So, we may be within measurable distance of a unified Eastern and a disunited Western world.44
Based on this interview, the editorial concluded that, despite his credentials as a humanist, even “Mr. Angell seems to be a staunch advocate of the old policy of whitemenism” (348) because he seemed to be advocating for the League of Nations to unite the Western world against the awakening of the Eastern world, not to create a world based on racial equality and international justice.
Paralleling the Asianist critique of the League of Nations, several young bureaucrats such as Konoe Fumimaro began to voice apprehension that the Western powers, using the league and the process of disarmament as a pretense, were acting to maintain the status quo of the international order and to perpetuate their own global dominance. Konoe’s reservations about the league system derived more from the limitations imposed on further imperial expansion and armament by the new international framework than from the rejection of the racial equality proposal.45 But, in the end, no matter what reservations Japanese diplomats had about the league system, Japan joined the League of Nations as one of the founding members, demonstrating its enthusiasm by staffing the league secretariat with leading liberal internationalists such as Nitobe Inazô and even providing financial backing for the activities of the ostensibly private Japan League of Nations Association. At the same time, Japan pursued its national interest through mutual and multilateral cooperation with Western powers, symbolized by the Washington Conference system.46 This policy of co-operation with the Western powers in an era of capitalist internationalism was seen to pay off as Japan expanded economically in the Asian continent and the United States became Japan’s largest trading partner. It was this system of co-operative diplomacy and capitalist internationalism that Japanese pan-Asianists considered the greatest obstacle to their vision of liberating Asian under Japanese leadership. Throughout the 1920s, Japanese Asianists would remain in opposition, utilizing any indication of racial discrimination in international affairs to intensify their attack on the League of Nations and Japanese liberals.
While Japan’s pan-Asianists emphasized the neowhite imperialism of the League of Nations, Wilsonianism revealed the latent imperial logic of Japanese pan-Asianists. Ironically, when the Japanese delegates were advancing a moral agenda for racial equality, the Japanese Empire was challenged by the rising momentum of Korean and Chinese nationalism, both of which complained about the failure of the Paris Peace Conference to pressure the Japanese Empire. Thus Japanese Asianists had to reflect on the contradiction between their arguments for Asian liberation and their nationalist loyalty to the Japanese Empire, especially when Korean nationalists demanded national self-determination and rebelled against Japanese rule. In this context, the majority of Japanese Asianists tried to legitimize Japanese imperial rule over Korea by insisting on its difference from Western colonialism in Asia.
The tensions between Japanese pan-Asianism and Wilsonian nationalism can best be seen in the writings of Ôkawa Shûmei. In 1919 Ôkawa joined the General Meeting to Abolish Racial Discrimination (Jinshuteki Sabetsu Teppai Kisei Taikai), a group organized by the Genyôsha and supported by the major political parties of Japan.47 It was the largest Asianist pressure group aimed at influencing Japanese diplomatic attitudes during the Paris Peace Conference, and at several meetings participants favored a decision not to enter the league if the Japanese proposal were rejected.48 The Asianist mobilization over the racial equality proposal revealed, however, a major contradiction in their demand for international morality: while they were advocating Asian liberation and racial equality, they did not endorse the Korean demand for national self-determination. They were also not vocal about Chinese protests over the Japanese imperial policies in their country. Paul Richard, a guest at the second and third conferences of the Society to Abolish Racial Discrimination, in March and April 1919, asked his Japanese audience to be consistent in their moral claims by embracing the idea of the brotherhood of Asians, instead of maneuvering for Japanese superiority in Asia. Richard called for Japan’s moral leadership in the construction of a League of Asian Nations rather than a League of Nations; such an organization could then become the first step toward a true League of Nations that would encompass all People’s regardless of the color of their skin. For Paul Richard, however, Japan needed to liberate all its colonies before it could be regarded as a just nation deserving of a position of moral leadership in Asia.49
Ôkawa Shûmei, like the majority of pan-Asianists, would not agree on the issue of Korean self-determination, despite his intellectual admiration for Paul Richard. He offered an explanation for his contradictory position on Korean nationalism in the introduction to his later work on Indian nationalism.50 Ôkawa insisted that Japanese rule in Korea was different from British rule in India, claiming that the motives behind Japan’s colonial control were peaceful and noneconomic, that Japan’s geographical proximity to Korea gave rise to security concerns it could not ignore, and, most important, that the two nations were connected by close historical, racial, and cultural links.51 Ôkawa never commented on British rule in Ireland, a situation more comparable to Japanese colonialism in Korea, although he was a prolific writer on issues of European colonialism. Given the closeness of Ôkawa’s relationship with Indian nationalists, who followed the history of the Irish nationalist resistance, his silence on the issue of Irish nationalism could well be attributed to his anxieties over Korean nationalism.
Ôkawa Shûmei’s refusal to recognize Korean nationalism contradicted not only his enthusiastic advocacy of Indian nationalism but also contrasted with his assessment of the rise of nationalism in post-Great War Asia. Ôkawa saw the tide of Egyptian and Indian demands for independence as unstoppable, irrespective of British policies to improve the economy and political structure. For example, it was his opinion that Lord Cromer’s policies in Egypt were helping the Egyptian economy. Yet, no matter how positive a change was brought about by these policies, Ôkawa argued, Egyptian nationalism was still bound to reject British rule. For him, nationalism in Asia after the Great War was more about political and cultural pride than economic and social problems in the colonies.52 In spite of his acute observations on the nature of rising nationalism and his status as an expert of colonialism, however, Ôkawa was never able to face the reality of the Korean search for national self-determination because of his nationalist belief in the righteousness of the Japanese Empire. There were several pan-Asianists, such as Miyazaki Toten, who sympathized with Korean demands, but overall Japanese pan-Asianists developed a notion of racial harmony within Asia to deny the Wilsonianism-inspired national self-determination claims in Japan’s colonies.
PAN-ISLAMIC AND PAN-ASIANIST PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIALIST INTERNATIONALISM
The relationship between pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist visions, and the socialist internationalism of the Bolshevik government went through several stages from 1919 to 1923. Although there were hopes of collaboration between the pan-Islamic and pan-Asian movements of the Asia, on the one hand, and the Bolsheviks, on the other, soon both sides assumed a more cautious approach, trying to use the other but not be used by it.
The activities of the Ottoman leader Enver Paşa after the surrender of the Ottoman state on October 30, 1918, demonstrated the complex relationship between pan-Islamic ideas and the anti-imperialism of the Bolshevik government. Enver Paşa tried to lead a pan-Islamic resistance against the British Empire through a new cooperation with the Bolshevik government in Russia. Having developed contacts during his stay in Berlin around late 1918 and 1919, he arrived in Moscow in 1920, receiving positive responses to his anti-British pan-Islamic cause from the Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin.
The new Bolshevik government in Russia hoped to benefit from the preexisting anticolonial sentiments of Asian nationalists and undertook to organize the First Congress of the People’s of the East in Baku in 1920, attempting to appeal to a sense of colonized Eastern identity.53 While trying to lobby for military and financial aid from the Bolshevik government for the nationalist movement in Anatolia, Enver Paşa formed the Union of Islamic Revolutionary Societies to facilitate the coordination of the pan-Islamic network. In September 1920, Enver Paşa attended the Baku Congress of the People’s of the East to represent the international Muslim movement he claimed to have established.54 It is important to observe that during the year of 1920, both socialist internationalism and pan-Islamic internationalism were in harmony with each other in their goal to defeat the British and French imperial interests in the region. Similarly, the two were in agreement on the question of national self-determination, as their vision of world order assumed the coordinated struggles of each national movement against imperialism to establish the sovereignty of each national zone. During Enver Paşa’s attempt to form a pan-Islamic network and his cooperation with the Soviets, the main concrete goal was strengthening the national movement in Ankara. Until September 1921, Enver Paşa tried to gather international support for this movement, while looking for the right moment to return to Anatolia. The military victories of the new Ankara government against the Greek forces in early September empowered the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, who did not want Enver Paşa back for personal and realpolitik reasons. Once the Ankara government had concluded peace treaties and direct links with the Bolsheviks in Moscow, Enver Paşa’s pan-Islamic vision lost its value for the Bolsheviks.
Meanwhile, the tensions between the Bolshevik plans for Central Asia and the Muslim nationalist demands became sharper when there emerged a strong Muslim resistance against the expansion of Bolshevik rule to Central Asia. Soon, the early confluence between the anti-Western visions of pan-Islamic and socialist internationalism was broken. It is in that context that Enver Paşa decided to lead the Muslim national resistance against the expansion of Bolshevik control in Central Asia.55 Theoretically, the Second Congress of the Comintern urged the Communists “to fight against Pan-Islamism, Pan-Asiatic and similar movements which try to combine the fight for liberation from European and American imperialism with the strengthening of Turkish and Japanese imperialism and the strengthening of their large landowners, nobility, clergy, etc.”56 Although this recommendation was practically asking communists in Asia not to transform their struggles into movements that could serve pan-Islamism or pan-Asianism, Indonesian Marxists—Tan Malaka (1897–1949), for example—protested that such a policy would practically destroy the social recruitment efforts of communists in a predominantly Muslim country.57
Despite its suppression of the demands of the Central Asian Muslim resistance, the Soviet Union continued to support nationalist movements and independent nations in Asia, thus strengthening the decolonization efforts to break free from British and French imperial rule through the legitimacy of national self-determination. For example, it concluded its peace treatise with the Ankara government on March 16, 1921, thus becoming the first country to recognize the new Turkish national government in Ankara. After the Soviet Union reasserted Russian imperial control over Muslim areas in Central Asia, different from the czarist era, this entire region was given a semblance of national autonomy and self-determination first and then tied to the Soviet Union.
The early assessments of the Bolshevik Revolution by Japanese pan-Asianists were also generally positive. The sympathy of leading pan-Asianists such as Ôkawa Shûmei toward the Bolshevik Revolution and the policies of the new socialist government was indicative of the shared challenge of both Asianism and socialism to the Eurocentric world order. Like other anti-Western critics of the period, Ôkawa Shûmei welcomed the news of revolutionary turmoil in Russia in 1917, regarding it as another instance of Asian awakening and a further testament to the liberating impact of the Great War. The Russian Revolution confirmed Ôkawa’s expectation that the new world order after the Great War would indeed be different from the previous white domination in Asia. Ôkawa Shûmei’s sympathy for the Russian Revolution as a sign of Asian awakening demonstrates his ambivalence about the position of Russia in the East-West confrontation. In the context of the Russo-Japanese War, not only Japanese Asianists but also the world at large had regarded Russia as a Western power expanding in the Far East. In 1917, however, Ôkawa Shûmei considered the Russian Revolution a part of the larger Asian awakening. In addition to viewing the Bolshevik challenge to the European colonial order very positively, he also hoped that the foreign policy of the Bolshevik government would contribute to the decolonization of Asia.58
Ôkawa Shûmei praised the policies of the new government in Russia toward Asian nationalist movements, sympathizing with the Bolshevik challenge to the international system. He argued that if a strong state like Russia could support the rising pan-Islamic movement in the Middle East and India, European hegemony in Asia would be brought to an end. Ôkawa saw just such a possibility for an Asian alliance in the friendly policies adopted by the Bolshevik government toward Turkey, Persia and, Afghanistan in 1921.59
The Bolshevik Revolution had its most visible impact on Japanese Asianism by triggering the polarization of right-wing and left-wing ideologies around two different versions of internationalism, dividing them to the extent that, by the early 1920s, Asianism had begun to be associated with Japanism and ultranationalism.60 As explained in chapter 2, Asianism before the Great War was not always the monopoly of right-wing nationalist figures; it was embraced by liberals and socialists as well. The identification of pan-Asianism with the radical nationalist groups in Japan was a phenomenon of post-WWI period.61 Liberals and socialists were generally inclined toward Wilsonianism and Comintern internationalism after the Great War. Meanwhile, the Japanism and the cultural nationalism of the ultranationalists made them more sympathetic to a vision of international solidarity based on civilizational and racial identity. Japanism and Asianism were allied, moreover, in their critical stance toward the Westernization of Asian cultures.62
When Ôkawa Shûmei established Yûzonsha in 1919 as the first radical nationalist organization of Japan,63 one of the main pillars of the ideology of this organization was the claim to offer a Japanese and Asian alternative to Western universalism, and the organization did have the practical function of countering newly emerging socialist activism in Japan.64 The founding charter of Yûzonsha specified several pan-Asianist goals for itself, such as “working for the national liberation movements in Asia,” although the primary commitment of the organization focused on the radical structuring of Japan domestically. As Ôkawa envisioned a special role for Japan in the Asian revival, he did not find contemporary Japan ready to assume the real leadership of Asia.65 In fact, he made Asian revival not only a mission for Japan but also the purpose of radical reconstruction within Japan by combining his ideal image of the Meiji Restoration with a vision of Asian solidarity:
We should make efforts for the revival of Asia. This is my prayer all day and night. But what causes deep sorrow is that today’s Japan still has not reached the level of Mahayana Japan. There are too many devils around. If Japan continues to be like this, it cannot take on the great responsibility of saving Asia at all. Similarly, Asian countries can never trust and rely on Japan The sword in our hand is a double-edged sword: while this sword has to be very sharp against the injustices in Asia, at the same time, it has to be very strong against the wickedness that is building its nest in Japan. Thus a fighter for Asian Revival, without any hesitation, must be a fighter for the reform of Japan, too.66
Despite the general pairing of Japanese socialist with socialist internationalism and radical nationalists with pan-Asian internationalism, one should not assume that early Asianist views of the Bolshevik Revolution was negative. On the contrary, sharper pan-Asianist critiques of socialist internationalism formed gradually, in reaction to Soviet foreign policies.67 Only when the Soviet military presence increased in northern Manchuria and Siberia in the late 1920s did pan-Asianists like Ôkawa Shûmei began to perceive the Soviet Union as a potential threat to Japanese interests (the idea of this Soviet threat became important in Asianist suggestions for Japan’s policy in Manchuria). More than from a strategic viewpoint, however, Asianist critique of socialist internationalism came mainly from the perspective of the clash of Eastern and Western civilizations. For example, Ôkawa Shûmei criticized the socialist assumption that a class-based revolution would eliminate conflicts among nations and create a just international order. Referring to Bertrand Russell’s The Roads to Freedom, he argued that struggles among nations and civilizations would continue to occur even if socialist revolutions did take place in Europe.68 According to Ôkawa, not only struggles among nations but also the greater struggle between the colonized East and colonizing West were destined to continue so long as Europe failed to return “stolen Asia” to its rightful owner.69 Moreover, Ôkawa saw cultural Westernization as the most significant event in modern world history, establishing the basis of white hegemony in Asia. He regarded it as just as important to reject Western cultural domination in Asia as to resist economic exploitation and political hegemony. As he saw the revival of native cultural traditions and the reversal of Westernization as essential preconditions for the success of nationalist movements, for him, socialism, as a Western ideology, by its very nature could never transform the state of Western cultural supremacy in Asia.
In short, the relationship of pan-Asianist and pan-Islamic visions of world order with socialist internationalism moved from a stage of friendly cooperation to hostile competition. Despite their support for anticolonial national movements, Bolsheviks could not accept the idea of an alternative Eastern civilization entrenched within pan-Islamic and pan-Asian discourses, and gradually socialists distanced themselves from these movements, for fear that, instead of using them, they could become instruments of these two rival internationalisms. Similarly, after their initial sympathy toward the Bolshevik challenge to the Eurocentric imperial world order, both pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism underlined the importance of national and civilizational identities in international politics against the idea of class struggle and criticized the Soviet Union for its foreign policy during the interwar era. In the long term, pan-Islamic and pan-Asian ideologies lost a great deal of appeal for rising nationalist movements because of the attraction of Socialist internationalism. For example, pan-Asianist trends within the Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese national movements from 1905 to 1914 were replaced by the attraction of socialist alternatives for later generation nationalists.70
“CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS” IN THE AGE OF NATIONALISM
Evaluating the trajectory of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought during the 1920s requires close attention to their relationship with the rising nationalist movements. Anticolonial nationalist movements were popularly interpreted as a revival of Asia and thus associated with a vague notion of Islamic and Asian triumph over the West. Yet there were no practical projects to create an alliance or solidarity among Asian nations, and overall the political destiny of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian movements did not match the intellectual vibrancy of their critiques of world order.
Turkeys success in renegotiating its boundaries and gaining membership in the new international system rendered it a great inspiration and model for anti-colonial nationalists in Asia. In India, China, and the rest of Asia, the success of the Turkish war for liberation became a model for nationalist movements.71 It was in this context that many Western observers interpreted the success of Turkey as the revival of Islam and the East. Where the term “pan-Islamism” continued to be used in the postwar period in the vocabulary of international affairs, it referred more to the general activism of the nationalist movements in specific Muslim nations and their moral and material solidarity, rather than expressing concern about the emergence of a united Islamic state. Thus contemporary observers perceived the 1920s as the era of the rising tide of anticolonial nationalism. For example, in 1921 Lothrop Stoddard, an American white supremacist and keen observer of anti-Western ideologies, presented an analysis of Muslim nationalism in a book titled The New World of Islam. He argued that the revival of Muslim nationalism and internationalism could not be reduced to the interest in Ottoman caliphate but instead was much broader and deep-rooted.72 A similar interpretation of Turkish nationalism and pan-Islamic revival came from Ôkawa Shûmei, in his Fukkô Ajia no Shomondai (Problems of a resurgent Asia), first published in 1922. Ôkawa hailed the movements initiated by Gandhi in India and Mustafa Kemal Paşa in Turkey as new types of Asian revival, though different in character, rooted in national cultures and traditions. For Ôkawa, the trend to emphasize cultural pride and civilizational revival symbolized a double effort toward independence in Asia, simultaneously spiritual and political and rejecting the legacy of Westernization.73
In the same work, Ôkawa demonstrated his idealist Asian internationalism by describing the rising nationalist movements in Asia and the conservative reaction of the Western imperial powers. Focusing on regions of non-Chinese Asia such as India, Thailand, Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Saudi Arabia, Tibet, and Siam, Ôkawa outlined two key aspects of pan-Asianism usually overlooked in the historiography, namely, its internationalism and its universalist claims based on a reverse Orientalist discourse of civilization. Ôkawa’s Asianism celebrated the history of anticolonial national awakening in Asia, characterizing the period from 1905 to 1920 as the era of “the rising tide of color against the white world supremacy.”74 For him, Asia was the site of a universal struggle for freedom from colonial “slavery.” After describing the internationalism represented by the League of Nations as no more than a reaction to Asia’s nationalist awakening that sought to guarantee the colonial possessions of Britain and France, he reiterated that pan-Asian solidarity was a necessary first step in the creation of an internationalism based on the equality of the Asian and Western nations.75
Ôkawa Shûmei contributed to the expansion of the international vision of Japan’s pan-Asianism by redefining Asia to include all the areas of the Asian continent that were usually covered by the European concept of the Orient. This was much larger area than that represented in the more traditional Japanese view of Asia, which limited it to the Chinese cultural sphere. It also went beyond Okakura Tenshin’s Buddhist-centered view of Asian civilization, which included only India, China, and Japan. Ôkawa’s Asianist projects were based on his definition of Asia as a civilizational alternative to the West, a claim that implied a program of de-Westernization and indigenization as an essential precursor to liberation from Western rule. He noted that the trend of relying on Asia’s own native traditions in the nationalist struggle for freedom and liberation had intensified after the Great War. Ironically, Ôkawa’s sympathy for the language of civilizational revival led him to praise Indian nationalists such as Aurobindo Ghose and Tagore for expressing the “true” Indian spirit, even though they were British-educated intellectuals. Similarly, he saw the Young Turk movement, which was actually more pro-Western in its ideology than the Ottoman sultan had been, as the embodiment of the Turkish national spirit that allowed Turkey to gain true liberation and escape from Western hegemony (206–210).
Ôkawa Shûmei’s Asianist celebration of the rising tide of anticolonial nationalism did not mean that there was any hope of a pan-Asianist political program in Asia in the 1920s. On the contrary, in the early part of that decade, liberal internationalists and Japan’s policy of cooperation with Western powers overshadowed any Asianist thesis that Japan should be the leader of an independent Asia rather than a racially marginalized partner in the club of great powers. It wasn’t until 1924, in the aftermath of the immigration law that excluded Japanese immigration to the USA, that pan-Asianists in Japan found the political context suitable to reassert their main thesis that race mattered in world affairs and it would be better for Japan to be the leader of the East against the West.
When the Immigration Act passed the U.S. Senate in April 1924, Japanese immigration to America—already limited to a quota of five hundred immigrants annually—was banned altogether.76 The reaction from Japan was strong and widespread. What was humiliating for the pro-Western Japanese elite was the necessary implication that, despite Japan’s civilized status and proven record of Westernization, Japanese people would continue to face discrimination on the basis of their identification with the yellow race and Eastern culture.77 This event had a great impact on the psychology of young diplomats in the Japanese Foreign Ministry, who considered the passing of the act a national humiliation.78 It also strengthened race consciousness among some Western educated intellectuals, who began to develop notions that challenging the “white peril” in Asia was Japan’s global mission.79 Pan-Asianist groups in Japan capitalized on the issue of discrimination against Japanese immigrants in the United States to assert their agenda of foreign policy change.80 Pro-Western liberals, on the other hand, attempted to make use of a cultural diplomacy based on the concept of East-West harmony to solve the problem of discrimination against Japanese immigrants in the USA. For example, the U.S.-Japan Relations Committee, which represented the mainstream of the business and political elite with links to both the Japanese and American governments, couched its efforts to overcome the immigration controversy within the paradigms of harmony between Eastern and Western civilizations.81 The idea of dialogue between East and West as a solution to race distinction in the world order, as liberal internationals promised it would be, was countered by a new, Hegelian vision of conflict between East and West in the writings of Asianist Ôkawa Shûmei.
For Ôkawa Shûmei, dialogue between East and West did not offer a solution to the problem of racial discrimination against Japanese and other Asians in America. He immediately wrote a provocative article ridiculing pro-American liberals for “shaming” themselves by seeking cooperative diplomacy with a nation that clearly saw the Japanese as members of a second-class race. Despite their opposing policy suggestions, however, Ôkawa and liberal internationalists shared the same civilizational paradigm in their approach to the problem. The difference lay in the fact that Ôkawa argued for the necessity of solidarity among the colored races against white supremacy, suggesting world unity after a final conflict, while liberal internationalists insisted on pursuing harmony and dialogue between civilizations, hoping that a long-term cultural policy would solve the problem of discrimination against the Japanese in the United States.82
In the same year that Japan saw its Westernized and modern identity rejected in the Immigration Act, a well-publicized speech by the Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen reminded the Japanese of the Asian dimension of their identity. This famous lecture, titled “Greater Asianism” and delivered in Kobe in November of 1924—just a few months after the passage of the Immigration Act—formulated a strategic critique of Japan’s China policy and referred to the ideal of Asian values, with no reference to Wilsonian or socialist internationalism.83 Sun urged Japan to follow the moral Confucian politics of the East and abandon the unethical Machiavellian power politics of the West.84 His speech and its reception in Japan indicated the continuing salience of the Asianist discourse of civilization in both China and Japan during the 1920s85
It was in this context that Ôkawa Shûmei combined the political implications of the ideas of Western decline and Asian awakening to formulate his well-known “clash of civilizations” thesis, which served as both a diagnosis for the conflicts in international affairs and a prescription for solving them. In 1925, in his article titled ““Ajia, Yoroppa, Nihon” (Asia, Europe, and Japan), Ôkawa turned his vision of an inevitable clash of civilizations into a prophecy of a final war between Japan and the United States:
Now, East and West have respectively attained their ultimate goals. Indeed, they could no longer go any further if each pursues its own way. World history clearly shows that they have to unite in the end. This, however, can never be attained by peaceful means. . . . As history fully proves, in creating a new world, a life-and-death struggle between the champion of the East and that of the West is inevitable. This logic proved true when America challenged Japan.86 She is in Europe what Japan is in Asia. . . . These two countries are destined to fight each other as Greece had to fight against Persia, and Rome against Carthage.87
The prophecy of an Armageddon between East and West was partly shaped by the influence of Vladimir Sergeyevich Soloviev (1853–1900), a prominent Russian mystic philosopher whose work The Justification of the Good Ôkawa regarded as spiritual nourishment.88 In his pessimist diagnosis of the evolution of modern history, Soloviev predicted that a confrontation between East and West would become its main dynamic force. Ôkawa, however, turned Soloviev’s idea into a normative and prescriptive characterization of the future of the relationship between Asia and the West, confident in his expectation of victory for the East over the decadent West. His prediction also relied on his assessment of war as a positive factor in human history, which was again an idea borrowed from the philosophy of Soloviev.89
More than two decades after Ôkawa published this vision of the clash of civilization during the mid-1920s, the prosecution at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal naturally emphasized Ôkawa’s prophecy of a war between the United States and Japan in their argument for a Japanese conspiracy to attack America. When Ôkawa wrote his famous “clash of civilizations” thesis, however, the prediction that conflict would inevitably arise between Japan and the United States was not peculiar to pan-Asianists. As Mark R. Peattie points out, the anti-Japanese Immigration Act endorsed by the U.S. Congress in 1924 provided the impetus for a wave of literature “forecasting a Pacific war” between the United States and Japan.90 More important in Ôkawa Shûmeis “clash of civilizations” thesis was the fact that he crafted from the circumstances surrounding the anti-Japanese Immigration Act an attack on liberal internationalism, using it to reaffirm his Asianist views.91
Asianists of the 1920s were not alone in spinning apocalyptic visions of a clash with the USA. In any case, they soon abandoned this focus on the United States until 1940s. In fact, many Pan-Asianists, including Ôkawa Shûmei, focused their attention on challenging the British Empire in Asia, and, for that reason alone, it would be wrong to interpret their post-Immigration Act “clash of civilization” theories as a systematic plan to foment Japanese-American conflict.
THE WEAKNESS OF PAN-ISLAMIC AND PAN-ASIANIST POLITICAL PROJECTS DURING THE 1920S
Responses to the Immigration Act of 1924 strengthened the colored race identity of many young Japanese intellectuals and diplomats. Moreover, the idea of synthesis or dialogue between Eastern and Western civilization, a discourse essential to pan-Asianist thought, held appeal for liberal internationalists during the 1920s. Yet, despite the intellectual relevance of the construction of national and international identity discourses, pan-Asianism was weak as a political movement throughout the decade. Pan-Islamism also showed a similar destiny in that its discourse of civilization became more popular, appropriated by new generation of intellectuals, while its political projects lacked any state support. In the case of pan-Islamism, the abolishment of the caliphate in Turkey led to a period of soul-searching during which the idea of a Muslim League of Nations and Muslim cooperation through international conventions became significant, while the attempts by several Muslim leaders to assume the caliphate utterly failed.92 Many Muslim activists and intellectuals attended conventions in Mecca (1926), Jerusalem (1931), and Geneva (1935), and the discussions revolved around the international problems affecting the Muslim world. It was natural that, without the support of a state structure and without any legitimate and accepted leadership, these conventions would not produce effective results. The attempts of pan-Islamic gatherings and the writings they spurred reflect the general dissatisfaction of Muslim intellectuals about the interwar-era world order, which was still characterized by imperial domination. Yet, as long as no Muslim state entity was willing to utilize and mobilize these discontents, attempts at pan-Islamic solidarity did not go beyond intellectual critiques and proclamations of intent.
Pan-Asianist activities during the 1920s were not much different from the pan-Islamic networking during the same period. Though continuing to criticize the ineffectiveness of the existing world order and providing a vision of race solidarity and a discourse of civilization, pan-Asianist conventions, too, did not produce any significant political results. It is important to underline the weakness of pan-Asianist groups and projects during the later half of the 1920s because pan-Asianism was revived in Japan during the 1930s. A careful analysis of the character, participants, and results of the 1926 pan-Asiatic conference in Nagasaki demonstrates that the history of Japan’s pan-Asianist thought in the 1930s should consider the rupture that separated 1926 from 1933 in Japan.
The flourishing of pan-Asianist ideas after Sun Yat-sen’s “Greater Asianism” lecture in Kobe, combined with the concern over U.S. discrimination against Asian immigrants, led to the convening of an international pan-Asiatic conference in Nagasaki in August 1926, officially organized by the Pan-Asiatic Association in Japan (Zen Ajia Kyôkai) with the cooperation of the Asiatic People’s League (Ajia Minzoku Dai Dômei) in Beijing.93 The organization committee was led by Imazato Juntarô, a member of parliament representing Nagasaki from the Seiyûkai Party.94 The conference expected to attract about one hundred delegates from China, Korea, India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Turkey, and Persia, but only about a third of that number attended. It was followed by a gathering in Shanghai in November 1927, but third and fourth conferences, proposed to take place in Afghanistan and Dairen (China), respectively, were never held.95
The overall message of the conference was solidarity among Asian nations to achieve decolonization and economic prosperity. Given the participation of delegates from China, mention of an Asian Monroe Doctrine that advocated Japan’s regional hegemony was absent from the speeches and declarations. The speeches by Indian, Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese delegates condemned Western colonialism and racial discrimination in international relations, making reference to the moral universalism of justice and equality among nations. Several speakers emphasized that their goal was not to encourage hatred for the white People’s or to instigate retaliation against them but rather to affirm the fundamental moral values of humanity.96
The conference emphasized that the League of Nations and the post-Great War international system continued Western colonial rule in Asia and neglected the question of race in international affairs. Rash Behari Bose repeated the argument that a pan-Asiatic league would be a step toward the development of a real world league where each nation would be an equal member. Japanese delegates noted that if there had been strong international support for Japan at the Paris Peace Conference, the racial equality proposal would have been adopted by the League of Nations. In spite of the criticism of the League of Nations expressed by the conference delegates, however, the Osaka Asahi newspaper rightly observed that the principles and ideals of the Nagasaki pan-Asiatic congress were almost the same as those underlying the League of Nations. In contrast to earlier pan-Asianist predictions of a final confrontation between Eastern and Western civilizations, the delegates at the Nagasaki conference avoided any reference to the idea of a clash of civilizations. They specified as their long-term goals the “renaissance of Asia’s culture and civilization; the ultimate liberation of all foreign dominated People’s of Asia; the abolition of all unequal treaties existing among Asiatic nations; and the establishment of the League of the Asiatic People’s.”97
The participants in the Nagasaki pan-Asiatic conference discussed several long-term economic goals and projects, their shared assumption being that economic cooperation and exchange would strengthen bonds among Asian societies, an idea that was typical of the mood of capitalist internationalism of the 1920s. Proposals and suggestions ranged from recommending the “use of goods made in Asia as far as possible” to highly utopian projects that would have required huge investments and large-scale governmental cooperation, such as “the construction of a trans-Asiatic railway from Mukden to Turkey in 20–30 years” and the “establishment of an Asian Development Company and an Asiatic Monetary Organ.”98
The Nagasaki conference revealed two major obstacles facing the pan-Asiatic internationalism in Japan, namely, lack of any political support and an increasing gap separating the Japanese perspective on Asian solidarity from the nationalist perspectives in China and Korea. The Japanese government took an unfriendly and detached attitude to the conference, because of its unwillingness to offend Western colonial powers, especially Great Britain. In fact, the Home Ministry did not allow the congress to convene in Tokyo, forcing its relocation to a smaller city and limiting the number of participants from Japan.”99 Japanese authorities also created problems for Mehandra Pratap, an Indian nationalist representing Afghanistan, by refusing his entry into Japan from Kobe on the grounds that he lacked travel papers.100 Moreover, no other government in Asia was supportive of this pan-Asiatic conference. China’s nationalist leaders showed their own unfriendly attitude, especially during the Shanghai pan-Asiatic conference in 1927. Many of the Nagasaki conference participants were individual political exiles with previous connections to Japan’s pan-Asianist networks. They did not, however, have ties with the leadership of the nationalist movements in their home countries. People like Rash Behari Bose and Mehandra Pratap of India and General Ricardo of the Philippines were nationalists who had been important in the era of pro-Japanese Asian internationalism from 1905 to 1917, but they had begun to be overshadowed during the 1920s as a result of the changing nature of the nationalist movements in their home countries.101
The most serious problem of the Nagasaki conference, however, was the conflict between the Japanese vision of Asian solidarity and that of China and Korea. From the very beginning, there was concern on the Japanese side over the issue of Korean nationalist participation in the conference, and in the end the Japanese organizers invited only a pro-Japanese delegation from the League of Korean Journalists.102 Several Korean nationalists telegraphed Japanese newspapers to denounce the conference on behalf of the Korean people. Of the four representatives from the Japanese parliament who attended the conference, two withdrew in reaction to a Chinese proposal calling for the unconditional abrogation of the Sino-Japanese treaty based on the Twenty-One Demands.103 Despite the initial protests of the Japanese delegates, however, the Chinese proposal for the condemnation of the Twenty-One Demands came to represent a prominent achievement of the conference once the mediation of Rash Behari Bose succeeded in producing a compromise between the Japanese and Chinese sides. According to the final statement, which received the full support of the Japanese delegation, it was declared that “all unequal treaties, discriminatory treatment and other unequal conditions existing between Japan and China or between all other countries should be abolished.”104 This joint declaration shows that pan-Asianists in Japan could be receptive to the demands and criticism raised by Chinese nationalists.
The main contradiction among the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean visions of pan-Asianism was made apparent in the nature of the media coverage of the conference. From the very beginning, the mainstream Japanese media commented on the conference in a negative manner, paralleling the cynical but relatively extensive coverage of the conference in the English-language media in the United States and Japan. Korean commentaries were not only furious over the hand-picked Korean delegates who would not condemn Japanese colonialism in Korea but also raised suspicion about the Japanese discourse of Asian unity against the West. Chinese newspaper coverage of the conference indicated the fallacy of Asian solidarity when parts of China were under Japanese domination. Japanese papers were condescending and critical toward the conference, yet even their negative commentaries showed an agreement with the discourse of civilization that attributed to Japan the leadership of the Asian People’s against the supposed civilizational unity of the West. Critical Korean and Chinese media reports on the conference thus did not even agree with the Japanese perception of world reality within the framework of “Euro-America versus Asia” (Oubei tai Ajia), or “white race versus colored races.” Rather, they gave primacy to the dichotomy of “imperialism versus oppressed People’s” to implicate Japan within the category of imperialism and rejected the notion of their sameness and common identity with Japan under the name of “Asia.” This did not mean denying the framework of civilizational discourse in Korea and China but giving primacy to the problem of Japanese hegemony in East Asia and rejecting the Japanese interpretation of the shared Asian interest against the Western political threat.105 Reflecting colonial power relations and the Japanese media’s own Euro-American-centric views, Japanese papers rarely talked about the Korean and Chinese commentaries on the conference, although they followed the coverage in English-language papers in Japan and the United States.
The first commentary on the Nagasaki conference appeared in the New York Times, which aptly suggested that in the context of Japan’s policy of cooperation with Britain and the United States for peace in the East Asia and the Pacific, a pan-Asiatic congress did not seem advantageous for Japan’s national interest. The same article described Asianism as a trend instigating revolutionary activities against the hegemony of whites in Asia among a number of disgruntled, weak nations, dismissing the movement as even less tenable than the pan-Europeanism of the 1920s.106
Further comments by the English-language press, including the Chicago Tribune, the Times and the Advertiser, repeated condescending commentaries belittling the Asianist movement and emphasizing the contradictions and weaknesses of its anti-Western ideology. Critics particularly focused on the fact that Asia was too diverse to be united and too Westernized to form a civilizational alternative.107 They often contrasted Asia with Europe, noting that it never had the level of cohesion and cooperation that Europe possessed:
Inter-Asiatic hostilities are fiercer than any Asian hostility towards Europe, and as for the cultural aspect of the matter, the Asiatics care a good deal for European culture but their regard for other Asiatic cultures is mainly a polite and political fiction. The Japanese enthusiasm for Chinese culture has long ago vanished, and nowadays manifests itself mainly in the love for lavish Chinese food occasionally. The Asiatic cultures have never learnt how to commingle and assimilate, like those of Europe, but live side by side, mighty interesting to observe, but hardly making for progress and social happiness.108
The Asianist claim to offer a civilizational alternative to the West attracted the second major line of critique from English- and Japanese-language papers, for which the vision of the “renaissance of Asia’s cultures and civilization,” as expressed in the final declaration of the conference, was a goal in conflict with Asia’s urgent need to modernize itself. The Japan Weekly Chronicle underlined the contradiction between the anti-Westernization discourse of the Asianists and the successful Japanese experience of modernization through adoption of Western methods. “The assumption of all Pan-Asians is that the East is something morally and socially superior, which happens for the moment to be submerged beneath an inferior but more energetic system. Japan shows that it is merely a case of adopting the Western methods to become just like the Western powers, and rather more so. . . . To follow Japan’s example will be simply to catch up to the Western powers in all those qualities, which it is the fashion to decry as materialistic, rapacious, or predatory.109
In short, the Nagasaki pan-Asiatic conference represented an attempt by Japanese pan-Asianists to reassert their vision for Asian solidarity and new world order. However, the hostile attitude of the Japanese government toward Asianist projects, the lack of any real representation from nationalist movements in Asia, and the denunciation of the conference by Chinese and Korean nationalists effectively demonstrated the weakness of pan-Asianism.
Japan’s liberal internationalists during the 1920s never viewed the pan-Asiatic movement as a serious rival. For example, Zumoto Motosada, an ardent liberal internationalist, lecturing at a League of Nations-affiliated university in Geneva in 1926, sought to reaffirm Japan’s liberal orientation in response to Western media attention to the Nagasaki pan-Asiatic conference.110 He looked down on the pan-Asiatic movement in Japan, emphasizing its marginality and insignificance for both Japan’s foreign policy and international politics:
How faithfully Japan fulfills this self-imposed mission was shown in connection with the so-called Pan-Asiatic Congress held at Nagasaki at the beginning of August in the present year, about which more or less sensational press dispatches appear to have been printed in Europe and America. During the last twenty years Japan has been visited by a succession of radical leaders and political adventurers from different parts of Asia for the purpose of enlisting Japanese sympathy and assistance in various propaganda against one or another of the European powers. Always finding deaf ears turned to their pleadings, some of these indefatigable plotters recently struck upon the bright idea of realizing their aim under the inoffensive guise of promoting the Asiatic renaissance, and finally succeeded in interesting in their plan a few notoriety mongers of no standing in our public life. The result was the Nagasaki conference in question. It was an event of no consequence whatever, no person of any importance in any country taking part in it. And what is most significant, it was scarcely noticed by the press in Japan.
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Despite Zumoto Motosada’s rejection of the pan-Asian political movement, however, his liberal internationalism was based on a discourse of civilization that was similar to the Asianist language on East-West relations. While it denied the idea of a race war and clash of civilizations, his internationalism did recognize the political relevance of civilizational identities. He noted that Japan “imposes upon herself the role of harmonizer between the civilizations of East and West” (9) to aid the cause of international peace within the framework of the League of Nations. Thus he proudly described a cultural awakening in Asia that was inspired first by the Japanese victory over Russia and then by the traumatic experience of the Great War in Europe. Zumoto saw rising liberalism and industrialization in Japan as compatible with elements of the renaissance of the Asian cultural legacy such as the revival of Buddhism, and he regarded this harmony as a positive contribution to world peace. Alfred Zimmern, deputy director of the League of Nations’ Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, likened Zumoto Motosada to Nitobe Inazô in his commitment to an intellectual exchange between East and West and praised Japan’s role in this civilizational dialogue (4).
Pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of the world did not fade away in the face of competition from the two “Western” alternatives to imperial world order, namely, Wilsonianism and socialism. When the rising tide of nationalism in post-WWI Asia continued to erode the legitimacy claims of the Western empires and imperial policies with their utilization of the principle of national self-determination, it also diminished the realpolitik value of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian visions of world order. The success of the Turkish Republic had inspired a pan-Islamic notion of triumph against Western colonialism, yet the new republic’s decision to abolish the caliphate and disavow any leadership in the Islamic world undermined pan-Islamic visions. More important, neither pan-Islamism nor pan-Asianism had any practical political projects appropriated and supported by a state agency. The example of various pan-Islamic and pan-Asian congresses from 1924 to 1926 shows continued attempts based on a certain ideal but also vivid failures of organization, state support, and appeal. Pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism remained, during the 1920s, a network of ideas and critiques without any institutional and political backing.
Nevertheless, both pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought continued as potential alternatives for expressing discontent with the interwar-era world order in the Muslim world and Asia. Their critiques of Wilsonian internationalism were based not on its ideals but on its implementation through the League of Nations, which was seen as being manipulated by imperial interests and white-race biases. In fact, the failure of the League of Nation system to fulfill its own proclaimed ideals of equality and fair membership in the international community, the continuing practice of racial discrimination in the international system, and the perpetuation of colonial rule in the Muslim world and Asia all contributed to the vitality of intellectual critiques informed by pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thought.
The intellectual vitality of pan-Asian visions based on the powerful notions of East-West civilizational discourses and the white race’s continuing discrimination against the colored races helps explain one of the major paradoxes in the history of pan-Asianism. If pan-Asianism in Japan lacked any political support during the 1920s, why did it gradually gain official endorsement during the 1930s? Why and how did the Japanese government decide to revive the old notions of a Japan-centered pan-Asian internationalism by the late 1930s? The answer to these questions lies in the way the Japanese Empire utilized pan-Asianist thought, despite Asianism’s anticolonial lineage, to solve the crisis of Japan’s own imperialism in East Asia.