The Articulation of National Identity in Early Twentieth-century East Asia: The Intertwining of Discourses of Modernity and Civilisation (original) (raw)

The article examines the ways in which national identity was articulated by intellectuals of Japan, China and Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth century as a first step to review the westerncentric and diffusionist account of nationalism. Conventional accounts of nationalism regard nationalism as intrinsically European rooted in development such as the Enlightenment and the Westphalian system of states and consider non-western cases as those of diffusion. While the discourse of the nation and national identify produced by East Asian intellectuals of the early twentieth century was shaped by social and political theories developed in the West, their frequent use of civilisational referent suggests that they were subjectively engaged with the project of selfdefinition drawing from their own sources, which undermines the diffusionist account of nationalism. The article briefly examines the discourse of national identity articulated by the Kyoto School of philosophy, Sun Yat-sen and Tsai Pei-huo as the first step in exploring the possibility of multiple origins of nationalism.