Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. x, 328 pp. US$35.00, paper; US$35.00, ebook. ISBN 9780231206778.
For all who might have settled comfortably into a conceptual framework through which they analyze political developments in their own domestic, regional, or global contexts, this book will unsettle your framework and compel you to rethink and re-engage with questions that you might have satisfactorily set aside as completed projects. Jie-Hyun Lim eschews conventional conceptual binaries on large political questions. Framing some of these issues within the histories of the binaries that drive the issues across different historical periods and national spaces, i.e., transnationally, he exposes their underlying shared premises and disrupts the presumed moral superiority of one over the other.
The first set of binary concepts discussed is the political left and right, and its cognate terms East and West and Asia and Europe. Lim draws on his own experience living through the democratization of South Korea and Poland; the first, against the successful authoritarian developmental state and the second, liberation from Soviet communist empire. Unsurprisingly, in South Korea, the intellectual left was anti-capitalist, while in Poland it was anti-communist; consequently, both capitalism and communism ended on the right—the existing state serves as the right and the critics symbolize the left, respectively. If, as per convention, capitalist development refers to the West and underdevelopment refers to the East, then Korea would be relatively West while Poland East, in contrast to their geographical location of Korea in Asia and Poland in Europe. In this sense, the East-West division constitutes an “imaginary geography,” rather than real physical space; hence, the title of the book, Global Easts, in the plural.
The second set of binaries examined is a nation’s claim to be victimized or victimizer of historical events—Holocaust, Stalinist totalitarianism, colonization—through selective remembering or selective forgetting, which usually ends up with the same result; that is, a nation would tend to remember its suffering as the victim or the victimized and choose to play down its role as a victimizer, if the latter role cannot be denied completely. Lim provides ample examples from different nations, including contemporary Polish silence on its participation in the Holocaust against its remembrance of being occupied by Nazi Germany. For Asians, closest to home, is the contemporary Japanese nationalist projection of Japan as the only victimized nation in the world to have suffered the devastation of the atomic bomb, while playing down the violence it committed—the victimizer—upon the rest of Asia in its imperialist imagination of Greater Co-prosperity Sphere, with it as the centre.
For my fellow Singaporeans, the local equivalent of the national victimized narrative is the common belief that Singapore was “kicked out” of Malaysia, rather than admitting the hands of the political leaders on the exit, once they realized the common market—the basis that motivated their desire of the membership in Malaysia—was not going to materialize. In the kicked-out narrative, Singapore is a reluctant nation that had political independence thrust on us.
Globally there is apparently a competition among nations to out victimize oneself—to claim to be the most “victimized,” since being victims at the hands of other nations is an important affective foundation for rallying citizens to unite behind the “bullied” nation. Being victimized is good for nationalism.
The third set of binary concepts examined is dictatorship and democracy. Their shared premise is introduced early in the book by tracing the concept of dictatorship to the ancient Roman republic, in which a leader was granted permission to be a dictator by a popular assembly, for a limited period of time during a crisis in a state of emergency. For a recent historical example, Lim cites the case of past South Korean dictatorial president Park Chung-hee, who conducted two plebiscites to legitimatize his imposition of emergency rule. “Dictatorship, like democracy, requires its demos” (3). The requisite demos are provided by the necessary induction of individuals into self-internalized subjectivity as citizens, an ideological transformation of the self that is an essential part of the nation-building process, which is particularly acute in postcolonial nations.
Two major themes running through the deconstruction of these binaries are the travels of Marxism and nationalism, and the different roles they play across different national spaces, as these countries struggle to establish themselves domestically as nations and find their place in the world of nation states. Illustrative of this convoluted trajectory is the transformation of class struggle into the struggle between underdeveloped postcolonial nations, as the Global East and South, against the previous metropolitan colonizing West, in Latin American dependency theory.
As with all exercises in deconstructing binaries, the analysis leaves the individual (reader) in a conceptual trap with no way to turn because to take a position is to become complicit in one side of the binary. So, as expected, Lim provides an escape hatch for the individual’s agency. No matter how deeply one is inducted into a national-citizen subjectivity, such internalization is never total. What remains is the site of resistance against the tyranny of the masses. “Thanks to the silent and unacknowledged forms of resistance that ‘breaks through the grid of established order and accepted disciplines,’ mass dictatorship ceases to be a perfect, tightly sutured machine” (265). One might add that such silent resistance might, occasionally, turn into collective sentiment and burst out as instances of popular direct street democracy, as in the recent occupy movements across the world. However, such disruptions are temporary, as the struggle between the possibility of dictatorship and democracy appears to be permanently in place in a world of nation states.
Beng Huat Chua
National University of Singapore, Singapore