citizens of the new nations of the Americas and Australia.
Nations of the Colonial Zone constitute a third variety, nations identified as ex-colonies. There were no historical territories, no singular historical peoples, only colonial boundaries. In a rare wise decision, African nationalist leaders decided to accept all such boundaries, however arbitrary and culturally divisive. Ali Jinnah did not, and British India, which was larger than any pre-colonial state of India, broke up into India – which Nehru refused to call ‘Hindustan’ – Pakistan and Bangladesh, through terrible pogroms and wars of divorce.
The maintenance of the colonial language is arguably the most ostentatious legacy of the colonial pathway to modernity, with its ensuing complicated and hierarchical relations of nation and culture, though also pragmatically practical in multilingual nations – such as Nigeria, with 400 to 500 languages according to different estimates,37 or India, which has at least 122, according to a recent linguistic census analysis.*
The European notion that a nation is defined by its language could not be applied in the ex-colonies. When it was, as in Pakistan, it had disastrous results, from 1952 bitterly dividing the Bengali east to the Urdu-promoting leaders of West Pakistan, where the Mughal hybrid of Urdu was not the majority mother tongue either.38
A general legacy of anti-colonialism is a strong nationalism as the decisive modern mass politics. Post-colonial culture also tends to be starkly divided between elite and mass culture. Elite culture is usually conducted in the language of the former colonial power, a language which the majority of the population does not understand. In the capital city, the colonial divide is usually reproduced, the post-colonial elite taking over the official buildings and the private mansions and villas of the colonizers. Colonial administrative practices tend to be kept, although often subverted by corruption and/or lack of state resources.
Traditional authorities and rituals tend to persist, drawing upon both their colonial institutionalization and their national credentials. In spite of their use in colonial indirect rule, traditional leaders were often incorporated into modern anti-colonial nationalism. The founding programme (from 1948) of the radical Convention People’s Party in Ghana, for instance, demanded as its first objective ‘independence for the people of Ghana and their Odikros [traditional rulers]’.39 Modern Malay nationalism, as the national Tunku Abdul Rahman Memorial museum in Kuala Lumpur narrates, started after World War II as a protest against British plans to reduce the powers of the traditional rulers and to institute an equal colonial citizenship for Malays, Chinese and Tamils alike. Independent India, on the other hand, did away with the princely states of India.
The nation of reactive modernization is the pre-modern realm, defined by the writ of the prince, the emperor, the king or the sultan. This was how the successful modernizers of Meiji Japan saw it, as did the less successful rulers of Siam and Abyssinia and the soon-defeated modernizers of Joseon Korea, Qing China and the Ottoman empire. It was a historical legacy of rule, synonymous with its ruling dynasty, who often (though not in Japan) gave the realm its everyday name. The modern task here was not national emancipation but building the realm into a nation. In Japan this was greatly facilitated by the high ethnic homogeneity of the country and the low salience of intertwined religions. The most important measure of national unification was the abolition of the feudal daimyo domains, returning their lands ‘to the emperor’. The Meiji modernizers built a modern Japanese nation around the symbol and mystique of the Emperor, whose status, but not his power, was more and more exalted as the modernization process progressed, culminating in the 1930s and during the Pacific War.
In Japan and Thailand in the twenty-first century, the monarch is a sublime national icon, in comparison with which even British monarchical deference and protocol pale into civic celebrity – but an icon of the nation, not the owner of the land. The great modernizer of Siam, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), has even become a figure of religious devotion, as I noticed at his equestrian statue in Bangkok in 2007.
National language and culture were not primary issues. They were given by the realm, although the status of Sinic civilization and culture came to suffer from the recurrent defeats of China. They became primary when the Turkish nation succeeded the failed Ottoman empire.
The national capitals coming out of emancipation from colonialism and from reactive modernization both have a tendential duality, abruptly juxtaposing urbanistic elements from different civilizations. The hegemonic combination is different, though. The centre of the colonial city was built by the conquerors and then taken over by the ex-colonized, de facto reproducing the characteristic duality of the colonial city. The centre of reactive modernization – usually the princely palace and its surroundings – remained in native hands, though ‘modernized’ by foreign imports of style and amenities. Paraphrasing the doctrine of socialist realism, we may say that it was foreign in form and native in content.
The two great hybrids
The meandering of actual history is rarely captured by the straight lines of scholarly ideal types. In the history of modernity there are two great hybrids weighing heavily on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century worlds: Russia and China. Russia was a part of Europe from the time when the latter was still subsumed under the worldview of Christianity. In the fifteenth century, a Muscovite prince married a Byzantine princess and invited Italian architects to the Kremlin to bolster a claim to being a Third Rome. Peter I had learnt about the modern world in the Netherlands, and in the later eighteenth century the court of Catherine II was part of the Francophone Enlightenment, harbouring Denis Diderot as the court philosophe. In the nineteenth century, Tsarist Russia became a European precursor of the global Cold War United States, the gendarme of last resort against any rebellions against the status quo. Inside Russia there also developed powerful currents of the European labour movement, Marxist social democracy.
However, Russia was also an underdeveloped part of Europe, and among its ruling elite self-consciously so, from Peter I to Lenin. Reactive modernization—catching up with resourceful enemies—was a second crucial part of the Russian path to modernity, from Peter’s use of his absolutist power to build the city of Saint Petersburg rather than a Peterhof replica of Versailles, to Lenin’s and Stalin’s conceptions of socialism as electrification and breakneck industrialization, respectively.
Late imperial Qing China did attempt some reactive modernization, without much success as the devastating imperialist invasion of Beijing in 1900 brought home. Nevertheless, China was never properly colonized; no alien governor-general ever ruled it. But it was partially colonized: its main ports were largely foreign imperialist ‘concessions’ and a major revenue source, the Customs, was controlled by an inter-imperialist consortium.
The hybridity of China included a third, non-negligible component, an offshoot from European class structuration and mobilization. The Communist Party of China has undergone multiple mutations, but its ultimately successful character of a Marxist class organization derives from Europe and the European labour movement, transmitted through the Comintern (the Communist International) in the 1920s.
While post-Ottoman Turkey may be seen as a late case of reactive modernization, after the failed half-hearted Sultanate attempts, Egypt, an autonomous important area of the empire, had to experience the mutation of extravagant khedival modernization into semi-colonial bondage.
Summing up
Nation-states constituted tipping-points of modernity, creating a political space of open horizons of action regardless of whether the nation saw itself as rooted in ancestral territory and culture or not. At their very core of nation conception and constitution, nation-states arose out of very different kinds of power constellations, following from their history of development. Their capital cities have varied accordingly, in ways never before explored systematically, if at all.
There were four main
