Government

This thematic section studies nationalism in a new arena: constitutional politics. The nationalist aspect to constitutional politics is becoming increasingly important across Europe. Historically, structural transformations in the nature of the modern state have been reflected by the increased importance of national identity issues on constitutional life. The content of constitutions was at first little influenced by nationalist ideas, but in recent decades their presence has become stronger. The collapse of communism prompted a new wave of constitution-writing in which the drafters sought to combine republican and nationalist concepts of the state with the liberal norms of the Council of Europe. In older European Union member states, minority constitutional agitation has also become more salient, notably in Spain, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Opposition to European integration has prompted widespread debates on the nature of national sovereignty. In most member states, as well as in non-member states such as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, the proposed EU Constitutional Treaty generated considerable debate about national, religious, and European identity. That patterns of state-building and nationalism have varied across time and space in Europe is well established. This thematic section explores how these patterns have been reflected in constitutions. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the contest between monarchy and limited (representative) government was the central issue. As nationalism became more dominant in the nineteenth century, the state became increasingly legitimised on the basis of its population and national identity, rather than its monarch or territory. The same applies to constitutions. Since then questions of national identity have shaped the political context in which almost every modern European constitution has been written. In the early twentieth century, the central contest was between nationalism and republicanism. The second half of the twentieth century saw liberal principles prevail. Yet the tension between liberal and nationalist approaches to

This article maps out the role played by national identity in modern European constitutions. It does this by comparing its impact on constitutions across Gellner's time zones of European nationalism, and shows how the impact of nationalism has increased gradually over time, and is now strongest in Central and Eastern Europe. It concludes with a reflection on why this has been the case, and why constitutional politics have increasingly lent themselves to nationalist influences in the modern era.

Democracy implies, if nothing else, citizen participation in crafting the political institutions those same citizens inhabit, even if the actual contours of such participation have been widely contested. Majoritarian voting procedures and public deliberation are the two most popular implementations of the ideals of democratic rule, but they do not exhaust the entire field of possibilities. Zhang Shizhao 章士釗 (1885Shizhao 章士釗 ( -1973, an early twentieth century Chinese political thinker, uses the participatory promise of democracy to challenge China's traditional elitism and bureaucracy, but he privileges "self-awareness" (自覺) rather than a form of collective action as foundational to this democratic practice. Although Zhang wrote shortly after the establishment of republican government in China, and during a time of unprecedented Western influence, his "selfaware" individual bears a more than superficial resemblance to the literati-bureaucrats who were the primary political actors under the Chinese dynastic empire. However, while contemporaries invoked the literatus ideal to claim a right to educate and manipulate the masses, Zhang recasts the literatus posture to formulate a new form of political action: one that disaggregates the "group" (群) concept central to contemporary elite political thinking, and in turn opens greater spaces for political participation. In the process of elaborating the requirements of self-awareness, and demonstrating its efficacy in building a regime of self-rule where none existed before, Zhang shows how thinking about political action in an individualized rather than collective way can leverage resources for changing shared human environments that would otherwise be overlooked.

Asian Values discourse was widely criticized for its cultural inauthenticity and instrumentalism. However, its similarity to an early twentieth-century conversation about the values of "€œEastern civilization"€ places it within a particular history of cultural assertion, which emerges when Asian experience defies expectations about the direction of future progress. Both discourses reformulate historically-central Chinese ideas in more general terms to carve out space between regional ethnocentrism and mimeticism of the West. Although sometimes co-opted by authoritarian elites, they nevertheless articulate "€œAsian"€ characteristics as challenges that transform, rather than traditional values which supplement, "€œWestern" processes of modernization.

Globalization has brought together otherwise disparate communities with distinctive and often conflicting ways of viewing the world.  Yet even as these phenomena have exposed the culturally specific character of the academic theories used to understand them, most responses to this ethnocentricity fall back on the same parochial vocabulary they critique. Against those who insist our thinking must return always to the dominant terms of Euro-American modernity,  Leigh Jenco argues—and more importantly, demonstrates—that methods for understanding cultural others can take theoretical guidance from those very bodies of thought typically excluded by political and social theory. 

Jenco examines a decades-long Chinese conversation over “Western Learning,” starting in the mid-nineteenth century, which subjected methods of learning from difference to unprecedented scrutiny and development.  Just as Chinese elites argued for the possibility of their producing knowledge along “Western” lines rather than “Chinese” ones, so too, Jenco argues, might we come to see foreign knowledge as a theoretical resource—that is, as a body of knowledge which formulates methods of argument, goals of inquiry, and criteria of evidence that may be generalizable to other places and times.  The call of reformers such as Liang Qichao and Yan Fu to bianfa—literally “change the institutions” of Chinese society and politics in order to produce new kinds of Western knowledge—was simultaneously also a call to “change the referents” those institutions sought to emulate, and from which participants might draw their self-understanding.  Their arguments show that the institutional and cultural contexts which support the production of knowledge are not prefigured givens that constrain cross-cultural understanding, but dynamic platforms for learning that are tractable to concerted efforts over time to transform them.  In doing so, these thinkers point us beyond the mere acknowledgement of cultural difference toward reform of the social, institutional and disciplinary spaces in which the production of knowledge takes place.

This article examines Chen Di's 1603 text Record of Formosa (Dongfan ji), the earliest first-hand account in any language of the indigenous people of Formosa (now called Taiwan). Recent commentators have viewed Chen's text as a key elaboration of Chinese imperial discourse and its various tropes of hierarchical difference. In contrast, I argue that Chen reads the perceived cultural differences between his society and Taiwan's indigenous peoples as evidence of the contingency, rather than inevitable superiority, of a historical story that produces the outcome of ‘civilization’. Building on a broader understanding of Chen's intellectual biography and his extant works, I show that Chen Di places the indigenes along a different timeline in which they forge their own contingent history parallel to, rather than behind, that of a civilizational centre. By doing so, Chen's historical narrative resists aligning their society with Han Chinese forms of development and offer...

This article argues for a ‘history from between’ as the best lens through which to understand the construction of historical knowledge between East Asia and Europe. ‘Between’ refers to the space framed by East Asia and Europe, but also to the global circulations of ideas in that space, and to the subjective feeling of embeddedness in larger-than-local contexts that being in such a space makes possible. Our contention is that the outcomes of such entanglements are not merely reactive forms of knowledge, of the kind implied by older studies of translation and reception in global intellectual history. Instead they are themselves ‘co-productions’: they are the shared and mutually interactive inputs to enduring modes of uses of the past, across both East Asian and European traditions. Taking seriously the possibility that interpretations of the past were not transferred, but rather were co-produced between East Asia and Europe, we reconstruct the braided histories of historical narrative...

This special issue addresses the diverse ways the past may be used and perceived in different places for political purposes. Noting that histories of political thought have traditionally reproduced the parochial exclusions of the discipline, contributors to this special issue consider how the past matters for political thought and from a global perspective. This mandate does not entail the assumption that there exists some singular global vantage point from which historical ideas might be assessed or that Euro-American concerns and experiences should be projected ever more broadly across the world’s pasts. Rather, these contributors directly engage the globally diffuse, intellectually substantive confrontations of past with present, of tradition with modernity, and of heritage with necessity that erupted (and continue to erupt) as thinkers in diverse societies grapple with the specific dilemmas of their time and place.

This article examines how the classicist and folklorist Gu Jiegang, in conversation with his Hui (Chinese Muslim) colleagues at the Yugong study society and journal (published 1934–1937), theorized the “Chinese nation” ( Zhonghua minzu) as an internally plural and open-ended political project, to resist homogenizing claims by both Japanese imperialists and the ruling Chinese Nationalist party under Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s. Echoing the struggles of his Hui colleagues to articulate their place in the nation as both Muslim and Chinese, Gu reworked traditional “culturalist” assumptions about the non-racial character of identity formation to pose minority experience as constitutive of a constantly expanding and transforming political community. When Gu asserted in his notorious 1939 essay that the “ Zhonghua minzu Is One,” he posed a unity built not on cultural assimilation or ethnic identity, but on a shared political commitment to an expansive and culturally hybrid concept of the ...

In her essay, “Global Knowledge Frameworks and the Tasks of Cross-Cultural Philosophy,” Leigh Jenco proposes that certain knowledge frameworks may, in virtue of their accessibility to erstwhile outsiders, be more congenial to the aims of cross-cultural philosophy. Her co-symposiasts use Jenco’s essay to further the discussion on different aspects of this claim. Steve Fuller contests whether postcolonialism is the right lens through which cross-cultural encounters should be studied. David H. Kim suggests that an inclusive multifactorial account of frameworks relevant to cross-cultural philosophy may be more apt for the aims of this sub-discipline. Thaddeus Metz seeks to provide reason to doubt Jenco’s self-transformative conception, and also advance another, pluralist conception of knowledge. Miljana Milojevic reinterprets Jenco’s knowledge frameworks as different conceptualizations of knowledge used in attempts to justify the neglect of non-Western traditions.

In this essay I argue that recent philosophical attempts to ‘modernise’ Confucianism rehearse problematic relationships to the past that – far from broadening Confucianism’s appeal beyond its typical borders – end up narrowing its scope as a source of scholarly knowledge. This is because the very attempt to modernise assumes a rupture with a past in which Confucianism was once alive and relevant, fixing its identity to a static historical place disconnected from the present. I go on to explore alternative means of situating past thought to present inquiry, by examining a debate among early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals over the value of their past heritage in a modern age. Their diverse responses undermine the certainty of a singular or persistent Chinese past, enabling a creative presentism that encourages deliberate filiation with alternative ‘tracks’ of past practice and thought.

How is cultural otherness any different from the historical otherness already found in our existing canons of thought? This essay examines an influential Chinese conversation that raised a similar question in struggling with its own parochialism. Claiming that all “Western” knowledge originated in China, these Chinese reformers see the differences presented by foreign knowledge as identical to those already authorizing innovation within their existing activity of knowledge-production. Noting that current academic theory-production treats the otherness of past authors in a similar way, I argue that we must broach something like a China-origins claim if we are to see typically marginalized (“non-Western”) thought as part of what disciplines our thought, rather than serves simply as its target of inclusion. Doing so, we blur self/foreign binaries and enable future innovation of thought on radically new terms.