Assembling Civilisational and Cultural Nation-States in East Asia: The Case of Japan

Understanding nation-state formation in East Asia is often divided between what I term as ‘globalist’ and ‘localist’ explanations. The former observes that East Asian polities modelled their nation-states by replicating a catalogue of external ideologies and institutions. The latter emphasises instead pre-existing cultural elements that conditioned distinctive nation-state formation. Presupposing nation-state formation with external/internal bounded categories obscures complex interactions while hardening and reifying such boundaries. To overcome this divide, this article follows nation-state builders and observes how they imagined and actualised complex external/internal boundaries for their nation-state formation projects. More importantly, to map their dynamic interactions, I develop two specific patterns, namely ‘defining the global’ and ‘designing the local’. The former shows how nation-state builders visualised different global boundaries with corresponding nation-state identities and interests. The latter, in turn, shows how they modified local complexes to legitimate what was specifically defined. Because they were configured through these interactive patterns, emergent global and local boundaries were intertwined, rather than polarised. For empirical demonstrations, I focus on Civilisational and Cultural nation-state projects in 19th-century Japan that emerged out of the ‘defining’ and ‘designing’ patterns.