So Exciting and so Much More to Explore: Comments on Aram Hur (2022) <i>Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia</i>

Aram Hur's Narratives of Civic Duty: How National Stories Shape Democracy in Asia is a thought-provoking piece of work. It is refreshing for those of us who are interested in the study of nationalism because Hur challenges the established public policy wisdom about nationalism: nationalism, as opposed to patriotism, is evil or, if not downright evil, it has, without exception, a negative impact on society in general. What is more, her work also attempts to go beyond what she calls ‘democratic essentialism’ (p. 27) by questioning a deeply entrenched assumption that nationalism would have a detrimental impact on the health of democracy. What is very exciting in this regard is her case studies—South Korea and Taiwan—two young-ish democracies in East Asia which are not readily associated with democracy and which are often seen as having strong ethnic nationalism (though in the case of Taiwan, the question of ‘ethnic’ nationalism is complicated as Hur acknowledges). Advancing a thesis on the possible positive impact of nationalism on democracy using cases which do not usually feature in the study of democracy—this is why Narratives of Civic Duty stands out. While Hur does not give a blanket endorsement of nationalism, she argues, ultimately, that certain types of nationalism in which national stories enhance people's perception of the strength of connection between the nation and the state would have positive effects on the health of democracy because these national stories would enhance people's sense of civic duty. The book demonstrates the validity of her argument with case studies of South Korea and Taiwan augmented by that of post-unification Germany. Hur's argument centres on the role of what she refers to as ‘national stories’, an unmistakably qualitative concept, and the work's qualitative insights are supplemented by quantitative analyses—an effective employment of the research strategy of triangulation. In short, this is a well-designed piece of scholarship which offers exciting insights into nationalism and how it works. In what follows, I would like to lay out my understanding of Hur's argument though I will not go into the details of quantitative analyses she has carried out as I am not well versed in that department. I will then offer some comments and raise some questions in order to kick-start the debate. Narratives of Civic Duty opens with an episode of Mrs. Han, an ordinary South Korean citizen, who felt compelled to donate her and her husband's rings and gold bars to the national bank when South Korea was badly hit by the 1997 financial crisis. We first need to note that the gold drives were not organised by the South Korean state but started by a women's church group. In the end, about 3.5 million Koreans (one in four households) joined in and donated their personal gold. The drives raised 225 tons of gold worth $2 billion (p. 3). This was a drop in the ocean as South Korea's debt exceeded $100 billion, but this is not the point. Mrs. Han donated her and her husband's personal gold because ‘[I]t was the only right thing to do’ (p. 4). Hur asks why Mrs. Han and other South Koreans voluntarily gave up their personal wealth to a movement which was, after all, not a governmental project but a private initiative: in other words, without coercion by the state. Why did they give up their personal gold? Her answer is ‘because of their sense of civic duty’—they simply fulfilled what they considered their moral obligation. Moral obligation to whom? It is not very clear at the opening section of the book, but as we go through the volume, it becomes clear that donations were made to ‘Korea’ (p. 15), a political community in which the perceived Korean nation and state are very well aligned. Hur claims that this strong alignment of the nation and the state can be brought about by national stories, a product of historicised national identity politics. While duty and moral obligation sound very Confucian, and therefore, it can be seen as a trait which is peculiar to South Korea, where Confucianism retains stronger influence than, say, in Japan, Hur reminds us that in the study of democracy, the importance of civic duty has been repeatedly emphasised starting with Alexis de Tocqueville. And in the face of ongoing democratic backsliding across the world, the significance of civic duty is attracting renewed interest in the study of democracy (pp. 4–6). So, is this a case of Confucianism coming to a rescue of democracy in a post-Cold War society? Not really. Hur argues that the strong sense of civic duty Mrs. Han and other South Koreans felt at the end of the twentieth century was not so much a product of Confucian socialisation, though it definitely helps, but of a perception of a strong linkage between the national people and the state which has been historically cultivated by means of national stories (p. 8). And in this process, nationalism can serve as a resource to strengthen democracy by enhancing people's sense of civic duty, a sense of obligation to be a good citizen. The book then substantiates this claim using personal narratives, opinion polls, and experiments in South Korea and Taiwan (chapters 3–5). After investigating the two East Asian cases, the book proceeds to examine the case of East Germans in post-unification Germany to show that the claim about the sense of civic duty holds in a different historical and cultural context (chapter 6). The book concludes with some policy recommendations (chapter 8), some of which are somewhat counterintuitive because of the dominant assumption about the relationship between nationalism and democracy. This is a very rough outline of Narratives of Civic Duty as I understand it, which plainly does not do justice to its richness. However, I hope the above is sufficient in preparing the ground for my comments and questions. Because this is such a stimulating volume, I have a long list of questions—but here, I will focus on four questions. Two of them are theoretical, one of them is ‘mechanical’, and the last one is empirical. My first question is inevitably about definition. The question is: what is nationalism in this volume? What I have gathered from the volume is that it is interested in finding out what makes people feel that they have a stake in a polity, a feeling that then mobilises them to take certain action, to fulfil their civic duty. The volume argues that it is national stories that facilitate a strong identification between the national people and the state, allowing people to feel the state/political community as ‘mine’. This sense of propriety, as it were, induces behaviour built on the sense of civic duty—you sacrifice something (in Mrs. Han's and others' case, their personal gold) because ‘it is the right thing to do’ as it is for ‘my’ community. The term nationalism is frequently used in the first two chapters, and Hur clearly rejects the conventional dichotomy of ‘bad nationalism’ vs. ‘good patriotism’ and states that the term nationalism is employed in the volume on purpose (p. 20). The book discusses national attachment and, above all, national stories in the context of nationalism. However, nationalism per se is not clearly identified. Perhaps this is because she agrees with Rogers Brubaker (1999) in that what is important is to investigate what nationalism does rather than what nationalism is (p. 23) because nationalism, nations, or national stories are not static nor fixed but constantly evolving. But then, what does nationalism do in this volume? Does nationalism do what national stories do?—to tell people how they and the state are related? Is it a discursive practice, therefore? Furthermore, in discussing who writes national stories, Hur acknowledges the significance of top-down influences of the state or the political elite (p. 23). While the book emphasises that the state or the political elite does not have the monopoly in writing national stories, how ordinary people can write national stories in a bottom-up manner is not focused on. In this regard, the book seems to suggest that nationalism is ideology spread from the top even though it may well take a banal form to be successful. On the other hand, during the Debate, Hur mentioned that the term ‘national stories’ was chosen after a long period of reflection. This was because, in Hur's mind, ‘national stories’ would better capture a range of interactions among various actors that would lead to the formation of a sense of belonging to ‘my’ community on the part of citizens, which then would lead to the cultivation of a sense of civic duty. In this deliberation, the emphasis then was clearly on the idea of everyday nationhood in that the focus was on how ordinary people participate (or do not participate) in defining and maintaining the nation as ‘their’ political community. So, is nationalism in the volume a label of the process through which the ‘nation’ is naturalised by way of quotidian action conditioned by various forces including top-down indoctrination? The Narratives of Civic Duty has much potential to contribute to the discussion of what nationalism is by further articulating what nationalism does. Following the question of definition, my next point is about the theoretical implication of the book's claim. As touched upon earlier, the volume does not find distinguishing patriotism from nationalism as good and bad, respectively, is useful and this is the reason why the volume adopts the term ‘nationalism’ throughout. The volume is not content with the established ethnic vs. civic nationalism classification, either (p. 23). Hur further argues that ‘the democratic manifestations of nationalism have less to do with having a good or bad variant and more to do with how different nationalisms are embedded vis-à-vis the state’ (p. 20), which suggests it considers the relationship between the people and the state the most relevant in analysing how nationalism works. In other words, the volume appears to lean towards a state-centric understanding of nationalism. How does this conceptual orientation contribute to the refinement of theories of nationalism? The volume offers a fascinating example of a strong manifestation of what we would call civic nationalism in a country which is usually seen as having ethnic nationalism dominant: overseas Koreans' volunteering to take up conscription motivated by, according to Hur, a sense of civic duty informed by national stories. Of course, an ethnically or even racially defined nation can demonstrate a civic characteristic if we understand ‘civic’ as something to do with ‘society’ demarcated by non-ascriptive criteria such as borders, a set of values and so on. And I am curious what the example of the overseas Koreans' volunteering to be conscripted tells us about the classification of ethnic vs. civic nationalism. Does it question the relevance of the classification? In other words, does the classification continue to make sense in light of this analysis? Is the volume therefore suggesting a major corrective to one of the conventional ways of classifying nationalism? More broadly, what does Hur's analysis imply regarding the very idea of categorising/classifying nationalism? Does this help us achieve a clearer understanding of nationalism or is it now more of a hindrance in our endeavour? The Korean case study, in particular, appears to contain a lot of potential to be explored in terms of interrogating conventional theories of nationalism because of its ‘unexpected’ nature. Thirdly, I would like Hur to expand on the mechanism or process through which national stories (the historicised link between the national people and the state, p. 8) emerge and are adopted by the people. As touched upon earlier, the volume claims while the state is an active and significant participant in making national stories, really powerful national stories are those that are told through a personal lens (pp. 21–24). This makes sense; after all, people are not just passive recipients of top-down messages but thinking and reflective individuals, and for a national story to work, to resonate with people, people have to think about and reflect on it in reference to their experience. Obviously, people are not constantly engaged with conscious reflection because it is demanding and tiring, and routinisation is a very useful process for any individual to negotiate their life. Successful national stories are therefore those that have been reflected upon and routinised. However, in the volume, how these stories emerge away from the state-sponsored structure such as school curriculum, message control in media, and so on, remains rather obscure. More details on the processes through which national stories emerge and become successful would be very welcome. In regard to the emergence of successful national stories, there are a few associated questions: Does the size of the national people matter? Is there an optimal size of population to have national stories which are well-aligned with the state? Or is it the question of the degree of homogeneity that is more important in determining which national stories are successful and which are not? The last question leads back to the issue of civic and ethnic nationalism again from a different angle. In thinking about the two cases the volume discusses in regard to national stories, another question comes to mind: what about the low birth rate in South Korea and Taiwan? The decline in the birth rate in South Korea is not a recent phenomenon, and it was already noted in the period the volume covers. If the bond between the nation and the state at the time was perceived to be strong and intimate by the Koreans, why does it appear to have a negligible impact on the birth rate? Is it because reproduction saddles different aspects of the private and the public? Conversely, can Taiwan's low birth rate be explained by the incongruence of the nation (admittedly a very contested idea in Taiwan) and the state? Was the birth rate low because people did not feel the Taiwanese society as ‘theirs’? Fourthly, an empirical question regarding the application of the national theory of civic duty to Taiwan in recent years. I completely agree with the book's analysis that there was a disconnect between the ‘national people’ and the state in Taiwan when the Kuomintang was in power, and the book's investigation into how young Taiwanese saw military service is very illuminating. As such, the Taiwanese case study is a great contrast to the South Korean one, and one of the book's strengths is having identified these two cases for a successful most-similar case study design. However, the analysis carried out for the book covers the period before the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)’s victory in 2016, and they are still in power—albeit just about—and Taiwanese society is greatly divided (but is there any country that is not ‘deeply divided’ or ‘deeply polarised’ these days?). Since 2013, a lot has happened in Taiwan in terms of democracy, including the Sunflower Movement in 2014, which the book analyses. The DPP became the majority party, and Tsai Ing-wen was elected President in 2016. The DPP government legalised same-sex marriage in 2019, which is seen to mark the progressiveness of Taiwan under DPP. It successfully navigated through the Covid-19 pandemic without depriving civil freedom from its people in contrast to the People's Republic of China (PRC), demonstrating that democracy can deal with a serious national crisis. The proportion of respondents in opinion polls who identify themselves as ‘Taiwanese only’ is hovering around 63%, with 31% of them saying they are both Taiwanese and Chinese. Against alleged massive interference by the Chinese Communist Party, the DPP candidate, Lai Ching-te, won the presidency in 2024. In the face of the rising tension with the PRC, the compulsory military service has now been extended from 4 months to 1 year, a move supported by all three main presidential candidates of the 2024 election, and according to the National Chengchi University's poll, 58% of the respondents supported it (Tang 2024). This is not to say compulsory military service has suddenly gained traction in Taiwan; it is still largely seen as ‘useless’ and ‘a waste of time’, detrimental to young people's career development, as Hur has documented (ibid.). However, in terms of the democratic manifestation of nationalism, the situation in Taiwan has clearly evolved since the period which Hur has analysed. Does this mean the alignment between the nation and the state has shifted substantially in the period since 2013? The book claims it takes time for national stories to emerge to link the nation and the state successfully and intimately, which leads to several questions: how can the shift in formal politics in Taiwan from 2013 be explained in reference to the national theory of civic duty? What mobilised the protesters in the Sunflower Movement in 2014 when they stood up for what they thought was the real interest of Taiwan? Their sense of civic duty to protest against a bad deal for Taiwan—where did it come from? These questions show how exciting Hur's argument of the national theory of civic duty is—it continues to stimulate questions.