[Bilimsel Haber] FW: Book review: Cemil Aydin, _The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia:, Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought_

[Onur Inal]

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Subject: Book review: Cemil Aydin, _The Politics of Anti-Westernism in
Asia:, Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought_


*Cemil Aydin.* /The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World
Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought./
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0231137788> New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007. 320 pp. $33.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13778-2.

*Reviewed by* Erez Manela
*Published on* H-Diplo (January, 2009)
*Commissioned by* Christopher L. Ball



*Race, Civilization, and International Society*

This book covers the emergence, development, and decline of pan-Islamic and
pan-Asian visions of international order over a period of more than a
century, from 1840 to 1945. Its focus is on intellectual elites, and to a
lesser extent on political leaders, in the Ottoman Empire and Japan, though
substantial attention is given to the role of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian
ideas elsewhere, particularly in India. The story is not simply an
intellectual history but is rather intimately tied to the tides of
international politics and, perhaps even more important, to the concurrent
evolution of international discourses of legitimacy. Neither is this a work
of comparative history, though many fascinating comparisons can be drawn
from it. Instead, it tells the stories of pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism as
an artfully integrated narrative, and is thus a part of the emerging history
of international society as a historical subject in its own right.

Cemil Aydin posits six turning points in the evolution of pan-Islamism and
pan-Asianism as intellectual constructs and as political movements, each
anchoring a chapter in the book. The first occurred in the 1840s when the
European powers, their military and economic power fortified by centuries of
imperialism and decades of Industrial Revolution, began to penetrate both
the Middle East and East Asia more thoroughly and insistently than they had
in the past. By then, Aydin points out, the ideas of the Enlightenment had
been around for a while, but it was only the display of overwhelming power
in the 1840s--the First Opium War of 1840-42 and the increasing pressure on
Ottoman territories--that launched a widespread interest of Ottoman and
Japanese elites in Western ideas as well as technologies. The Ottomans,
after centuries as a leading power in the European order, suddenly found
themselves internationally marginalized, branded an "uncivilized" power
whose rights were curtailed. And Japanese leaders after 1853 noted that,
having been forcibly brought into international society, Japan too occupied
an inferior, unequal station in the Eurocentric order.

Both Ottoman and Japanese elites surveyed the landscape of international
relations and concluded that only states recognized as "civilized" could
survive and thrive in it. This realization helped launch the
"self-civilizing" reforms of the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839) and the Meiji
Restoration (1868). In both cases, the reforms aimed to make the state equal
to the Western powers in military and economic might, but also, and partly
as a result, to earn recognition as "civilized" powers deserving of the full
rights and considerations in international society. Taking Enlightenment
thinkers at their word, Ottomans and Japanese leaders during this period
understood "civilization" as a universal standard, which peoples of all
races or creeds could attain. The standard, though imprecise and shifting,
appeared to include technologically advanced military forces and industrial
development along with a public discourse that valued rationality,
efficiency, and science, and political and legal structures that
approximated the Western norms. Appearances were important, too, in the
quest for civilized status. It is no accident that reformers--in Japan
especially, but in the Ottoman Empire, too--made drastic changes to the
dress and rituals of political leadership, diplomatic exchange, and military
units to meet Western standards of "civilized" deportment.

By the 1880s, however--the second turning point in the story--the notion of
a universal standard of civilization appeared under siege with the rise in
the West of exclusionist notions of civilization that emphasized immutable
traits, such as religion and race, and implied that only white, Christian
peoples could be civilized while Muslims and "yellow" peoples were
inherently uncivilized. Ottoman intellectuals met claims, such as those of
Ernest Renan, that Islam was incompatible with science by highlighting the
Islamic traditions of rational discourse and scientific inquiry. But, even
more than the musings of Orientalists, Ottoman and Japanese reformers grew
frustrated with the failure of their reforms to earn them equality in
international society. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the
peremptory treatment that the European powers meted out to Japan in the wake
of its victory over China in 1895 made clear that, despite several decades
of reforms, the Ottomans and the Japanese had not attained full citizenship
in international society.

It is in the context of such rejection, Aydin tells us, that modern ideas of
pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism first emerged. If a racist, Orientalist Europe
would exclude nonwhites permanently from full membership in international
society, then the Eurocentric vision of world order was no longer
acceptable, and alternatives had to be found. One such notion was what Aydin
calls a "defensive Muslim internationalism," as some Muslim intellectuals
began emphasizing Ottoman leadership in the Muslim world as an alternative
to integration in the European order (p. 67). At around the same time, some
Japanese leaders, dismayed with the growing European penetration in their
region, proposed an Asian Monroe Doctrine, which would keep the European
powers out of East Asia.

Such "anti-Western" critiques emerged from an ongoing engagement of Asian
thinkers with a global circulation of ideas and exemplified, as Aydin points
out, the global character of debates over modernity, culture, and
international politics. Indeed, Asian critiques of the materialism of the
modern West echoed ideas that were common at the time in the West itself, as
were the essentialist notions of a refined Asian "spirituality" adopted by
Asian thinkers in what Aydin calls "reverse Orientalism" (pp. 89, 203). And,
in the field of international politics, Asian and Muslim critics of the West
did not reject the universal standards of the Enlightenment; rather, they
employed those standards to condemn the European powers of hypocrisy in
violating, with their racist, exclusionary, and imperialist practices in
international affairs, the very ideals they claimed to uphold in their
"civilizing mission."

Pan-Asianism and pan-Islamism emerged as alternatives to an international
order in which the West failed to live up to its own universalist standards,
but they were hardly the only possible alternatives. In fact, despite the
intellectual attraction and occasional political usefulness of pan-Islamic
and pan-Asianist ideas, neither had a significant, long-term impact on
Ottoman or on Japanese foreign policies in this period. Instead, decisions
were driven by a growing attachment to concepts of national identity and
national interests. Ottoman leaders under the Young Turks pursued the
interests of the Ottoman state, rather than any broader pan-Islamic agenda,
while Japan concluded an alliance with Great Britain--the paradigmatic
racist, Orientalist, imperialist Western power--gamely adopting the logic of
power politics and chucking aside any notion of Asian solidarity against
Western penetration.

Despite Japan's rise in the ranks of imperial powers, and also, ironically,
because of it, the third turning point in the story came with the dramatic
Japanese victory over Russia in 1905. The impact of 1905 across Asia and the
Middle East has been much asserted but rarely explored in any detail, so
Aydin's thorough treatment here is all the more valuable. The wave of
excitement that rippled from Egypt to Persia to India to China in the wake
of 1905 reflected the "scope and syncronicity of global intellectual sphere"
and generated a broadly shared sense of an "Asian awakening" (p. 72). But
the responses across Asia and the Middle East to the Japanese victory
abounded with ironies. First, the very concept of the "East" whose awakening
was being celebrated--the notion that Japan, India, Egypt, Turkey, etc. all
belonged to a single unit that possessed geographic and even
cultural/civilizational coherence--was a "self-Orientalizing" move that
assimilated European notions of a unitary "Asian" space that stood in
opposition to "Europe."

Second, and more important, Japan was celebrated as an "Asian" icon
precisely for having defeated the West at its own game, that is to say, for
having become "Western" more successfully than any other "Eastern" nation.
The Meiji reformers had centralized the state, modernized the armed forces,
and proved that Japan, too, could play the game of international power
politics and imperial expansion. Japan was being feted as a champion of the
"East" even as it was preparing to nullify the independence of another Asian
nation--Korea--and laying the groundwork for future expansion in China. And
although such Japanese pan-Asianists as Okawa Shumei--a central character in
the book--read the responses to 1905 as evidence of broad support for
Japan's leadership role in Asia, other Japanese were uneasy with the
adulation they received as champions of the "East." For them, the goal of
the reforms was not so much to make Japan a leader /in/ Asia but to take
Japan /out/ of Asia, as the famed Meiji intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi had
proposed decades earlier; to make it, in effect, a "white" power.

The next turning points in the intertwined histories of pan-Islamism and
pan-Asianism came with the First World War. The war actually saw two
distinct turning points, one at the run-up and outbreak of the war in
1912-14, and the second with the conflicts over the postwar settlements that
lasted from 1919 to 1923. It is during this period that the profound
disconnect between the consistent attractions that notions of civilizational
unity held for cultural and intellectual elites, on the one hand, and
feebleness of their ability to mobilize broad popular support or to
influence policy, on the other, was most clearly on display.

In wartime Japan, pan-Asianism fell into irrelevance as Tokyo capitalized on
its British alliance to grab additional territories and bullied China in the
best traditions of imperialist realpolitik. The Ottomans, for their part,
did make an attempt to enlist pan-Islamic sentiments in the war effort by
issuing a call for jihad, but the call, though it excited much alarm in the
British official mind (and some hope in the German one), had little success
in mobilizing Muslims either outside or inside the empire. And later, while
the Ankara government under Mustafa Kemal was happy to have the moral
support of Indian and other Muslims as it fought to reverse the punitive
verdict of Sevres, the new Turkish state quickly chucked pan-Islamism, along
with its figurehead, the Ottoman sultan/caliph, once victory was attained,
opting instead to found itself on the precise ideological opposite, a
militantly secular Turkish nationalism.

In fact, if there is one major theme that runs through this book in its
entirety it is that by far the most powerful enemy of the anti-Western
pan-ideologies were not the Western powers themselves but rather the
enthusiastic adoption among non-European peoples of the competing ideology
of nationalism, that Western idea of political, social, cultural
organization whose logic undermined the legitimacy of an international order
based on empire. Aydin titles his penultimate chapter "The Triumph of
Nationalism?" with the question mark perhaps designed to create in the
reader a sense of suspense, but it is clear that the book as a whole answers
the question in the affirmative.

In the entire period covered in this book, the only time in which a
pan-ideology played a significant role in international affairs was when the
Japanese empire adopted pan-Asianism as its official ideology in the years
between 1933 and 1945. It is this final turning point to which Aydin devotes
his final chapter. Even then, however, Japanese pan-Asianism was little more
than a justification for imperial expansion, a useful tool in an era when
the old justifications for empire, from survival of the fittest to the
"civilizing mission," were falling into disrepute as the right to
self-determination was widely adopted by anticolonial nationalist movements
across Asia and reaffirmed by the Western allies in the Atlantic Charter.
And lest we see such "anti-imperialist imperialism" as a "peculiarity of the
Japanese imperial style," Aydin archly reminds us that other
"internationalisms, including liberal and socialist ones, are susceptible to
such utilization by imperial projects" (p. 198).

In the end, it appears that neither pan-Asianism nor pan-Islamism were fully
anti-Western, at least not in the period covered in this book. Both emerged
as the efforts of Ottoman and Japanese reformers to adopt and adapt the
West's "standard of civilization" were undermined by Europe's insistence on
an exclusionary international order, and both were conceived as alternative
paths to integration in international society rather than as its rejection.
In the ensuing decades, while both ideologies developed intellectual and
cultural appeal, their advocates rarely managed to mobilize broad popular
sentiments behind them or to gain consistent support from political leaders,
whose policies were instead largely shaped by their perceptions of national
(rather than
civilizational) interests in the evolving contexts of international power
relations and discourses of legitimacy.

Ottoman pan-Islamism, never a potent force in international politics despite
its cultural roots and intellectual appeal, was decisively rejected in
post-Ottoman Turkey after 1924, while Japanese pan-Asianism evaporated in
1945, where the present book ends. The story, of course, does not end there.
Other modern versions of pan-Islamism, in particular that reflected in the
rise of the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1930s, have, of course, become
internationally significant in recent years, and while postwar attempts to
establish Asian solidarity in international politics, for example at the
Bandung Conference in 1955, have been feeble and short-lived, discussions of
purported "Asian values" and their relationship to modernity and the "West"
have recurred with some regularity in global conversations in recent
decades.

Whatever the future holds for pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist ideas, Aydin has
done an important service in writing such a thoroughly researched, carefully
conceptualized, and intricately argued book on their modern history. In the
originality of its scope, the richness of its sources, and its impressive
linguistic range--working extensively with both Turkish and Japanese
language sources--it is a model of the emerging "new international history."
/The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia/ should become required reading in
seminars on international history and the history of colonialism. It will be
useful to anyone interested in the history of modern international society,
in particular in the role of non-European peoples within it, as well as to
those intrigued with the potential of new approaches to international
history.


*Citation: * Erez Manela. Review of Aydin, Cemil, /The Politics of
Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian
Thought/. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. January, 2009.
*URL:* http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23966