BOOK REVIEWS

Hartmut O. Rottermund, Alain Delissen, François Gipouloux, Claude Markovits, Nguyên Thê Anh, L’Asie Orientale et Méridionale au XlXe et XXe siècles - Chine, Corée, Japon, Asie du sud-est, Inde

Even twenty years ago, a book like this would have seemed ill-conceived, for two reasons. Firstly, in what ways could the histories of China, Japan, India, Indonesia and Burma be considered sufficiently similar to justify a joint study? And secondly, in which of these histories could the nineteenth century be said to usher in a true historical turning point? But nowadays there is the real prospect of the emergence in the coming decades of a third regional centre of globalisation, as the Indo-Pacific region confronts the European Union and the United States. This prospect fully justifies an in-depth retrospective examination of the two centuries preceding what was up until now a process of modernisation in all the different countries concerned. How could one assess the mutual influences between China and Japan at the opening of the twenty-first century without taking account of their past interactions within the Asian context? Or how could one weigh up the overall influence of ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in the region, and the chances of it growing stronger, without reconsidering the recent history of its member states in relation to their partners and their rivals? It is these kinds of enquiry that provide the rationale for the wide geographical and historical scope embraced by this latest volume from Nouvelle Clio publications. Its main advantage is that it provides anyone who may be well acquainted with one or other of these countries (and therefore less familiar with others, since one cannot keep up with everything), with excellent coverage of the latest research on the others. The volume opens with such valuable research tools as a thorough bibliography of publications in oriental languages (752 on China, 718 on Korea, 932 on Japan, 314 on Southeast Asia and 251 on India, in addition to the periodicals), an inclusive chronology covering 75 pages, and a dozen maps. All this serves as an introduction, not an Appendix, to the main body of the work, which makes it clear from the outset that the director of this project and his collaborators envisage their undertaking: to be an ongoing research rather than a presentation of established knowledge.

For over half of the human race which is what the work covers (currently 3,200 million people out of the global total of 6,000 million), modernisation has passed through two stages. The first, lasting until the mid-twentieth century, took the form of a Westernisation following the European model; and the second, after the Second World War, was, and still is, the development of independent states but linked to globalisation under the hegemony of the United States.

For all the different states in the area, the first stage begins by following the developmental curve of national evolution which, throughout the nineteenth century was marked by successive upheavals caused by Westernisation under the pressures of European expansion. Apart from the Philippines, where Hispanisation goes back to the sixteenth century, but in the shape of structural changes of a pre-industrial type with no prospects for future development, the first country to undergo the shock of the new was India, where British supremacy was finally established after the defeat of Maharashtra in 1818. The Dutch transformation of the Indonesian archipelago did not begin until the end of the British occupation and the end of the Javanese war in 1830. Europeanisation continued after that, either by coercive colonisation, as in French Indochina, or by simple economic and cultural influence, as in Japan after the Meiji reforms or in Siam under Rama V where “the transformations .. [were] ... as drastic as those carried out by the British or the French in their respective areas of control” (p. 343). By the end of the century, this Europeanisation was conducted at one remove, through the colonisation of Korea and Taiwan by the Japanese who considered themselves more Western than Asian, or even, in the case of China, simply through Japanese influence. China was in fact the last to succumb to Westernisation, at the time of the institutional settlements of 1898. It did not come about so much under the pressure of the Opium War or the Franco-Chinese War, as through the Self-Strengthening Movement (yangwu yundong) by absorption of Japanese ideas after its defeat at the hands of Japan. But Europeanisation itself engendered anti-European reactions. In India, beginning with the end of the nineteenth century, certain strata of the population were becoming “more and more sensitive to the increasing discrepancy between English constitutional principles as they were taught in the new Indian universities, and the political reality of the completely despotic way in which India was governed” (p. 428). In China, the May 4th Movement of 1919, moulded by Western ideas, was launched as a violent protest against the Treaty of Versailles. In Japan, the demand for the practical application of the Western idea of the “racial equality of nations” turned against the West itself, and its already virulent anti-Westernism developed further into ultra-nationalism (p. 280). And in general, throughout the whole region, the first decades of the twentieth century saw the modernist reformism, nurtured on European ideas, turning against Europe and its civilisation, which was already discredited in Asian eyes by the horrors of the First World War. Anti-colonialist movements grew up, directed particularly against Britain, France, and Holland. Decolonisation, which was their eventual achievement after the Second World War, led the countries of Asia into their second stage of modernisation, as independent states undergoing “development”—an American concept cleansed of occidentalist overtones. The Asian states then modelled themselves on either one or the other of the two major victors of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union. The whole area became divided between socialist and liberal capitalist regimes, although this did not prevent the resurgence of the old demons of ideological, ethnic and religious conflicts, which colonial domination had held in check. The Chinese revolution, the partition of India, and later that of Pakistan too, the division of Korea, the Vietnam War, and the Cambodian genocide, created more victims than the war in the Pacific. By the century’s end, however, a certain stability was achieved, thanks to the Pax Americana, which the collapse of the Soviet Union has left unchallenged. What is this peace worth? It is held in place by globalisation in the economic, financial and information spheres, and this has benefited the Asian region more than any other. Its trade with the rest of the world in 1997 reached a total value of US$1.5 billion, which is close to that of the United States (US$1.58 billion) and even the European Union (US$1.64 billion). As a result, even the Chinese communist leaders, having patented their extraordinary “market socialism”, have insisted on being admitted to membership of the World Trade Organisation. What is the dynamic behind this powerful emergence of South and East Asia? And what are its weaknesses? This work by H. O. Rottermund and his associates throws a flood of light on these questions as they affect the entire region. If there is any regrettable absence, it is not that the volume passes over the Asian financial crisis of 1997 (which happened too late to be taken into account, and which now turns out to have been far less consequential than it appeared at the time); it is rather the lack of a comparative analysis, which might have brought out more clearly the pattern of relationships between the particular countries within the whole ensemble. It would have been particularly helpful to find chapters, or at least sections in the bibliography, dealing with a comparison of the development of India and China; with Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Japanese-Korean relations; and the history of regional institutions (ASEAN, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the Asian Development Bank). But it must be said that it is only bad books that seem to lack nothing, whereas good ones always give rise to a regret over what could have been included.