Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My paper explores the varying degrees of success nationalist groups in East Asia experienced across time in their attempts to establish sovereign statehood during the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Empirically, nationalist groups in East Asia experienced most success in achieving their ends during the mid-twentieth century. This is the case despite divergent historical, social, political, economic, and colonial experiences. In undertaking this issue, the paper aims to understand why nationalist groups only experienced widespread success during the mid-twentieth century. After all, strong nationalist movements and influential nationalist groups existed across East Asia since at least the late nineteenth century.The argument the paper hopes to test is that the increasing costs of both conquest and occupation forced rising powers in at the time, the United States and Soviet Union, to promote the creation of sovereign polities in East Asia. This process was a bargain that allowed each superpower to attain influence over local leadership in different East Asian polities, while allowing particular groups to acquire political power over a territorial area. In turn, this arrangement permitted each superpower gain access to resources in areas under the control of their client groups, while denying similar opportunities to their rivals.As such, the two superpowers fostered sovereign statehood among East Asian polities by restricting military, economic, and political support to competing domestic groups with claims to autonomy, territoriality, and alignment. Additionally, the various international organisations established by the superpowers limited membership and support to polities that could claim autonomy and territoriality. By granting access to additional resources, these conditions privileged groups whose aims were congruent to the Great Power interests embedded in international organisations and aid. This situation, I believe, led to widespread sovereign state emergence among East Asian polities and the demise of overseas colonial empires during the mid-twentieth century.Apart from offering a theoretical framework, the paper considers the case of nationalist groups in China between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The paper will also attempt to bring in comparisons against nationalist groups in other East Asian polities. In other words, this paper presents a dissenting view on the panel by suggesting that Great Powers can manipulate non-state actors and even the political arrangements of a polity through international organisations. This implies that rather than merely being agents that can ameliorate democratic deficits in international organisations, non-state actors may actually exacerbate the democratic deficit by extending it into domestic politics.