Robert Kaplan has written a fascinating big-picture piece on the evolving security environment in East Asia. He argues that the future of conflict is the South China Sea, where China, the US, and a set of key regional players will engage in a complicated, but potentially stable, balancing act as China rises. Kaplan is a provocative and serious thinker about war and global politics. He is right to focus on the emerging conflicts in East Asia and he has many insights to offer. Yet this piece shows the downsides of free flowing foreign affairs punditry. I’m not a China or East Asia scholar, so I will leave those issues for others, but I was particularly puzzled by his arguments about nationalism.
Kaplan argues that East Asian security competition is different from past conflicts:
Instead of fascism or militarism, China, along with other states in East Asia, is increasingly defined by the persistence of old-fashioned nationalism: an idea, certainly, but not one that since the mid-19th century has been attractive to intellectuals.
This is a remarkable claim. The rise of nationalism has historically been intertwined with the efforts of intellectuals to construct and re-imagine national pasts and articulate present worldviews and demands. Greenfeld has noted “the central role played in the emergence of national identities by intellectuals” (22). There were many romantic nationalist intellectuals in Europe prior to the horrors of World War II. After the war, anti-colonial nationalisms frequently had roots in the upwardly mobile local intelligentsia (India and French Indochina being excellent examples). Anderson argues that “intelligentsias were central to the rise of nationalism in the colonial territories” (116), which tended to occur well after the mid-19th century. Even in the modern world, battles over identity are often waged by nationalist intellectuals. Nationalism is one of the most important forces in the modern world, in part because of its production and propagation by intellectuals. It’s hard to know what to make of an analysis of nationalism that says the exact opposite.
Kaplan then moves on to argue that “it is traditional nationalism that mainly drives politics in Asia, and will continue to do so. That nationalism is leading unapologetically to the growth of militaries in the region — navies and air forces especially — to defend sovereignty and make claims for disputed natural resources. ” Later in the same paragraph, he suggests that “It is all about the cold logic of the balance of power.” He goes on to state that “unsentimental realism” is “allied with nationalism.”
If nationalism is meaningful in world politics it cannot be the same as simple power balancing. The tension between them is why the rise of nationalism in Europe fundamentally complicated great power politics. It is instructive to compare the nature of wars before 1789 – limited, small armies, manageable territorial divisions – with the dynamics of escalation and conflict associated with the rise of nationalism after the French Revolution. This is something Clausewitz keyed on rather awhile ago (see also this forthcoming piece by Cederman et al. on shifts in war intensity after the rise of nationalism).
Scholars have plausibly argued that nationalism can lead to counterproductive “myths of empire” and intellectual myopia. More specifically, China expert Robert Ross has noted the dangers of nationalism for Chinese naval policy. Ross writes, “There is little evidence that land power challenges to the interest of maritime powers [caused by nationalism] are driven by rational, security-driven states making cost-benefit analyses” (80). It is difficult to see how unsentimental realism is seamlessly allied to old-fashioned nationalism, and consequently how nationalism and the balance of power can both be simultaneously the dominant logic of East Asia.
Kaplan is an important writer and I consistently read his work. I agree with a number of his prescriptions for US policy in Asia. But this piece suggests some of the problems that arise from sweeping assertions with a problematic relationship to the historical record.[1] This approach makes for intriguing and readable articles, but tighter and more plausible claims grounded in history and area knowledge are more likely to accurately guide policy.
[1] There are other issues of consistency. For instance, at the end of the piece Kaplan argues that in the region “morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability.” Yet earlier in the piece he argued that “It will likely produce relatively few moral dilemmas of the kind we have been used to in the 20th and early 21st centuries.” These claims seem to contradict one another.
[1] There are other issues of consistency. For instance, at the end of the piece Kaplan argues that in the region “morality may mean giving up some of our most cherished ideals for the sake of stability.” Yet earlier in the piece he argued that “It will likely produce relatively few moral dilemmas of the kind we have been used to in the 20th and early 21st centuries.” These claims seem to contradict one another.