How has Asia appeared as a region and been conceived as such in the last hundred years? While there is a long-standing and still burgeoning historiography of Asian connections through the study of the precolonial and early modern maritime trade, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally not seen as a time of growing Asian connections. The recent rise of interest in Asian connections in the current time is thus unable to grasp the continuities and discontinuities that form the present. Even more, it is unable to evaluate the risks and possibilities of the present moment.

Before launching upon the subject, we need to question how, where, and why a region appears. I will approach this question from the perspective of historical sociology. Scholars have made a useful distinction between a region and regionalization, distinguishing between the relatively unplanned or evolutionary emergence of an area of interaction and interdependence as a “region,” and the more active, often ideologically driven political process of creating a region, or “regionalization.”

While understanding the history of the concept of the Asian region requires us to utilize both of these conceptions and their complex interactions, I believe that there is a more fundamental issue underlying why regions and regionalisms succeed or fail, and also why they take the shape they do, as few will argue that the Asian region reflects a cartographic representation of Asia. After all, Asia was merely the name of the area east of the Greek ecumene in ancient times. I hypothesize that regions and regionalizations tend to follow the dominant or hegemonic modes of spatial production during a period. For the twentieth century, the paradigm of large-scale production of social space was the territorial nation-state under conditions of global capitalist production and exchange. Note that this way of formulating the problem may also incorporate the socialist nation-state, which sought to industrialize under conditions of global capital accumulation.

In Henri Lefebvre's classic study, he shows how powerful systems such as capitalism produce the kinds of space they require.Footnote ¹ These spaces are constituted by relationships that can be abstracted, standardized, exchanged, and secured by property rights. In capitalist space, physical factors of production such as land and water become commodities. National spaces are often continuous with this kind of space, which the nation-state authorizes not only by guaranteeing property rights, but also by seeking to homogenize the population as citizens with overarching loyalty not to their substantive communities or life worlds, but to the national community through the nation-state. This homogenizing tendency of the nation-state may, of course, be reproduced within nested formations in which horizontal identity is expressed in associations, provinces, language groups, and so on, theoretically under the sovereign nation-state. In the national model of space, there is an effort to make culture and political authority congruent. Of course, this also produces tensions between national and capitalist space. Most significantly, the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state can limit the deterritorializing imperative of capitalism.

Imperial Regionalism

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the relationship between global capitalism, regional formations, and the nation-state was mediated by imperialism. Much of nineteenth-century Asia was dominated by the “free trade” imperialism of the British Empire, at a time when several historical networks of the Asian maritime trade were able to adapt and expand their operations. By the late nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth century, imperialism came to be driven by nationalism to compete effectively in a capitalist system, whether this was to secure resources, markets, or the military needs of the capitalist nation. This yielded a complex relationship between imperialist nations and their colonial or dependent territories, which they sought to develop as imperial regions.Footnote ²

Turning first to the nineteenth century, colonial empires, most notably the British Empire, created significant regional interdependencies in Asia. This had the effect of intensifying some of the old relationships and generating new linkages between the cities (and hinterlands) of Aden, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai as entrepôts and financial centers for Asian trade. For a long time, the study of Asian trade in the colonial period was conducted apart from the rich and high-quality scholarship of the precolonial maritime Asian or Indian Ocean trade, thus yielding a skewed picture of the former. It was perhaps taken for granted that the financial, technological, and political-military superiority of the colonial powers in the nineteenth century had completely subordinated, if not eliminated, these networks. This seems to have been the assumption behind the dual economy model of J. H. Boeke and others. More recent work on the Indian Ocean—along the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea as well as the South China Sea—has shown how faulty this picture was.

Since at least the thirteenth century, the maritime region from the Red Sea to the South China Sea represented an interlinked system of trade routes. From the 1400s, the routes were held together, most importantly, by the cosmopolitan port city of Malacca, to which the monsoon winds brought Indian, Persian, and Arab traders. There, they waited for the reversal of the monsoon winds to carry in the trade from the Chinese empire and eastern regions before returning. The networks of Chinese, Indian, Jewish, and Arab merchants, among others, with their sophisticated credit transfer mechanisms and trading techniques enabled the wholesale and forward carrying trade across the Indian Ocean littoral from Zanzibar to China.Footnote ³

According to Rajat K. Ray, while Asian networks from the nineteenth century were doubtless subordinated to colonial trade and power, the older networks of Chinese, Indian, and (Baghdadi) Jewish communities, which possessed long-distance credit networks and negotiable financial instruments operable in several countries, adapted and expanded their operations within certain spheres. Their business practices enabled them to occupy a realm between the European world of banks and corporations and the small Asian peddler and retail markets. Indeed, without the financial and marketing services provided by these mobile merchant communities of Asia, European capital would not have been able to penetrate the hinterlands. During the course of the twentieth century, not only did these networks expand into the lower latitudes of Africa and Southeast Asia, but also they emerged as the modern Asian business and industrial classes, which were able to integrate the three-tiered colonial economies into national and postnational economies.Footnote ⁴

On the East Asian side, the multiple connections and shifts between the precolonial maritime networks and modern Asian networks has been studied masterfully by Hamashita Takeshi. By the Qing period, the Chinese imperial tribute system had become the framework for commercial transactions based on the price structure in China. The entire tribute trade zone became loosely integrated by the use of silver as a medium of trade settlement. It became the axis around which wider trading networks in the region were organized. Thus, for instance, the private trade between Siam and South China was fueled by profits from tribute mission, and when trade in this region declined, traders in South China were able to switch to trading alongside other tribute missions, say, from Ryukyu to Nagasaki. Tribute trade also linked the European trade with the East Asian one. While it may have appeared to be an exclusively political relationship, in reality, the tribute system also expressed trading opportunities under a loose regulatory system of several different states within an imperial Chinese tribute zone.Footnote ⁵ Not only has Hamashita shown how European-dominated patterns rode on older networks of Asian trade, he also has recently revealed what he calls the “crossed networks” (kōsa nettowaku) of Chinese and Indian overseas financial groups in East, South, and Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁶ The Japanese conquests and the partial overtaking of control of this trade opened new opportunities for regional integration, but it turned out to be more destructive than enabling during the short period it existed.

Moving on to imperial regional formation in the interwar years of the twentieth century, national imperialisms sought to develop a regional or (geographically dispersed) bloc formation promoting economic autarky as a means for the imperial power to gain global supremacy or advantage. Here they sought to establish common standards, measures, currency, and laws to facilitate integration—if uneven development—across the bloc. After World War I, the indebtedness of Great Britain to the United States and its weakening competitiveness vis-à-vis other imperialist powers caused the British to impose the doctrine of imperial preference and the sterling zone in its colonies and dependencies. This was also, however, a time when the anti-imperialist movement in the colonies began to make increasing demands for economic and political parity. Thus, imperialists sought to create economic blocs in which colonies or subordinate territories were promised self-governing status and other concessions, and sometimes were even constituted as nominally sovereign nation-states, although they remained militarily in thrall to the metropole. The imperialism of nation-states reflected a strategic reorientation of the periphery to be part of an organic formation designed to attain global supremacy for the imperial power. As Albert Lebrun declared after World War I, the goal was now to “unite France to all those distant Frances in order to permit them to combine their efforts to draw from one another reciprocal advantages.”Footnote ⁷

But it was less the older imperialist powers than the new ones such as Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union that proved able to switch to this mode of regional imperialism of nation-states. With the increased need for resource and social mobilization within colonies or dependencies, it was more efficient for the imperialists to foster modern and indirectly controlled institutions in them. The goal was to control these areas by dominating their institutions of mobilization, such as banks, transportation infrastructure, and political institutions, which were created to resemble those of the metropole (such as legislative councils, institutions of political tutelage, and political parties such as the communist parties or the Concordia in Manchukuo). In short, unlike colonialism or British free trade imperialism, the interwar imperialists attended to the modernization of institutions and identities. They often espoused cultural or ideological similarities—including sometimes anticolonial ideologies—even while racism and nationalism accompanied the reality of military-political domination.

To compete with Britain and France, Germany had sought to develop a regional bloc in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸ This trend accelerated during the interwar years, and German commercial influence before the war peaked in 1938, when Austria was incorporated into the Reich and Adolf Hitler annexed the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia. Hannah Arendt regarded the German (and Russian pan-Slav) movement as an expression of “continental imperialism” whereby latecomer nationalists sought to develop their empires through the nationalistic pan-German movement.Footnote ⁹ The German economic New Order in Europe, built on states that were essentially German puppets or had German military governors, was designed to supply the German war effort. However, there were also plans to build an economic region around a prosperous Germany linked to new industrial complexes in central Europe and captured areas of the western Soviet Union. This unitary European market, however, remained a nationalistic German vision—and we should be wary of seeing it as a predecessor of the European Union. The German plan represented in several ways no more than an aborted version of the new imperialism.Footnote ¹⁰

Beginning with the formation of the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932–45), the Japanese economic bloc idea grew by the mid-1930s into the East Asian League (Tōa renmei) and the East Asian Community (Tōa kyōdōtai), and still later into the idea of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai-Tōa Kyōeiken). Manchukuo signaled fundamental changes in the nature of the Japanese empire. The truly intensive phase of industrialization and development in Korea and Taiwan came after 1931 and emerged as part of the plan for strategic autarky centered on Manchukuo. The rapid growth in industrialization, education, and other aspects of development in Korea and Taiwan began mostly in the early 1930s, and accelerated with the invasion of China in 1937. The Japanese wartime empire resembled the German New Order in that the entire occupied zone became subordinated to Japanese war needs, and Japan's defeat represented a failure of the new imperialism.

This form of imperial regionalism, then, was characterized by an unsustainable tension: a commitment to creating a common space akin to the nation that would extend the benefits and pains of creating a globally competitive region, but would extend them unevenly over the whole. By the same token, the imperial-national region was often ripped apart by enduring nationalist prejudices fostered in earlier times and simultaneous processes of nation building, especially within the imperial metropole. In other words, while it sought to create a region of interdependence and cooperation, the national interests of the imperial power made this an unsustainable region.

What was the spatial composition of this imperialist region? While most of the subordinate nations or colonies within the region were by no means fully integrated with capitalist urban centers, the infrastructure of capitalist market relations—including standardization of weights and measures, currency unification, and the physical and educational infrastructure—were being laid across many of these societies, both within each colony or country and across them. The integration was a dual and interactive process undertaken by the colonial states and metropolitan capitalists, as well as by Asian merchants, who, as shown earlier, dominated the indigenous financial markets through bills of exchange, promissory notes, and other negotiable instruments (such as the Chinese gu or South Asian hundis). As Hamashita has shown, Singapore and Hong Kong were colonial cities in which the Chinese and Indian money transfer and remittance networks intersected, and their resources became part of a vast regional financial market interfluent with the Western-dominated banking sector.Footnote ¹¹ But if the material lives and economic practices of Asians were becoming interlinked on an everyday basis, how was this reflected in the representation of the region?

The Anti-imperialist Regionalization Project in Asia

While the British and Japanese empires were trying to create autarkic, interdependent regions to sustain their imperial power in Asia, anti-imperialist thought linked to rising Asian nationalism was seeking to build an alternative conception of the region. These intellectual proponents of an “Other Asia” evoked earlier linkages between their societies, but it should be noted that their conceptualization of Asia was itself premised and enabled by contemporary imperialist technologies and modes of regional integration.

The idea of Asia among these Asians was expressed largely through a cultural movement that is instructive for us to explore. I will review here the efforts of three intellectuals—Okakura Tenshin, Rabindranath Tagore, and Zhang Taiyan—as in this early period, Asianism was principally an intellectual and cultural effort until it was overtaken by the Japanese military for imperialist purposes. Okakura Tenshin or Kakuzo is perhaps most famous for his opening line “Asia is one” in his book The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Arts of Japan, written in 1901 (published 1903).Footnote ¹² Okakura, who was deeply knowledgeable about Chinese art and culture and closely connected with South Asian Asianists such as Tagore and Ananda Coomarswamy, as well as with American art entrepreneurs such as Ernest Fenellosa, probably did more than anyone to establish Asian art as a legitimate and viable domain of high art, fit for museums and the art market.

It was through his conception of the great civilizational arts of China and India, and not least the aesthetic values of Buddhism, that Okakura saw the unity of the Asian ideals that reigned before what he regarded as the marauding of the Mongols and their successors. But even as Okakura was articulating the ideal of Asia, in the same moment, he was also carving out a place for Japan in the civilized world of the West as the inheritor and leader of this present fallen Asia. Okakura saw Japan as a survivor and a leader. “Thus Japan is a museum of Asiatic civilization and yet more than a museum, because the singular genius of the race leads it to dwell on all phases of the ideals of the past, in that spirit of living Advaitism which welcomes the new without losing the old.”Footnote ¹³ The temples of Nara reveal that the great art of the Tang and the much older influence of Shang workmanship can also be found in Japan.

Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura had a close friendship, and Okakura spent considerable time in India, acquiring a deep respect for its arts and culture even while introducing the utterly fascinated circle in the Tagore house, Jorasankho, to Chinese and Japanese culture. Both men sought to live their lives according to their ideals, even donning the clothing of their historical cultures while most Western-educated gentlemen were opting for the prestige of the West. Thus, Okakura dressed in a dhoti when he visited the Ajanta caves, and Tagore often wore his Daoist hat, given to him during his first China visit. Yet, of course, let it not be forgotten that they possessed the self-confidence to advocate Asian culture because they were so knowledgeable and polished in the arts of the West. Moreover, theirs was sometimes a troubled relationship, in part because Okakura could not quite overcome the social Darwinist presuppositions and imagery of Indian backwardness, and partly because he was an object of exotic curiosity, if not ridicule, among many Indians who had never seen East Asians, particularly in their historical dress.

Some have seen a form of Japanese Orientalism in Okakura's paternalistic attitude toward the older Asian societies. I believe this is an ahistorical impulse. Japanese pan-Asianism at the turn of the century had several different strains, including imperialistic ones, but also egalitarian and compassionate feelings toward fellow Asians who had been exploited and devastated by more aggressive cultures. At the same time, pan-Asianism cultivated a deep claim of Japanese leadership in Asia and a self-imputed responsibility to raise Asians from their fallen state. Okakura saw Japan as the hall or museum—the enabler—that would display all of the different civilizations of Asia. This enabling role, of course, could easily be transformed into a superiority and instrumentalization of what it enabled. It was this tendency—or what we might call a “structure of feeling”—that grew into the ideological foundations of Japanese imperialism, endowing it with the mission to lead Asians. Indeed, as is well known, it is the subservience of pan-Asianism to Japanese militarist imperialism that doomed its future in the twentieth century.

Zhang Taiyan or Zhang Binglin is widely considered to be one of the most powerful intellectuals of late Qing and early Republican China. The great writer Lu Xun certainly regarded him as such and saw himself as a lifelong student of Zhang. Many see Zhang as a maverick thinker who was both narrowly racist in his violent anti-Manchu revolutionary views and deeply humanist and learned—being not only the foremost scholar of ancient Chinese learning, but also widely read in Buddhist philosophy, especially the Yogacārā or Consciousness-Only (weishi or vijnapati matra) school of Buddhism, of which he was a practitioner.

Zhang became committed to Buddhism during his years in jail (1903–6) as a result of his revolutionary activities. He suffered greatly in jail and watched his younger colleague Zou Rong die under terrible privation. He claimed that he was saved only by his voracious readings of Buddhist philosophy. We do not have the time here to discuss the allegation of the maverick's inconsistency except to indicate that alaya (storehouse) thinking permitted different levels of consciousness and commitment depending on the needs of the time. This philosophy disposes one to think very differently from the principle of commitment to ethical consistency.

Zhang espoused the cause of freedom from imperialism in Asia while in Japan after his release from prison. There, he attended the meetings of the Indian freedom fighters commemorating the birth anniversary of the Maratha warrior Shivaji, who had fought against the Moguls. He is said to have authored the manifesto of the Asian Solidarity Society created in Tokyo around 1907. It begins thus:

Zhang's Asianism emerged from his commitment to the values of Buddhism, but also from an anti-imperialist position. He saw the threat to peaceful, agrarian societies from warlike cultures. But while committed to the ultimate values of peace, like Okakura, he acknowledged the necessity of creating a modern nation-state along the Western model to combat the imperialist powers. Nationalism was a necessary moment in the conception of pan-Asianism.

Only Tagore opposed this position. Tagore was deeply repulsed by nationalism. Writing about nationalism in Japan, he observed, “I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedoms by their governments … The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation, and emulate other machines in their collective worldliness.”Footnote ¹⁵ Tagore's pan-Asianism was deeply affected by his personal friendships in China, but even here, during his last visit to China in 1929, he was severely attacked by leftist intellectuals and the Kuomintang because of his views.Footnote ¹⁶ Most of all, he was bitterly disappointed by the growing nationalism of his own homeland in India, where revolutionary nationalists had overtaken the Swadeshi movement that he had once supported. Their growing narrowness—revealed, for instance, in their goal to burn every piece of foreign cloth—had also begun to affect relations between Hindus and Muslims.

Tagore was committed to an alternative cosmopolitanism drawn from Asian traditions, which he sought to realize in Vishwa Bharati (India of the World) University at Santiniketan. According to Saranindranath Tagore, Tagore's philosophy of education rose above both abstract and lifeless rationalism as well as violent nationalism and particularism. He was persuaded that reason would emerge only after a primary identification with an inherited tradition. Education would have to nurture the attitude of seeking reason to bridge radical differences by recognizing the consciousness of humanity's latent oneness.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the great hopes of Santiniketan was realized with the institution of Cheena Bhavan (China Hall) initiated by scholar Tan Yunshan, whose children, notably Tan Chung, remain cultural ambassadors between China and India. Among others, Tagore's own relatives were pioneers in introducing Chinese arts and scholarship to Indians.

Tagore's cosmopolitanism, which he derived from the Advaita or monistic philosophical tradition, has some unexpected parallels with contemporary thinkers from different traditions, such as Jürgen Habermas. Tagore's commitment to the universality of reason as made possible by working through difference resembles Habermas's idea of communicative rationality as emerging from the negotiation of various value claims of different groups and communities. But as with Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, Tagore's educational philosophy could not withstand power—expressed in Tagore's case in the historical force of nationalism and allied ideologies. The logic of communicative acts and education is not the only or dominant logic of society—the logic of power often frames this discussion through reified expressions of community (as in nationalisms or communal religion). For most of the century, while Tagore was celebrated, his cosmopolitan educational project in Santiniketan was ignored and marginalized by the imperatives of a competitive nationalism.

Through this brief survey, we have seen how the three major Asian thinkers were able to conceive of the unity of Asia founded on different principles. The idea of a common historical and religious culture, conceived sometimes as a utopian golden age of peaceful coexistence and dynamic exchange before the arrival of foreign invaders, may have prompted Asianists to think of original Asian value. Note also how in each case, their notion of Asia excluded societies from the Middle East and Central Asia, which each regarded as foreign invaders of their societies. Nonetheless, pan-Asianism, as several scholars have shown, was an important trend in the Middle East as these thinkers reached out especially to Japan as allies against Western imperialism. Indeed, Tagore's four-week visit to Iran in 1932, during which he and his hosts sought to highlight Indo-Iranian civilizational nexus, was perhaps one of his most successful Asian visits.Footnote ¹⁸ By and large, the three thinkers we have considered were looking for new beginnings in the search for alternative values—alternative to the dominant civilizational narratives of the West. In this sense, they were the founders of a cultural anti-imperialism and articulators of an Asian cosmopolitanism.

However, their thought was ahead of their time, in that it could not be sustained by the political societies in which they lived. Ideas of race, culture, anti-imperialism, and imperialism to be found in pan-Asianism all spelled a lethally close relationship with the dominant trend of nationalism. In the case of Okakura, pan-Asianism became easily absorbed by Japanese imperialism; in the case of Zhang, nationalism took priority because of the circumstances. In the case of Tagore, the nationalism of his time made his ideas and institutions irrelevant for a long period.

The spatial vision of Asia that these thinkers possessed was based not on the actual interactions of people from the different countries—of which there was a great deal—but on an abstract and essentialized notion of culture and civilization formed in the mirror image of the Western concept of civilization. Just as that celebration of the superior achievements of a race and religion—apart from specific classes and areas—worked to further a program of domination of Others, so, too, the idea of Asian civilization was hijacked by Japanese militarism.

Asia after World War II

The Cold War division of the world into two camps controlled militarily by nuclear superpowers seeking to dominate the rest of the developing and decolonizing nations may be seen as a kind of supraregionalism. While in fact, the two camps or blocs represented transterritorial spaces including noncontiguous nations, the contiguity of the core Eastern and Western Europeans nations within each camp served as a stepping stone for subsequent regionalism to develop within Europe. We see this tendency as well in Asia, where regional interactions were promoted among the countries of the Central Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which were basically security alliances. The Japanese efforts to cultivate Asian markets during and after the Vietnam War also created some economic and cultural grounds for later integration. After the Cold War, ASEAN, which had been designed, unlike the European community, to serve the nation, not only expanded to include the former communist nations of Southeast Asia, but also became more oriented to serve the economic needs of the region.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, places such as Hong Kong, which played an indispensable role as a conduit for exchange between the two camps, were able to reinforce and benefit handsomely from older regional links, especially between Southeast Asia and China.

Another effort to create a regional entity during the early Cold War was the movement of nonaligned nations, principally in Asia, although it also included the African nations. The culmination of this movement was the Bandung Conference, a meeting of the representatives of twenty-nine new nations of Asia and Africa, held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, fifty years after the Russo-Japanese war signaled the beginnings of pan-Asianism. The conference aimed to express solidarity against imperialism and racism and to promote economic and cultural cooperation among these nations. China, India, and Indonesia were key players in the meeting. The conference finally led to the nonaligned movement in 1961, a wider third-world force in which participants avowed their distance from the two superpowers—aligning themselves neither with the United States or Soviet Union—during the Cold War. However, conflicts developed among these nonaligned nations—for instance, between India and China in 1962—that eroded the solidarity of the Bandung spirit. At any rate, the nonaligned nations tended to be nationally autarkic in their economic strategies, moving further away from regional linkages.

Thus, all in all, although there were significant foundations for the post–Cold War regionalism to be found in the Cold War itself, the economic energies of the Asian countries in the two camps were directed more toward the nation and the supraregion than the region itself. The congruence between political and cultural realms also came to be directed toward the two loci.

The post–Cold War scene is usually characterized as one of globalization. At the same time, the nation-state and nationalism have by no means disappeared; they have developed a new relationship to globalization. In this reconfiguration, regionalism has clearly strengthened, emerging as an intermediate zone between the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism and the territorial limits of nationalism. Evidence of regionalism can be found in Europe, of course, but also in the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mercosur in South America, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, ASEAN (+3 and +6, i.e., the East Asian Summit), and many others. Unlike the Cold War, these are largely economic rather than security-based regionalisms. Moreover, most of these regions are not overwhelmingly dominated by one imperial power or hegemon.

Within East and Southeast Asia—and more recently, India—Asian economic integration has increased significantly, principally since the end of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. The economic integration of East, South, and Southeast Asia, which grew steadily under imperialist-dominated trade, declined precipitously at the end of World War II.Footnote ²⁰ Intraregional trade began to pick up in the 1980s, but it was the Asian financial crisis—the shock of the common crisis—that seems to have awakened states to the reality of regional networks and focused their attention on cooperation. Today, what the Asian Development Bank calls “integrating Asia,” including ASEAN, China, Japan, Korea, India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, conducts more than 50 percent of its trade among itself, in comparison to trade with the outside world, and compared with only 33 percent in the 1980s. Six major indicators of interdependence tracked for the sixteen Asian economies have increased markedly in the ten years since the financial crisis.Footnote ²¹

The most important factor behind the increased trade is the participation of these economies in a regional supply chain production network. Production is divided up into smaller steps, and each part is assigned to the most cost-efficient producer. Thus, for instance, an electronic product may be produced or assembled in China with hardware from Taiwan and software from India. Indeed, much of this type of vertical integration has been enabled by new information and communication technologies and open markets. At the same time, the bulk of these goods have been produced for consumption in Europe and North America. The present crisis in consumption may well lead to deepening markets for these goods within Asia. In recent years, ASEAN has developed free trade agreements with each of the East Asian nations and with India. The China-ASEAN free trade agreement due in 2010 will create the third-largest common market by trade volume. The significantly lower-volume trade between ASEAN and India has also, however, been growing at a compounded annual rate of 27 percent, and it is likely to accelerate with the signing of the ASEAN-Indian free trade agreement in August 2009.Footnote ²²

Financial integration has been relatively weaker within Asia than between individual Asian countries and Western economies. This is particularly noticeable because of the enormous savings generated within Asia that are not productively invested in projects within the region. However, after the 1997–98 financial crisis, the Chiangmai Initiative was undertaken to provide emergency liquidity in case of a foreign exchange crisis in the ASEAN + 3 countries with $80 billion. In 2009, the fund was increased to $120 billion, with Japan and China agreeing to contribute a third each, South Korea putting up 16 percent, and ASEAN making up the balance of 20 percent.Footnote ²³ In the last year, several other countries have entered into bilateral swap agreements. Such agreements have been reached, for instance, between India and Japan, and in response to the precipitous decline of the Korean won, Korea recently entered separately into bilateral swap agreements with China and Japan.

Macroeconomic interdependence in the region is also indicated by the movement of macroeconomic variables. For instance, the correlation of gross domestic product (GDP) among many of these states over three-year moving averages is very strong. The GDP correlation coefficient has gone up from 0.07 before the crisis to 0.54 after the crisis. Price movements are similarly correlated, and price shocks in one area are being transmitted to other areas with greater intensity. With the growth of macroeconomic interdependence, a growing need to manage it has appeared. For instance, exchange rates require monitoring and coordination so that central banks do not shoot each the other in the foot.Footnote ²⁴

Most of all, of course, the need to coordinate and manage interdependence arises from a common and linked set of problems faced by the region in the realm of climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and public health, among others. The provisioning of these items, which the Asian Development Bank dubs “regional public goods,” is evidently urgent. Consider a colossal and dire public goods problem that cannot be managed without a concerted regional effort. The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau are the source and watershed of ten major rivers that provide freshwater to many different countries in South and Southeast Asia, in addition to China. Climate change and environmental degradation have depleted the water resources available in all these countries, a situation that is particularly severe in north and northwest China, which is suffering the most severe drought in the last half century, with precipitation levels 70 percent to 90 percent below normal and water tables depleted from excessive well drilling.Footnote ²⁵

What does this crisis in a remote area of China have to do with South and Southeast Asia? A great deal, in fact. China not only has been building dams on rivers such as the Yangtze, but has also built three more on the Mekong River to produce hydropower for its southwest border regions. About twelve more large dams are expected to be built on the Mekong (or Lancang) alone. Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia have expressed grave concerns about water diversions, shortages, and ecological imbalance in the region. Although China and some authorities assert that the impact of Chinese dam building has not affected downstream waters significantly, the Chinese government has not been very forthcoming with the data on the dams, and it also has not permitted independent scientific studies of the dams. Greater regional efforts must begin with pooling all of the necessary data.Footnote ²⁶ Recently, there has been a proposal to divert the waters of several Tibetan rivers, including the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) in India and Bangladesh northward to irrigate the north China plains. The proposal, known as the Great South-North Water Transfer Project, appears to have the backing of President Hu Jintao. Needless to say, the effects of this diversion on South Asia could well lead to unprecedented water wars.Footnote ²⁷ In this context, it is heartening to learn that economic interdependence within Asia is the major—perhaps the only—factor reducing conflict among these Asian nation-states.Footnote ²⁸

The Circulation of People

I turn now to more direct people-to-people interactions. There is some indication of greater cultural interest of Asians in Asia. We see this in the increase in the number of tourists circulating the region to more than pre-crisis levels. Not only has the market demand for Asian art skyrocketed, but also there are plenty of exhibitions and showings of Asian art in which artists and curators are experimenting with new ideas of Asia as well as art. These shows often deliberately distance themselves from the culturally unified notion of Asia or reified versions of national civilizations prevalent among their predecessors, such as Okakura and Nand Lal Bose. They often seek to showcase the contemporary, urban, multicultural experience of Asia, emphasizing heterogeneity and cultural encounters.Footnote ²⁹ At a popular level, the circulation of East Asian cinema, manga, anime, television shows, food, design, and allied areas in East and Southeast Asia has been the most conspicuous cultural development in Asia since the 1990s.

Most revealing of the emergent space and complex nature of Asian integration is perhaps the subject of migration and sojourning within the region. Through this optic, we can observe the extent of the move away from the national production of space and explore the possibilities and dangers of a new type of spatial production. As globalization has proceeded over the last two and a half decades, nation-states have adopted, albeit to different degrees, strategies of neoliberal privatization and opening to world markets and circulations. The movement of people across the globe and region for purposes of work and livelihood has expanded considerably. The People's Republic of China has 35 million migrants across the world; India has 20 million, and the Philippines has 8 million. Remittances, cultural values and styles, and technical and professional knowledge from their host societies have a major impact on domestic economies and societies. As of 2001, more than 6 million migrants from Asia worked in the more advanced economies of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.Footnote ³⁰

Elite migrants and transmigrants circulating within Asia are a novel phenomenon of these last few decades, and they have ushered in a new culture of professional Asians in the major cities. They are embedded in both knowledge and business networks and have often been trained in Western academic establishments, where they develop their professional cultural ethos and connections. These professionals are a significant element in the cultural profile of the new global and metropolitan cities in Asia, whether in Shanghai, Bangalore, Dubai, Singapore, or Hong Kong. As the workshop on “Inter-Referencing Asia,” held in Dubai in 2008, points out, there is “an intensification of traffic in people, urban models, and cultural forms between Asian cities, big and small.” In many ways, these cities are increasingly linked by corridors of exchange with other Asian cities, as they are with their own national or regional hinterlands. The workshop identifies these Asian—indeed, intra-Asian—cities as “extraterritorial” metropolises that are produced not only by national resources but also through a set of global and intra-Asian flows of labor, capital, and knowledge.Footnote ³¹ The complex known as Biopolis and its sister establishment Fusionopolis in Singapore represent classic instances of such extraterritoriality. The scientists, technicians, and professionals who work here day and often night for Asian and global biotech companies hail from every part of Asia (often with Western degrees). These gigantic mall-like complexes feature every kind of Asian eatery and omniplexes featuring anime festivals, while construction and maintenance are performed by gangs of other Asian migrant laborers.

It is this new relationship between elite and working-class migration that I wish to comment on. As is well known, many Asian nations are seeking and succeeding in wooing back their talented émigrés to invest their knowledge and capital in their original homelands. Historically, this kind of migration and courtship has been exceptional. Migration over the last century and a half has largely been labor migration, mostly in plantation, mining, and infrastructure construction, but of people who have ended up in different niches in the host societies. The matrix in which this migration has taken place has been constituted by networks and institutions of global capitalism and the modern nation-state, whether in its imperialist manifestation or its nationalist one. While, as we have seen, the relationship between the nation-state and capitalism has largely been a collusive one, there has also been a tension in that relationship. To put it simply, while global capitalism has encouraged the flow of labor, nationalist states have sought to both regulate and curb this flow by responding to a set of other interests, including affected domestic working classes and constituencies based on racial and nationalist ideologies. Decolonizing nation-states have turned out to be as limiting of immigrant populations as older imperialist nation-states.

The laboring population that has both benefited and suffered most greatly from this tension between global capitalism and the nation-state is the Chinese community, first in the Americas and then in Southeast Asia. The exclusion laws against Asians in the United States until 1942 imposed strict quotas and controls on labor migrants from China. Indeed, the matrix made much immigrant labor the exception in the sense of Agamben—the impossible subject—necessary to labor on undesirable tasks for a pittance, but without rights, suspended between capital and the state and often between nation-state jurisdictions. To be sure, much of this labor was also able to creatively manipulate their suspension between powers, as the so-called paper sons of Chinese migrants who entered the United States in large numbers during the early twentieth century show.Footnote ³²

What has changed in the relationship between global capitalism and the nation-state? How has the globalization of recent decades changed this institutional matrix affecting migrants? One new element, as I have tried to show, is the substantially new flow of high-value workers, or professionals. Speaking impressionistically, it would seem that this is informed by the growth of what is called the knowledge economy, or knowledge-based service and production in the global economy. The fact that so much of it is Asian and circulating in the Asian region is a still more complex and interesting question. The return and transmigration of a professional and managerial stratum does signify a shift in the institutional matrix. Whereas the nation-state worked to regulate the deterritorialized flows of labor, capital, and culture of capitalism even when colluding with it, now the nationalist opposition to these flows is significantly smaller, especially from the institutions of the nation-state. As large states such as India and the People's Republic of China reach out to global professionals among overseas and global Chinese (huaren, haigui) and Indians (nonresident Indians) they create a nonterritorial, ethnic identity—as children of the Yellow Emperor or Hindutva or Bharat Pravasis—that fits with a neoliberal model of globalization and competitiveness. Until recently, this has also coincided with state withdrawal in many areas of provisioning public goods, such as education and health care.

On the other hand, labor migration, especially in seasonal and construction work, has expanded to many more societies. These labor migrants are typically sojourners who have short-term labor contracts and are prevented from assimilation into the host society. Many, such as the recent case of the Rohingas in Thailand and elsewhere, are regularly abused and exploited by local authorities and labor contractors. Moreover, unlike the previous round, there is increased sojourning by women employed as domestic workers, nurses, entertainers, and prostitutes, which, in turn, is also reshaping families across Asia. We need to focus more on the continuing power and role of the nation-state to regulate and expel immigrants. The nation-state continues to control the prerogative of return for them. It controls their tenure and bodies,Footnote ³³ and can satisfy the constituent interests of domestic workers and nationalist interests. They can serve as an important safety valve and whipping boy.

Thus, the new order in Asia must be seen in its totality. The figure of the professional global transmigrants, their flexible citizenship, self-improvement projects, and the state's interest in utilizing them must be seen against the ground of continuing power of the restructured nation-state to control and expel at the lower levels of the social hierarchy. While these Asian nations must be able to draw in and deploy migrants at the higher levels, they must be able to push out migrants at the lower levels. Thus, the new Asia does not by any means suggest the weakening of nationalism, but rather a refiguration or restructuring of the nation-state to adapt to global capitalism.

What Kind of Space Is This New Asia?

There are significant continuities and novelties in this space. While the nation-state continues to exercise deeply rooted powers, regionally, there is no congruence or sustained effort at producing congruence between politics and culture by any state. The absence of a single dominant nation-state in the region contributes significantly to this, but it is also the case that the individual nation-state finds it difficult to make a coherent case for a nationalism congruent with its territorial conception. In part, this has to do with state withdrawal and growing identification with transterritorial ethnic groups such as the overseas Chinese or Indians (often at the expense of peripheries and nondominant ethnics or marginal co-nationals). Moreover, both capitalism and the nation-state have transformed to the point where they celebrate heterogeneity and multiculturalism even as these sociocultural factors are themselves commoditized. As the authors of the latest management fad book Globality suggest, for multinationals, the very idea of domestic markets has been replaced by niche markets.Footnote ³⁴ Finally, because the nation-state is much more invested in and aware of regional and global interdependence, a split has appeared in the interests and rhetoric of popular nationalism and the nation-state, most evident in the People's Republic of China, but also in India, Thailand, and elsewhere. All of these factors make the political homogenization of culture or its essentialization an unnecessary and difficult process. The weakness and failure of the effort to create an ideology of Asian values in the late 1990s is a case in point.

But, as I have argued, actual interdependence has increased dramatically, and so has cultural contact. Interdependence, however, is being managed by ad hoc arrangements and specialized transnational institutions with little possibility of large-scale state-like coordination or control. In this sense, region formation in Asia is a multipath, uneven, and pluralistic development that is significantly different from European regionalism. Moreover, the region has no external limits or territorial boundaries and does not seek to homogenize itself within. Individual nations, economic, regulatory, cultural entities, and nongovernmental organizations have multiple links beyond the core, and when a country beyond the core arrives at the threshold of a sufficiently dense set of interactions and dependencies with it, it may brought within the region's frameworks of governance. Conceivably, this could include even regions outside the cartographic scope of Asia, say, for instance, South Africa. At least this has been the pattern in recent years.

Culturally, this plurality indicates a move away from an essentialist identity formation even when different Asians consume common cultural goods. Thus, consuming Korean television serials with the voracious appetite that has been revealed in East and Southeast Asia does not end up transforming an identity from, say, Vietnamese or Taiwanese to Korean. Rather, as Chua Beng Huat has pointed out, it requires the consumer to “transcend his or her grounded nationality to forge abstract identification with the foreign characters on screen, a foreignness that is, in turn, potentially reabsorbed into an idea of (East) ‘Asia.’”Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, I am not sure that this foreignness even need be reabsorbed. The reception of the Asian cultural product can remain a site of circulation and interaction, one that implicitly questions pure identity in the recognition of multiple connections and interdependence. It can remain without the potential of absorption into another political project of nationalism or another grand Othering process.

In a more literary language, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described a similar ideal: “To combat the desire for an origin in a name, I propose to deal with ‘Asia’ as the instrument of altered citation: an iteration. Indeed, the possibility of the desire for a singular origin is in its iterability.” She points to different “histories, languages, and idioms ‘that come forth’ each time we try to add an ‘s’ to the wish for a unified originary name.”Footnote ³⁶ Tagore would probably agree with Spivak. But identities are designed to emphasize exclusivity; presumably, that is their nature. Efforts to bridge differences have historically been the loser in the era of identitarian politics heralded by the nation-state and nationalism. In addition to founding the call for heterogeneity and plurality of homelands on textual, imaginative, and psychological grounds, I wish to emphasize our interdependence as necessary for our survival and even for individual flourishing. We need to recognize our interdependence and foster transnational consciousness in our education and cultural institutions, not at the cost but for the cost of our national attachments.

In an earlier work, I argued that in pre-nationalist societies, political forces such as imperial or feudal states did not seek to dominate every aspect of a person's identity. These societies were characterized by soft boundaries, where individual community difference (say, in diet or belief in deities) would not prevent large-scale and un-self-conscious borrowing in other respects. Modern nationalisms sought precisely to create hard boundaries between communities by privileging a defining characteristic of community (say language) as constitutive of the self in a self-conscious way that often developed intolerance for the non-national Other.Footnote ³⁷ The Asian maritime networks of the precolonial era exemplified such a framework. This long-distance trade involved a wide variety of merchant communities at different points who did not speak the same languages or trade in the same currencies. Yet as Janet Abu-Lughod says, goods were transferred, prices set, exchange rates agreed upon, contracts contracted, credit extended, partnerships formed, records kept, and agreements honored. Trade was contained “within the interstices of a larger collaboration in which goods and merchants from many places were intermingled on each others’ ships and where unwritten rules of reciprocity assured general compliance. This system was not decisively challenged until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese men-of-war violated all the rules of the game.”Footnote ³⁸

I am by no means arguing that we return—or can return—to the pre-national mode of identities; rather, I want to see whether the nationalist congruence between state and culture exemplified by the hard boundary may have represented a long twentieth-century moment. Certainly, the present regional nexus resembles the earlier Asian maritime networks in terms of this noncongruence. Although the actual products flowing through the Asian maritime networks were miniscule compared to today's figures, the cultural flows they enabled—packaged in Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Islam—were nothing short of world transforming. They created interlinked cultural universes, however, that were rarely accompanied by the kind of political domination that became hegemonic from the nineteenth century. To be sure, today's cultural identities are shaped by circulations of culture, knowledge, technology, goods, services, and finance that are dizzying in their velocity, while also becoming deeply commodified or consumerist. Nonetheless, the older Asian models of cultural circulation without state domination of identity present us with a historical resource to explore new possibilities.

But the two dimensions of migration remind us that regional formation is taking place under capitalist liberalization and state restructuring. While this favors the emergence of a professional and capitalist Asian community with its cultural openness and ability to forge multiple linkages and new cultures from their encounter, the power of the nation-state remains entrenched in relation to the movement—especially the transnational movement—of labor. The neoliberal circumstances under which regional formation is taking place can easily develop the concept of Asia for the rich and their representatives who attend to financial flows, knowledge economies, and corporatization, while containing or displacing the poor and privatizing public goods. It is well established that while globalization produces wealth, it also creates stratification and a deeper gulf between the rich and the poor. Does regionalism under these circumstances do the same? The verdict is not fully out on this, but it is clear that regionalism possesses a greater ability to bring states and other political actors together to address common problems and achieve common goals, if only because of the more limited scale and recognizable commonality of problems. Of course, a time such as the economic crisis of the present will represent a test for these nation-states. Will they withdraw to domestic protectionism and expel foreign elements or will they seek common solutions? In what degree will they engage in each? Has the expansion of regional interests and interdependence only yielded state-led and corporate modes of connecting and coordinating? If so, it will not be easy to prevent the entrenchment of the Asian elite versus the poor. We need to draw attention and encourage civil society organizations—the NGOs that have mushroomed in most Asian societies over the last few decades—to develop their linkages and guard the interests of the region as a whole.