This essay was written in China in 2020 for a course on nationalism in East Asia. It examines Isaiah Berlin’s view on the relationship between nationalism and resentment and applies it—very briefly and selectively—to two examples of nationalism in China and Japan.

1. Introduction
2. “The Bent Twig” account of nationalism
3. Chinese nationalism
4. Japanese nationalism
5. Conclusion
6. Bibliography

Introduction

In his article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Bent Twig,” from which the above is cited, Berlin makes an unusual claim about nationalism. Instead of attributing nationalism to impersonal forces, such as industrialization (Gellner), the rise of print-capitalism (Anderson), or shared sense of historic origins and mission (Hutchinson), Berlin provides a psychological account. Nationalism, he writes, can be caused by feelings of humiliation and the patronizing attitudes of “proud neighbours.” Such factors are not the usual objective facts of history, but are felt, taken personally. They are in Berlin’s words some of “the most traumatic experiences that individuals and societies can suffer,” thus emphasizing that it is both an individual and social phenomena. The response (which also holds true of both individuals and societies), is often “pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues, and resentment and hostility toward the proud, the happy, the successful.”[2]

This view of nationalism as a resentful response to collective humiliation or encroachment will be the topic of this essay, and it will explore the merit of Berlin’s argument by examining nationalism in China and Japan. I will begin by exploring his argument as it is laid out in “The Bent Twig” article. Then, I will present how his ideas apply to the cases of nationalism in China and Japan. The essay concludes by considering how Berlin’s arguments and insights apply to other approaches to nationalism.

“The Bent Twig” account of nationalism

Before discussing the contents of Berlin’s article, the title itself is worth of some consideration, as it illustrates an irony peculiar to nationalism. Berlin attributes the metaphor of the “bent twig” to the poet Schiller, writing that

The humiliated and defeated Germans, particularly the traditional, religious, economically backward East Prussians, bullied by French officials imported by Frederick the Great, responded, like the bent twig of the poet Schiller’s theory, by lashing back and refusing to accept their alleged inferiority.[3]

Puzzled by the metaphor, as I did not know what a “twig” was, I looked up the “bent twig,” which yielded an interesting result. On the webpage of The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, under a heading of “miscellany of information and opinion,” I found that Berlin had evidently misattributed the metaphor, and that it actually “seems to come from G. V. Plekhanov, Essays in the History of Materialism, trans. Ralph Fox.”[4] The irony is that Berlin is guilty of the same charge that is so often raised against nationalism itself, that it misattributes intellectual and cultural history. However, much like a misattributed national myth works just as well as a correctly attributed one, Berlin’s metaphor does not lose any of its force by its misattribution.

Berlin begins his article by discussing how the historical transformations of modernity led to an increased awareness of historical change. The growth of science, technology, new modes of production, which were very pronounced in the 19th century, coupled with the socio-ideological changes, such as “the disintegration of the unity of Christendom and the rise of new states, classes, social and political formations,” were so profound changes that people could no longer regard history as uniform or static. This provided an impetus for historical research. It is only if history appears changing and volatile that it is interesting, worthy of studying, not merely recording. As Berlin wrote, the changes “[made] men acutely conscious of change and excited interest in the laws that governed it.”[5]

He then lists the impressive achievements of thinkers such as Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Marx, who in their different ways prophesized the power of new technology, modes of production, and their social implications. Berlin notes that not all were positive about the future, such as the poet Heinrich Heine, who

[warned] the French in 1832 that one fine day their German neighbors, fired by a terrible combination of absolutist metaphysics, historical memories and resentments, fanaticism and savage strength and fury, would fall upon them, and would destroy the great monuments of Western civilization…[6]

Despite the impressive prophesies of such thinkers, Berlin remarks that there was one movement which they failed to account for, namely nationalism. In their efforts to discern the future, the prophets of the past and present (Berlin’s present is 1972) “virtually ignored” nationalism. He writes that “[no] social or political thinker in the nineteenth century was unaware of nationalism as a dominant movement of his age,” but that it “was thought to be waning” in the period before the First World War.[7] I take this to be an argument that there was a failure on the part of intellectuals to understand and foresee the power and durability of nationalism. 

Berlin then describes how he views nationalism, but does not present a coherent definition. For example, he writes that “it seems to emerge at the end of the Middle Ages in the West…” as a response to “the encroachment of some external power…” He writes that “[nationalism], unlike tribal feeling or xenophobia, to which it is related, but with which it is not identical, seems to have scarcely existed in ancient or classical times.”[8] He traces nationalism’s “emergence as a coherent doctrine” to the “last third” of the 18^th century and to the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder suggested that cultures were intrinsically valuable, and that all humans had a need to belong a group of their own. He was strongly opposed to universalism, which reduced “everything to the lowest common denominator,” thus draining “both lives and ideals of that specific content which alone gave them point.” As Berlin puts his views:

Human customs, activities, forms of life, art, ideas, were (and must be) of value to men not in terms of timeless criteria, applicable to all men and societies, irrespective of time and place, as the French lumières taught, but because they were their own, expressions of their local, regional, national life, and spoke to them as they could speak to no other human group.[9]

In this way, Berlin offers a view of nationalism, not a strict definition, that emphasizes cultural expression and autonomy, as opposed to universalism. However, it is not nationalism as such which is the subject of Berlin’s article or this essay. Rather, the most interesting part of Berlin’s article lies in his argument about how “national consciousness” becomes “inflamed.”[10] Here we return to the introductory quote, where he states that such an inflammation is often the result of “collective humiliation” and mistreatment by “proud neighbors.” The response is excessive self-adulation and resentment of one’s neighbour, and Berlin argues that this “characterized much German feeling about the West, more especially about France, in the eighteenth century.”[11] Berlin describes how the Germans

[discovered] in themselves qualities far superior to those of their tormentors. They contrasted their own deep, inner life of the spirit, their own profound humility, their selfless pursuit of true values – simple, noble, sublime – with the rich, worldly, successful, superficial, smooth, heartless, morally empty French.[12]

He further argues that there has been a persistent pattern of “inferiority-ridden peoples” casting their oppressors in the role of “old, worn-out, corrupt, declining nations” and themselves as young and uncorrupted “inheritors of the future.” These teleological narratives, he writes, persist in our time and are sounded “by many states and nations which feel that they have not yet played their part (but soon will do so) in the great drama of history.”[13] Despite the clear prevalence of “[this] attitude, almost universal among the developing nations” at the time of Berlin’s writing, he argues that the 19^th century prophets failed to predict it completely.[14] 

In addition to the nationalism of eclipsing one’s proud neighbours, Berlin argues that there is another important movement which is connected to nationalism. This movement is the revolt against scientific and technological methods of organizing society. In opposition to liberals and socialists, which both agree that technology should be used to effectively organize life and productive activity, Berlin writes that the revolt

springs from the feeling that human rights, rooted in the sense of human beings as specifically human, that is, as individuated, as possessing wills, sentiments, beliefs, ideals, ways of living of their own, have been lost sight of in the “global” calculations and vast extrapolations which guide the plans of policy planners and executives in the gigantic operations in which governments, corporations and interlocking elites of various kinds are engaged.[15]

In this revolt one can see the same tendency that Berlin attributes to nationalism, to resist encroachment. However, in this case it is resistance to being subject to the prerogatives of impersonal technology, not to a “proud neighbour.” I will now turn to examining how Berlin’s argument applies to Chinese and Japanese nationalism.

Chinese nationalism

The advent of Chinese nationalism, and of most nationalisms, is difficult to pin to a particular period, as they are comprised of features which have existed for varying lengths of time. For the purposes of this essay, the Chinese nationalism which I will briefly discuss is that of the period right before the First World War. In the last two years of the 19^th century, the pressure of foreign powers on China increased. The Germans took the Shandong port city Qingdao, the British took a Chinese harbour and demanded land north of Hong Kong, the Russians strengthened their positions in North-East China and occupied Lüshun, and the Japanese increased their pressure on Korea and their economic expansion in central China. In The Search for Modern China, Jonathan D. Spence writes that “[some] Chinese began to fear – rightly enough – that their country was about to be ‘carved up like a melon.’”[16] Under these conditions, a “vigorous force” emerged, and while it took “many guises,” it was essentially nationalism. “[For] the Chinese,” Spence writes, nationalism “comprised a new, urgent awareness of their relationship to foreign forces and to the Manchus.”[17]

Spence distinguishes between three sides of the nationalism that emerged at that time. The first was the Boxer Uprising of 1900. The Boxers, which came from the Shandong province, were a force comprised of various martial art groups and secret societies, united in their opposition to Christian influence in China. Frustrated by the privileges enjoyed by foreign and convert Christians, their movement turned increasingly against Christianity and foreigners generally. Spence cites some of their polemical poems, one of which contains the following lines:  

No rain comes from Heaven,

The earth is parched and dry.

And all because the churches

Have bottled up the sky.[18]

They spread to Beijing and Tianjin, where they attacked converts and foreign missionaries. The imperialist powers successfully beat back the Boxer forces and negotiated the Boxer Protocol which punished China. As a result of the effective suppression of nationalist resistance to imperial encroachment, the “forms of protest now passed back to the manipulators of the written word,”[19] the second side of the emerging nationalism. The most successful of these “manipulators” was the young Zuo Rong, who wrote the widely read book titled The Revolutionary Army (1903). In it, he implored the Chinese to overthrow the Manchu dynasty and seize control over their own destiny. Zuo wrote the following:

I do not begrudge repeating over and over again that internally we are the slaves of the Manchus and suffering from their tyranny, externally we are being harassed by the Powers, and we are doubly enslaved. The reason why our sacred Han race, descendants of the Yellow Emperor, should support revolutionary independence, arises precisely from the question of whether our race will go under and be exterminated.[20]

The third side of nationalism emerged against the background of the American anti-Chinese exclusions laws and American mistreatment of Chinese immigrants and residents in the US. In 1905, the merchants of several Chinese cities enforced a complete boycott of American goods, unprecedented in its scope.

The applicability of Berlin’s analysis appears so clear that it is almost superfluous to elaborate. First of all, the Boxer rebellion can be seen as a rejection of the encroachment of Christian universalism in China. Not only was Christianity foreign to China’s traditions and religions, but it was brought to China by foreigners who looked down upon the Chinese traditional faiths. Not only were the Westerners reaping material advantages through their unequal treaties and conquests, but they also attempted to spiritually conquer the Chinese. It hard to imagine a more fertile ground for resentment to grow. The churches may have “bottled up the sky,” but they also sowed the seeds of nationalism.

Secondly, Chinese nationalism is inflamed by and expressed through the relationship of the Chinese to their “proud neighbours”, the Manchus and Japanese, and the patronizing Western imperialists. As Spence writes, Chinese nationalism comprised “a new, urgent awareness of their relationship to foreign forces and to the Manchus.” The “collective humiliation” that Berlin emphasises clearly has its Chinese version in the well-known narrative of the “Century of Humiliation.” Thirdly, one can also see elements of the response of self-adulation in Zuo’s statement that “our sacred Han race, descendants of the Yellow Emperor, should support revolutionary independence…”

Japanese nationalism

As with Chinese and other nationalisms, the Japanese variant is also far too complex to be adequately discussed here. I will therefore confine my analysis to the nationalism that preceded the Second World War, but which has roots stretching back to the early Meiji Restoration period. Furthermore, I will concentrate upon the stream of agrarian fascism, which Masao Maruyama discusses in his seminal work on Japanese pre-war society.[21] By examining the agrarian fascist stream of nationalism, I hope to show that Berlin’s point about the connection between nationalism and the revolt against technocratic governance has merit in the context of Japanese nationalism.

In his account of Japanese fascism, Maruyama writes that one of its distinctive characteristics is “the prominent position occupied by the idea of agrarianism.”[22] While fascism tends to be a centralizing force, in Japan there was significant opposition to this tendency. Maruyama mentions Shūmei Ōkawa as one of the leading examples of proponents of agrarianism. Shūmei was a prominent nationalist writer, and he stressed that Japan should reject both the paths of capitalism and socialism, as they were materialist ideologies which “[placed] material things above the human personality.”[23] Maruyama notes that “[the] stress on ‘idealism’ and ‘spirituality’ as against materialism in the fascist ideology” was common also to the German and Italian fascists. In this we can find the echo of Berlin’s description of how the Germans found in themselves “qualities far superior to those of their tormentors,” the “rich, worldly, successful… French.”

Maruyama writes that the Japanese right wing was divided over the issue of centralization of power in the state and emperor. There were some who argued for state centralization and control of industry, and on the other hand were “those who flatly rejected the idea and thought in terms of agrarianism centred on the villages.”[24] Maruyama suggests that the “purest representative of provincialism” may have been Gondo Seikyo. In one of his works, Gondo made a clear distinction between two principles of government, namely autonomy and étatisme. The former seeks to “allow the people a life of autonomy,” with minimal interference of the ruler, who “hardly goes beyond setting examples,” and he claims that “Japan was founded in complete accord” with this principle. Étatisme on the other hand, is the attempt on the part of the state to carve out a space for itself, and then use its “economic and military power” to defend and extend its power. He wrote that

In order to increase the prestige of the State, the mass of the people are treated as building materials and as machines to create public funds; all organizations are set up solely for administrative convenience, and the rulers exert enormous authority by controlling the masses through laws and ordinances.[25]

The victory of étatisme spells defeat for the villages, and Gondo wrote passionately that “[in] the present state of fear and apprehension the villages suffer most,” the villages which he writes “are the foundation of the country and the source of our habits and customs.”[26] Once again we can hear echoes of Berlin’s ideas. We find a clear connection between nationalism and the revolt against technocratic governance that ignores individual human “wills, sentiments, beliefs, ideals, ways of living of their own,”[27] what Gondo called treating humans “as building materials and as machines to create public funds.” Maruyama writes that although not all go as far as Gondo, “the tendency against cities, industry, and central authority … may be called a consistent tradition of the Japanese-nationalist movement since the Meiji era.”[28]

Maruyama makes several distinctions between various groups and classes when discussing Japanese nationalism. For example, he argues that “an elementary form of national consciousness first arose throughout the East when countries like China and Japan reacted against the corporate pressure of European power surging in from the outside.” But this national consciousness primarily arose among the “privileged ruling classes in the old states,” and for them, “‘national consciousness’ meant above all defending the traditional socio-political order from the infiltration both of European Christianity and of industrialism.”[29] Here we see again nationalism as a form of response to encroachment, in this case of both a universalistic religion and a revolutionary mode of production.  

However, Maruyama points out that another class had a different relation to the emerging Japanese nationalism. For the masses, he writes, nationalism was introduced through a combination of national education campaigns and foreign military victories. The foreign “successes” and imperial expansion of the regime “strengthened the national consciousness,” and provided an “emotional projection of the self” that “magnified the insignificant individual.” Maruyama thus makes the provocative argument that “[despair] deriving from the narrow confines of the citizen’s freedom and the straits of his economic life found compensation in the nation’s foreign expansion.”[30] Sources in Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s work, Grassroots Fascism, lend support to Maruyama’s account. Yoshimi cites a patriotic bank employee who stated the following during the war:

My satisfaction, like iron and steel congealing over the heads of the red-haired Anglo-Saxons, a tight fist that’s pounded them, is truly an intense pleasure that relieves the accumulated grudges of years in an instant.[31]

Yoshimi also cites Ito Sei, who wrote after the attacks on Pearl Harbour that “[today] everyone is cheerful, with a pleased look. It is the very opposite of yesterday. This is the result of the destruction of a number of American warships in Hawaii.”[32] Following the attacks on the United States, Yoshimi writes that a “sense of relief combined with raised spirits … was shared to considerable degree with the younger generation and intellectuals, who had a strong inferiority complex regarding the West.”[33] All of this indicates how the confrontation with “proud neighbours” and patronizing foreigners can inflame nationalism. And there can be little doubt that to many Japanese, that is exactly how countries such as the US and Britain appeared to them. It was the British and Americans who had opposed the Japanese “Racial Equality Proposal” at the League of Nations, despite a majority of votes in favour. It was also the Americans who took a hard line in opposing Japan’s conquests, while at the same time erecting tariff barriers to Japanese trade. This nationalist enthusiasm at military successes fits into a long historical pattern. Similarly, when faced with Germany’s successes in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the parliamentary liberals, who opposed Bismarck’s authoritarianism, had to capitulate.[34]

Conclusion

The analysis of Chinese and Japanese nationalism lends support to Berlin’s claims about what inflames nationalism. None of this changes the value of other approaches to nationalism. For example, the interesting insight of Jack Snyder that nationalism, “a doctrine of rule in the name of the people but not necessarily by the people, provided a way for elites to be popular without being fully democratic,” is very compatible with Berlin’s analysis.[35] In Germany and Japan for example, leaders successfully exploited nationalist consciousness to maintain power.

John Hutchinson’s approach to nations also mirror some of Berlin’s arguments. Both consider a sense of historical mission to be important, and Berlin may be understood to give an account of how what Hutchinson terms “hot/sacred” nationalism is inflamed.[36] Berlin’s argument has perhaps the strongest bearing on Gellner’s thesis on nationalism, that it is produced by the homogenizing drive of industrialism.[37] To this drive to homogeneity, Berlin adds the oppositie; a stubborn affirmation of the particular:

It is true that the movement for national independence at times itself leads to the creation of larger units, to centralization, and often to the suppression by the new élite of its own fellow-citizens, and it can lead to the crushing of various minorities, ethnic, political, religious. At other times it is inspired by the opposite ideal – escape from huge impersonal authority that ignores ethnic, regional and religious differences, a craving for “natural” units of “human” size.[38]

Bibliography

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. “A–Z miscellany of information and opinion.” Accessed July 8, 2020. http://www.berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/information/a-z.html.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Hutchinson , John. Nations as Zones of Conflict. London: Sage Publications, 2005.

Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Bent Twig,’ Foreign Affairs, October 1972.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1972-10-01/bent-twig.

Maruyama, Masao. Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics. Edited by Ivan

Morris. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Palmer, R. R., Joel Colton, and Lloyd Kramer, A History of Europe in the Modern World.

11th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Search for Modern China. New York: Norton & Company, 1990.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki. Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People. Translated and annotated by Ethan Mark. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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[1] Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Bent Twig,’ Foreign Affairs, October 1972, 17.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1972-10-01/bent-twig.

[2] Ibid., 17.

[3] Ibid., 17-18.

[4] “A–Z miscellany of information and opinion,” The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, accessed July 8, 2020, berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/information/a-z.html.

[5] Berlin, “The Bent Twig,” 11.

[6] Ibid., 14.

[7] Ibid., 15.

[8] Ibid., 15.

[9] Ibid., 16-17.

[10] Ibid., 17 (emphasis added).

[11] Ibid., 17.

[12] Ibid., 18.

[13] Ibid., 18.

[14] Ibid., 18-19.

[15] Ibid., 25-26.

[16] Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton & Company, 1990), 231.

[17] Ibid., 231.

[18] Ibid., 232. Drought and flood in Shandong in 1897–1898 created unstable conditions which helped spark popular dissatisfaction with the status quo. 

[19] Ibid., 236.

[20] Cited in Ibid., 236.

[21] Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, ed. Ivan Morris (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

[22] Ibid., 37.

[23] Cited in ibid., 35.

[24] Ibid., 38.

[25] Ibid., 39. (emphasis added)

[26] Ibid., 39.

[27] Berlin, “The Bent Twig,” 25-26.

[28] Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, 41.

[29] Ibid., 139.

[30] Ibid., 146. In addition to this claim, Maruyama argues in another chapter that the social stratum which provided the “social foundation of fascism” in Japan, was what he termed the “pseudo-intelligentsia.” This group was made up of “small factory owners, building contractors, proprietors of retail shops, master carpenters, small landowners, independent farmers, school teachers (especially in primary schools), employees of village offices, low-grade officials, Buddhist and Shinto priests…” (57). This group, comprised of masters of microcosms, were in a position within Japan analogous to Japan’s position in the international state system. It is worth quoting his point at length:

In international affairs, Japan was for ever conscious of the pressure of the advanced capitalist countries, yet in the Far East it acted as a relatively advanced country. Japan was thus both bully and bullied. This was why the pseudo-intellectual class felt an inner sympathy for the continental development of Japan. They regarded the pressure of the advanced capitalist countries in the same way as that of the zaibatsu. The resistance of the East Asian peoples to Japanese imperialism aroused the same psychological reactions among them as the resistance of their subordinates in the shops, work-places, and other groups under their control. Thus they became the most ardent supporters of the China Incident and the Pacific War. (64-5)

[31] Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Grassroots Fascism: The War Experience of the Japanese People. Translated and annotated by Ethan Mark (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 99.

[32] Ibid., 96.

[33] Ibid., 108.

[34] R. R. Palmer, Joel Colton, and Lloyd Kramer, A History of Europe in the Modern World, 11^th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014), 552.

[35] Jack L. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 36.

[36] John Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict (London: Sage Publications, 2005).

[37] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 46.

[38] Berlin, “The Bent Twig,” 27-28.