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1 Civilization and National Identity Theodore Roosevelt in 1899 exhorted his countrymen to pursue the “strenuous life.” “We cannot, if we would, play the part of China,” he urged. The United States must prepare itself “if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—if she is not to stand merely as the China of the western hemisphere.”1 Roosevelt evidently meant this ludicrous comparison to shock Americans into fulfilling their exceptional role in the world. The irony of exceptionalism is that every nation believes it has a special culture or history that sets it apart from all others. A sense of pride and emotional attachment to national symbols, myths, and historic or invented tradition is a key element in the formation of national identity.2 Most often that national pride is grounded in a sense of superiority. For middle-rank countries, a possible course of action is to turn perceived second-class status into its own platform for extolling national virtue.3 In cases where a country’s objective status leaves little cause to feel superior, pride may look to a presumed glorious past and channel nationalist energies into passionate, if ineffectual, irredentism. But, in fact, an ideology of superiority does not require an empirical basis to be strongly felt and fiercely maintained. The United States and China are both leading examples of the trope of exceptionalism . Japan, too, despite its complicated relationship with the idea of “China” and its history, came to believe that it occupied a special role in Asia. Each in its way believed itself to be the embodiment of civilization—not merely the most advanced exemplar but Civilization itself. For Americans, this habit of superiority originated in the Protestant ideology of chosenness. China’s Confucian world order posited the emperor as the center of civilization. And Japan, though perhaps in slightly less universalistic terms, came to see itself as the island of civilization in the midst of its backward Asian neighbors. Civilization requires barbarians. In order to define oneself as Civilization, one mustbeabletodesignatethoselivingbeyondthebordersofcivilizationastheOther, the not-civilized and barbarian. For early American colonists, Native Americans 21 22 ideas and the making of identity represented the savages surrounding the English settlements, while by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Americans began to see the whole world as a target for spreading the American way of life. In the Chinese worldview, peoples living beyond the reach of Confucian culture were yi, or barbarian, fit to be ruled by force rather than by moral suasion. And the shifting Japanese conception of civilization cast a variety of candidates in the role of not-civilized, including the Chinese. The Chinese, for their part, had long considered Japan to be inferior culturally, though somewhat above the level of barbarian. Moreover, Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often used Asia as a foil for their notion of civilization, weighing China and Japan against each other. Yet despite the hubris and evident arrogance of these hierarchical worldviews, all three ideologies of universal superiority included the possibility of transformation . The barbarians could become civilized if they acknowledged the Chinese emperor and adopted Confucian ways, while the Japanese believed that the Ainu could be civilized and made into proper Japanese subjects. And, most notably, Americans went forth to spread the blessings of American civilization and ideals to lesser peoples around the world. American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny “Identity is constituted in relation to difference,” according to David Campbell, and Americans have always understood themselves to be different.4 According to the somewhat mythologized history of the colonies’ founding, the early New England settlers came to the New World to escape religious persecution and establish a new and better society in the wilderness. This originary myth combined in the nineteenth century with an equally mythologized belief in Manifest Destiny to form a potent ideology for an expanding nation in the nineteenth century.5 As “the imagined community par excellence,” in Campbell’s words, American identity “is peculiarly dependent upon representational practices” and imaginings . By the nineteenth century Americans had constructed ideas of Anglo-Saxon “ethnicity” and a set of shared values as the basis of what it meant to be “American ,” but initially that identity was largely defined by what they were not. The colonists emphasized the “savage” nature of the native peoples, both to reaffirm their own identities and to remind themselves of what could befall them should they stray beyond the boundaries. If the barbarian was capable of being...

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