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156KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 23 their main points untouched. This is so especially in the cases of the Koreacentered chapters. An unfortunate exception is the chapter on Australian security policy. As the book was being published, the Keating government, with its proactive policy of "hitting above our weight" (an instructive model indeed to other middle powers like South Korea), was about to be swept away. Dora Alves's fine delineation of the Hawke-Keating years (1983-1996), with their talk of "enmeshment with Asia," of networks rather than power balances, would require a major revision to encompass the intensified ambiguity ofthe Howard government's security policy. David Kelly University of New South Wales Korea and EastAsia: The Story ofa Phoenix, by Kenneth B. Lee. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997. xxiv, 285 pp., chronology, bibliography, index, $59.95 cloth. The last few decades have been marked by a substantial upsurge of virulent nationalism in the writing of history. In Europe and North America the xenophobic and ultrapatriotic approach to history, once far from unusual, has faded, but the same approach has found particularly fertile soil in many countries of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, especially, but not exclusively, in former colonies of Western powers (but also in Russia, other former Soviet republics, and China). There history is too often perceived not as a way to recover our past but to revenge real and perceived humiliations and, in turn, humiliate the enemies. For a nationalist, history is a war by other means, or, at best, a zero-sum game, where the perceived "gain" of one side is another's loss. It is understood as, above all, a way to settle the score with the forces the nationalists consider "enemies" as well as to prove the "eternal greatness" of one's own nation. As in any propaganda war (since, for a nationalist, history writing is essentially a propaganda operation), the first victim is the truth. Only facts that fit well into a nationalist conception well are recognized, while other data are routinely discarded or distorted. The international academic community, mostly English-speaking these days, seems to be largely unaware of the full extent of the nationalist fury that devours many a historiography. Radical nationalists tend to write in their native languages, addressing their faithful, and aim primarily at stirring up nationalist emotions among their compatriots. Their works seldom appear under the imprint of renowned academic publishers overseas, not least because the distortions of history, so inherent to a nationalist historiography, are only too obvious for every outside (and, hence, unbiased) observer. BOOK REVIEWS157 However, reading a work by a nationalist author might be instructive, even ifbiased interpretations are abundant. Which events (real or invented) are played up and which are underreported or omitted may tell us a lot about the nationalists' self-perception and world view. Korea and EastAsia: The Story ofa Phoenix by Kenneth Lee provides a good example of such nationalist historiography. The book is a short history of Korea from ancient times to the present, but, for the purposes of our review we shall dwell on the first half of the text (100 out of the total 256 pages), where the author deals with premodern Korea. In South Korea books of similar inclinations and approaches are copious, but they seldom find their way to foreign readers (some official cultural propaganda notwithstanding). So, Lee's book, though rather unreliable as a guide to Korean history, might provide a Western reader with a good idea of which past Korean nationalists themselves would like to have. At the same time, Lee does not go too far, and by the standards of a nationalist history, he is no radical, which means he tries to respect hard facts whenever possible. Still, nearly all the classic preoccupations of a nationalist discourse are to be found in this book, and they profoundly influence the author's approach to history. The first is preoccupation with the real or alleged "ancientness" of the nation and its cultural roots. Lee recognizes that the Koreans are not the autochthonous population of the Korean peninsula, and, as members of the Ural-Altaic language family, they came to East Asia from somewhere else, but...

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