History, Identity, and the State in East Asia

These two recent books on East Asia, while not closely related at first glance, are both testimony to the persistent power of history in group identity, how citizens view their state, and states’ international relations. Historical memory is a potent force in public opinion that can be manipulated for political ends—but, despite the discrediting of the primordialist approach to identity in postmodern theory and the current popularity of constructivism, the sense of connection to traumatic events experienced in the past by the group one identifies with is not purely constructed, and persists, even if sometimes as a latent force, among members of political groups. A difficult history between groups can never be completely erased or tamed. As the political scientist Lily Gardner Feldman has demonstrated in her studies of Germany’s post–World War II relations with its neighbors and the descendants of victim groups, difficult histories must be consciously managed and never taken for granted.¹ This is essentially what is called long-term reconciliation. The two very interesting studies under review here, the first a collection of articles mainly by historians whose work includes a focus on history education and historiography in Asia, and the other by a political scientist, are further linked by a recognition of the importance of education as a crucial political institution—as opposed to just a social service traditionally provided by the state in the modern period—both in domestic as well as international relations.

Gotelind Müller’s edited volume Designing History in East Asian Textbooks: Identity Politics and Transnational Aspirations is, of course, a more overt study of the politics of historical memory and education. While it has some weaknesses, the volume is valuable for those who follow this topic, which has grown in interest over the last decade or so, parallel to the emerging fields of transitional justice and conflict management. The volume’s cohesiveness transcends its origins as a set of papers prepared for a conference, usually a guarantee for a rather random collection. The greatest weaknesses are the fact that, while it claims to be about East Asian textbooks, the real focus is on China (the Sinitic world, including Hong Kong and Taiwan) and Japan and their relations. South Korea is represented by one essay by the only Korean author. This understudied country is very interesting in its own right for issues of group identity and relations with its neighbors, and it has tensions, contrary to popular belief, not only with Japan—which is almost certainly unlikely to be an existential threat to Korea for the conceivable future, whatever disagreements arise over islands between the two countries—but also with China, the enormous regional power and closer neighbor fast rising to be a world power. In addition, the problem of history is also a potent force between North and South Korea, and this problematic is not discussed in the volume.² More attention to Korea would have enriched the book. The book is also poorly edited, especially considering that many of the authors are not native English speakers; at best, many nonnative constructions and word usages undermine the substantive contributions of many of the articles and, at worst, make them confusing in places.

However, these two weaknesses do not detract significantly from the volume’s main contributions. The first is to take this topic beyond the cul-de-sac in which it too often seems to get trapped, into pertinent education disciplines beyond history, thus situating history education within education (schooling) as a larger system rather than leaving it marooned as its own topic, which it too often...