A few notes on pride politics...

I've been following the saga of the Chinese students' riot in Seoul, in which 6,000 or so Chinese kids went nuts in downtown Seoul and beat up a bunch of protesters for Tibetan and North Korean human rights. The Chinese government issued a semi-apology, in which it defended the students as "protectors of China" and lauded their "pride," while Korea responded by booting a bunch of Chinese students out of their country, on the grounds that Korea's "pride" was hurt.

Pride politics is nothing new in Asia, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Nor are China and Korea alone in this - the Japanese have long been tinkering with their history textbooks, to eliminate uncomfortable references to WWII on the grounds that it hurts students' pride in their country.

Most of the truly ridiculous acts of pride politics I saw in Korea were ignored by the Western media, but now that China's big enough and assertive enough to get their attention, I have the pleasure of sitting back safe in New York and watching the world fret about pride politics again.

I say "again" because it wasn't so long ago that pride politics was a world phenomenon, not so much Asian as
French, Mexican (link hard to find due to page after page of US anti-immigrant media links), or southern American. Given that de Gaulle was kicking the Americans out of France as little as 50 years ago for reasons of pride, in the long view, it's only been very recently that Western governments stopped resorting to hurt pride to justify their policies.

So: are Asians merely behind the curve, or is there something in East Asian cultures that makes pride politics particularly easy to fall back on?

The answer might be both, but let's look at the latter first. There's the ever-present problem of "face" in Asia, the lessons of WWII, and the lack of minority voices that make pride politics particularly effective.

I found out pretty quickly after coming to Korea that the concept of "face" was little more than a bargaining position. Face isn't generally invoked by the side of right and reason - it's what you're probably going to hear from the side that realizes it made a mistake or was caught committing a wrong. It's a last, desperate measure to come out of a conflict relatively unhurt. Alternatively, I heard it used to quiet those in lesser social positions. After a while, I came to despise the idea altogether: a childish, pathetic swap at younger people by older people who should know better but whose vanity required them to stifle debate.

But face isn't going to disappear anytime soon, and paired with nationalism, it makes countries and peoples excruciating to deal with. It occurred to me some time ago that Asia and the West took diametrically different lessons from WWII; while Westerners saw it as the inevitable result of nationalism running amok, Asians saw it as the result of not enough nationalism. If only Korea and China had had more national spirit and unity, they reckon, they would have had the strength to repel the Japanese from the beginning.

Given the emphasis on nationalism in Asia, it's not surprising that there are so few minority voices. As I've mentioned elsewhere here, I see homogeneity as assisting nationalist tendencies in a culture, because it lets a country engage in a massive racial/ethnic circle jerk. Put face, nationalism and homogeneity together, and the Pride of the Country® starts sounding like a pretty good reason to do anything.

So it looks like Asia's going to be pumping the Pride angle for a while. I'm willing to bet, however, that this too will pass relatively soon.

My optimism is based largely on Asia's increasing legalism. For a while now, China has been building its legal system, and building largely from scratch. Korea has been messing around with legal reform for much longer, though moving slowly, and in fits and starts. Even in Japan, recent reversals of court cases have caused much hand-wringing about the legal system. As the legal systems strengthen and mature, face and pride will (hopefully) lose force and power in society. You can't let a rapist go simply because punishing him would Hurt his Pride. Once the change comes from within, Western societies will have better relations from without.

There's a catch to this, and it's not pretty: Western societies have always caught a lot of flak for their inability to live next to people who don't think like them, and deservedly so. If Westerners cheer Asia's development of legalistic thinking and rationalist politics, it just reinforces the idea that we can only deal with them when we see they're like us. Asia might be behind the curve, but it can see that the curve somehow always leads back West.