The Ghost in the Machine: How Postcolonial 'Non-West' Internalises Western Statecraft — Epoche C2
The question this essay puts to the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism is a narrow one. When Korean nationalists set out, over the half-century between the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 and the founding of two rival republics in 1948, to end foreign rule over the peninsula, what political form did they take for granted, and what did taking it for granted cost? The answer defended here is the thesis of the earlier and shorter version of this essay, now supplied with the evidence it lacked: the 'non-West' has not simply transcended or deconstructed Eurocentric categories but has internalised one of them — the nation-state — as the foundational element of its modern political existence and of its resistance. What follows sets out the framework, corrects three claims in the earlier version that do not survive examination, states the strongest objection to the thesis, and then works the Korean case in enough detail to see whether the objection holds. 1. What Chakrabarty's apparatus contains, and one term that is not in it Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000) supplies the framework, and it is worth being exact about what it says, because the earlier version attributed to it one phrase it does not contain and one historical claim it does not make. Chakrabarty's project is emphatically not the rejection of European thought; his own formulation is that European political thought is at once indispensable and inadequate for thinking through the experience of political modernity in non-Western nations, and the book is an attempt to hold both halves at once. What is to be provincialised is 'Europe' in its role as the hyperreal figure that functions as the silent referent of all histories — the entity of which Indian, Chinese or African history is written as a variant, a lag or a failure. Two pieces of his machinery do the work the earlier version wanted done. The first is the structure he calls 'first in Europe, then elsewhere', which converts a spatial difference into a temporal one: the colonised are not different, they are earlier, and therefore not yet ready for self-rule. Chakrabarty's point is that the anticolonial answer was not to accept the training programme but to refuse the tense — to insist on the 'now' of the democratic demand against the 'not yet' of the waiting room. The second is his adaptation of a distinction from Marx's Grundrisse between History 1, the past that capital posits as its own necessary antecedent and can therefore absorb, and History 2, the pasts and practices that do not belong to capital's life process and interrupt it from within without ever forming a coherent alternative to it. This pair is what allows one to say that a form can be adopted completely at the level of institutional grammar and still be inhabited by practices its logic does not generate. The phrase 'imaginary homologies', which the earlier version put in Chakrabarty's mouth, I cannot locate in his book, and it is withdrawn; History 1 and History 2 do its work and are his. The second correction is historical rather than textual. The earlier version described the modern nation-state as having 'Westphalian origins', with sovereignty and territoriality settled in 1648. Andreas Osiander's examination of the treaties of Osnabrück and Münster (2001) shows this to be a retrospective construction: the instruments themselves are preoccupied with the constitutional order of the Holy Roman Empire and with confessional settlement, they contain nothing that establishes sovereignty as an organising principle of interstate relations, and the 'Westphalian system' is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century back-projection. This matters for the argument rather than merely tidying it. If the sovereign territorial state is not a seventeenth-century constitutional achievement but a much later standardisation, then its universality is not the slow diffusion of an old European invention but something closer to the imposition of a recent administrative standard — which is exactly what the Korean chronology below shows. 2. The template's modularity, and the strongest objection to the thesis If the claim is that a form was internalised, one needs an account of how a political form travels at all, and here Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) supplies the mechanism. Anderson's nation is an imagined political community, imagined as inherently limited and as sovereign, and his decisive move for present purposes is the claim that once assembled, the nation-form became modular — capable of being lifted out of its conditions of origin and transplanted, with more or less self-consciousness, by very various political actors. Modularity is what makes the essay's thesis intelligible: a form that is modular can be adopted by people who did not make it, for purposes opposed to those of its makers. It is also what provoked the objection this essay has to answer. Partha Chatterjee's The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) puts the point as a question: if the modular forms are all supplied by Europe and the Americas, what is left for the rest of the world to imagine? His answer is that anticolonial nationalism divides the world in two before it ever contests the state. In the outer or material domain — economy, statecraft, technology, the apparatus of administration — Western superiority is conceded and must be studied and replicated. In the inner or spiritual domain — language, religion, the family, and above all the conduct of women — sovereignty is declared first, and colonial intervention is refused absolutely. On Chatterjee's account nationalism's most creative work happens in the inner domain, is completed before the political struggle begins, and is invisible to anyone who looks only at institutions. If he is right, the internalisation this essay describes is real but shallow: it covers the outer domain only, and the inner domain is where a genuinely non-derivative politics was made. That is the objection at its s