Small-medium-large countryism: divesting the nation-state

Abstract

ABSTRACT 2018 marks the sixty-third anniversary of the 1955 Bandung Conference and fifty-fifth anniversary of the 1966 Belgrade Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. This presentation addresses one aspect of the Bandung and Belgrade legacies, which has inherited from the anti-colonial struggle and continued to shape the post or ex/colony in the present moment of world history, namely the consolidation of the modern nation-state form. Revisiting intellectual sources of thoughts, such as Rabindranath Tagore’s 1917 Nationalism, I wish to argue that we need to first recognize the critical and liberating power of the Third World nationalism against imperialism and colonialism (“the politics of the anti”) as the assumption of our reflection, but then proceed to examine the problems embedded in the struggle via revisiting histories, so as to search for grounded alternatives (“the politics of the alter”) without avoiding the depth of psychic energy always and already invested in the national, if not nationalist, history. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s notion of “trusteeship” and Choi Wonshik’s analysis of the Chinese Warring States (770–403 B.C.) experiences to address contemporary deadlock of the nation-state formation, invented in Western Europe, I will begin to explore the possibility of a “small-medium-large countryism,” to liberate ourselves from the colonial and imperial invention of the “nation-sate” and to open up intellectual space for imagining the future world.