The great transition: our battles over history

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper was written in Hong Kong during a protest movement that shows no signs of ending anytime soon. It coincided with a military lockdown of Kashmir that followed the abrogation of key Articles of the Indian Constitution guaranteeing administrative autonomy to the region. There is little to suggest any similarity between Hong Kong and Kashmir. Nevertheless, as the continuing agitations in both regions make any resolution along available theories of political science increasingly impossible, their coincidence opens new questions around Empire, Nation, Colonialism and indeed Modernity. We explore the resurgence of a very modern empire, stretching from Central to North East Asia. Although effectively a Sino-British co-production (as the One Belt One Road project shows in its tacit reiteration of older British demarcations of regional boundaries), empire splits into two genealogies. One is precisely colonial, the other more amorphously despotic. This divide now determines the modernist pedigree of today's nationalisms and provides ethical justifications for extreme state action. As an old imperial divide reinvents itself as a bipolar global order, Kashmir and Hong Kong require conceptual relocating within larger geographies if we are to take seriously the demands of militant protest to force the question beyond the totalitarian nation-state. Both protests are viewed within a growing crisis of the nation-form as they invoke, but also exceed, the languages of conventional politics, moving into a domain variously named apocalypse, endgame and catastrophe. As distinctions grow between rational politics and the experimental “frontline,” history itself hangs in the balance.