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Anatomy of the Nation: The East Asian Reconfiguration of the Western Nation and Bildung Nationalism

  • Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • 2026, 83(3), pp.185~231
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : July 11, 2026
  • Accepted : August 10, 2026
  • Published : August 31, 2026

ZHENGMEILING 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The Western concept of the nation originated in a somewhat derogatory sense, referring to groups of foreigners bound together by their regions of origin. It subsequently evolved into the small, elite groups that dominated medieval European councils , and then, through the development of parliamentary politics in the early modern period and the revolutions of the modern era, gradually transformed into the modern concept of the nation as a sovereign people. Britain, through the maturation of commercial capitalism and the mediating institutions of constitutionalism and common law, was an early exemplar of a civic nation rooted in an organically developed civil society. France, by contrast, demonstrated the paradigmatic model of a republican nation, a transformation from people to nation, through the revolutionary rupture that brought the contradictions of the Ancien Régime to a head. By contrast, confronted with the structural constraints of political fragmentation and late industrialization, Germany pioneered another path to nationalism by mobilizing the Volk as an organic cultural community rooted in language, spirit, and culture, as an alter native to the classical model of civic identity. The nation thus underwent a 230 인문논총 83권 3호 2026. 8. 31. historical oscillation from concreteness and exclusivity toward abstraction and universality, and later back toward concreteness and exclusivity. In modernizing East Asia (Japan), where centuries of dynastic rule and seclusion had made Western-style theories of social contract grounded in autonomous individualism difficult to access, the state instead adopted the organicist Staatslehre of late-developing German Empire, exemplified by Johann Caspar Bluntschli ’s Allgemeines Staatsrecht (1852) and the Bismarckian system, as a particularly suitable model, putting the principle of “wealth and military strength” (fukoku kyōhei) into practice. Of course, during the process of modernization , there were efforts to adopt the values of modern republicanism and democracy, including constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, and constitutionalism. Ye t these efforts ultimately converged on the logic that, in a ruthless international order, there was no existential alternative to self-strengthening. This led to a fundamental limitation: western modernity came to be understood not through Kantian ideals of perpetual peace, but through a Hobbesian condition of the state of nature, which in turn paved the way for a German-style biological determinism derived from a transformed version of British social Darwinism. Accordingly, intellectuals in the three East Asian countries recognized that even with the institutional and systemic “hardware” of the nation-state in place, the absence of the “software” of a politically capable nation remained a fundamental problem. They therefore identified the formation of active modern subjects―citizens/ nationals capable of embodying critical thought, as the foremost task of their time. At the time, East Asia developed a form of Bildung Nationalism by combining an intellectual orientation analogous to Bildung, advocated by liberalism and early Romanticism in the German territories undergoing 정미령 네이션의 해부 231 belated modernization in the late eighteenth century, and conceived as the highest good of the comprehensive realization of the self, with Confucian moral cultivation and modern Western ideals of holistic human formation, including intellect (智), virtue (德), and physical cultivation (體), as well as vital strength (氣力), capacity (能力), popular strength (民力), and the spirit of independence. This synthesis gave rise to distinctive ideals of holistic human subject in each of the three East Asian countries. As a practical methodology for mobilizing the masses around this civilizational project, they set in motion a state-led, gradual, top-down program of enlighten ment. However, in this process, organicism of the state was elevated to the status of an absolute good, while the rights of autonomous individuals were suspended and subordinated to the dictates of Raison d’État, giving rise to a profound historical irony.

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