Cornell University Press 2023 Asian Studies Magazine

February 2023

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THE EXCERPT

W HOSE NATURE? CENTERING THE ENVIRONMENT IN KOREAN STUDIES

David Fedman

For nearly four decades, a water fight has gradually escalated along a short stretch of the Bukhan River, a waterway that transects the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). There, not twenty kilometers apart, stands a pair of dueling dams—“twin brothers, born at the same time, facing each other across the DMZ.”1 North Korea was the first to break ground, commencing work on the Imnam Dam in 1986. Almost immediately, South Korean officials began to sound the alarm about an imminent North Korean “water offensive.” W hether by accident or design, they warned, the Imnam Dam was bound to burst, a failure that would inundate every t hing downstream, Seoul included. In keeping with the Cold War rhetoric of the times, South Korean politicians suddenly spoke of a North Korean “water bomb,” the power of which was likened to an atomic blast.2 To forestall such a disaster, the South Korean government launched in 1987 a dam construction project of its own: the Peace Dam, a rampart against North Korea’s supposed riparian aggression.3

The tidal wave never came. Whatever urgency had initially impelled the Peace Dam project gave way to doubts about the actual threat, prompting officials in South Korea to suspend construction in 1990.4 In actuality, South Korean hydrologists soon found themselves confronted by the opposite of what they had feared: a suddenly lethargic river. Where North Koreans observed newfound abundance, South Koreans saw a serious infrastructural impediment. Farmers fretted over irrigation shortages. Engineers warned of reductions in hydroelectric power generation. Residents of Seoul faced the prospect of drinking-water shortages from the reservoirs on which they had long depended. Having structured so

much of South Korea’s economic growth around waterways like the Bukhan, officials now had to reckon with a watershed management scheme partly beyond their control.5

The burgeoning “water crisis” on the Bukhan escalated further in 2002, when the South Korean government released satellite photog raphs that revealed apparent cracks in the Imnam Dam. North Korea’s assurances of the dam’s structural integrity did l ittle to allay fears in the south of an impending breach. This breathed new life into the Peace Dam project. To the tune of US$429 million, the South Korean government contracted out a massive expansion of the project, which was completed in 2005. Now it was North Korea that was staring down the prospect of a deluge. With its height elevated and structure reinforced, the Peace Dam raised concerns of a hydrological “back-r ush”: a sudden and forceful reversal in floodwater that would wash across North Korea, Pyongyang included. Their fortunes fixed to the same watershed, officials on both sides had little choice but to call for joint management of the river and mutual inspections of each dam—coordination that lives or dies with the broader politics of denuclearization and inter-Korean relations on the peninsula.6

Simply put, watersheds do not abide geopol itical divisions. No matter how heavi ly fortified the DMZ or how vast the ideological gap between north and south, Koreans across space and time have been bound by the same stubborn realities of the physical environment on the peninsula. Before t here were two dams, before t here were two Koreas, t here was a single catchment basin, which has structured life and labor in the region for centuries.

We begin with the sibling dams on Bukhan precisely because they illustrate the contested terrain of the natural environment in Korea—a reality that has long animated politics on the peninsula. Insofar as t hese dams represent monuments to environmental engineering, they speak to both the promise and the perils of state-led efforts to impose order on the landscape. As a conflict ensnaring not just north and south, but also engineers, urban planners, soldiers, farmers, and city dwellers, the management of the Bukhan reveals the social frictions created by enduring questions over access to and use of precious natural resources across the peninsula. For every dispute over a waterway, t here have been strugg les over other environmental issues such as woodland use, waste disposal, and wildlife protection.

Not every facet of the environment in Korea is contentious. The Korean landscape, after all, is far more than an array of habitats, resource pools, and land titles. It is also an idea, one tightly bound up with long-standing efforts to define the very meaning of Koreanness. Consider, for example, the historic summit in April 2018 between Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, a moment of rapprochement that raised hopes for inter-Korean relations. What did t hese heads of state do when they

came together? They did what generations of Koreans had done before them. They planted a pine tree. Placed into a mixture of soils provided by both countries and nourished by waters drawn from rivers north and south, the pine served as a symbol of not only a peaceful future but also a common past. To Koreans across the peninsula, it was a powerful reminder of shared roots, of the environmental heritage that transcended national division.7 Indeed, whatever the daylight between the two Koreas on issues related to denuclearization, both sides cling to strikingly similar ideas about a distinctively Korean landscape. In the “land of mountains and rivers embroidered in silk,” as one popular saying has it, nationalistic ideologies of nature have found fertile soil.

Look no further than the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, where the invention of Korean nature was on spectacular display. One need only have watched the opening ceremony to appreciate the centrality of nature myths to the selfimage on offer in Pyeongchang. Tacking between imagery of hypermodern green cities and pastoral hinterlands, this carefully curated event took pains to showcase Korea’s enduring tradition of environmental stewardship. The star of the show was an animatronic white tiger—animal protector of Korea and mascot of the games—t hat, though long extinct, testified to how Koreans had supposedly lived in harmony with nature.8 Beamed into telev isions across the globe, the Pyeongchang games conveyed a portrait of a grandly green Korea, a land of pinesmothered mountains that had been protected by a nature-loving society.9

Yet behind the facade of artificial snow and bucolic uplands lay a much messier reality. For months, in fact, resentment had simmered in the shadows of the highlands of the host province, Kangwŏn. At issue was the felling of forests to transform the slopes of Mount Gariwang into a ski run. What to provincial officials was a simple measure to bring the area’s mountains into conformity with the standards of the International Ski Federation was to environmental activists an egregious exercise of government overreach. “It’s shortsighted, illogical and worst of all, irreversible,” decried one pamphlet circulated by opponents.10 It flew in the face of the notion of an “eco-f riendly” Olympics, long touted by organizers, and did irreparable damage to a “forest genet ics protection zone,” as spelled out in the Forest Protection Act. By one estimate, no fewer than fiftyeight thousand trees were sacrificed to make room for lifts, stands, and runs that were used for only sixteen days of competition. While some local residents welcomed the ski run as a potential source of tourism and economic stimulus, others decried the destruction of a “sacred” forest, old growth that, since its enclosure by the Chosŏn state, had been left undisturbed for more than five hundred years.11

Provincial officials responded with a survey of the proposed site, enlisting botanists and other experts into an extensive investigation of the ecolog y of the area. Their findings yielded a markedly different portrait of these slopes. Far from a

pristine forest, they concluded, much of the mountain was covered in trees only seventy years old. To bolster their case, provincial officials also pointed to evidence that shifting cultivators had previously inhabited the area. Accurate or not, in the traces of this “fire-field” farming, officials found counternarratives of land use and exploitation—grounds on which they justified another phase of development.12

Though the battle over Mount Gariwang has largely faded from public view, disputes over the control of Korea’s environment remain alive and well. Where t here are golf course greens, nuclear power plants, and projects of urban renewal, t here have been “site fights” over their environmental impact. This is hardly a feature only of the present or recent past. As John S. Lee and Sooa Im McCormick each make clear (chapters 1 and 3), such conflicts stretch back deep into Korea’s preindustrial history. While the meanings and ideological valences of nature have shifted over time, the negotiation of t hese competing interests has been a fixture of local politics across generations. Questions of who gets to define nature, and on what terms, are of profound importance to people in Korea. They bear on every t hing from food security to ecotourism, labor rights to public health. Just as importantly, they are central to how Koreans have historically understood what binds them together and what sets them apart.

Hence our title for this book, calling attention to the forces of nature in Korea in multiple senses of the phrase. We show, at one level, how geophysical processes across timescales have continually shaped the course of events on the peninsula— how floods, droughts, climatic oddities, famines, fires, and pests have inexorably impinged on human affairs. At another level, we illuminate how di fferent forces have been mobilized by states—prei ndustrial, colonial, authoritarian, or other w ise—a nd their corporate and civic partners to variously control, protect, develop, and showcase the Korean landscape. Needless to say, t hese forces were met with resistance at every turn. This book accordingly devotes considerable attention to state-planning as well as local responses, to national enterprises as well as community projects. Considered together, the chapters reveal the myriad ways in which Korean society has shaped, and been shaped by, its physical landscape, with implications that reverberate well beyond the peninsula.

Old Questions, New Lenses

The past three decades have witnessed a flowering of the field of environmental history and, more broadly, the environmental humanities. Self-described “environmental historians” populate academic departments the world over, specialized scholarly bodies have proliferated, and canonical works in the field have been

translated into dozens of languages. Meanwhile, collaborations between environmental historians and scholars working in anthropology, political ecolog y, and science and technology studies (STS), among other disciplines, stretched and blurred the boundaries of inquiry, pushing the field well beyond its native soil in the American West. East Asia is a case point. Whereas scholars a generation ago could count the number of environmental histories of East Asia on one hand, they today scan entire library shelves.13 The creation of national and even regional academic societies devoted expressly to the study of East Asian environmental history have all but assured that these trends will continue well into the future.

And yet, only recently have scholars working in the environmental humanities begun to claim residency in the house of Korean studies.14 In part, this lag can be attributed to the focus on human subjects in Korea’s history. This is especially true of minjung historiography, a deep well of research that has foregrounded the role of common people in shaping the arc of Korea’s history.15 Agency, in this view, rests principally in human subjects and systems. Intentionally or not, in their efforts to highlight the collective strug g les that attended colonial oppression, national division, and authoritarian rule, many South Korean writers have cast the environment as a mere tableau, a stage on which the human drama unfolds. Something similar can be said of prevailing narratives in North Korea, which tend to highlight how farmers and factory workers have historically overcome material constraints to “master” the natural realm.16 After half a century of foreign occupation followed by national division and a ruinous war, it is only natu ral that commentators in both Koreas would set out to highlight the resiliency of the Korean people themselves.

With a few recent exceptions, English-language scholarship on Korea has similarly portrayed its physical environment as a passive backdrop.17 Scattered throughout the growing body of research on the globalization of Korean cuisine—a driving current of the so-called Korean Wave—are references to Korean agriculture and foodways.18 One would be hard pressed to find an account of the Korean War that does not call attention to the bone-chilling winter conditions that defined the lived experience of this conflict.19 The Korean landscape, in short, is at once everywhere and nowhere in Korean studies. Although scholars across fields have long gestured toward the importance of Korea’s climate, topography, and biota, they have only recently begun to focus their attention on how t hese environmental factors—real and i magined—figure into Korea’s history.

Forces of Nature takes the flora, fauna, soil, energy systems, and climate events that have long been confined to footnotes and puts them front and center in analysis and argumentation. In setting our sights on the Jeju horse, the icefish, and the tapeworm, we seek to cast familiar events and themes in a new light. We do not so

much de-center human actors as more firmly embed them in their physical and material surroundings, revealing relationships often taken for granted.

In this, we follow the lead of a pathbreaking community of Korean environmental writers, phi losophers, and intellectuals. It may be true that Korean scholars have only recently begun to self-identify as prac t it ioners of “environmental history” (環境史, hwan’gyŏngsa), but they have for decades staked out a place in the broad but vibrant field of “ecological studies” (生態学, saengt’aehak).20 Galvanizing this intellectual movement were the agricultural and industrial policies of Park Chung Hee, the authoritarian dictator who ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1979. Guided by the logic “grow first, clean up later,” Park’s breakneck heavy industrialization resulted in pollution of all sorts.21 What to international observers was an economic miracle on the Han River was to many Korean communities a toxic trade-off—a “poisoned prosperity,” in the words of Norman Eder.22 With growing alarm, South Korean activists and pol itic al dissidents warned of a mounting ecological crisis with dire public health implications.

For evidence, many simply pointed to the Onsan Industrial Complex, a densely packed compound of factories that became the hub of the South Korea’s rapidly growing chemical manufacture sector, a pillar of Park’s industrial plans. There, in the early 1980s, local residents began to take note of a growing list of mysterious illnesses: rashes, eye irritation, neuralgia. Scientists eventually traced these maladies to wastewater runoff from surrounding non-ferrous-metal plants. They dubbed this, appropriately enough, Onsan disease (温山病, Onsanbyŏng), which is now recognized as a form of cadmium poisoning.23

Incensed by the lack of government accountability and, following a moratorium on fishing rights, the blow to local livelihoods, civil society rallied into opposition. Their activities dovetailed with a broader push following Park’s assassination in 1979 toward democratization, a movement that brought new energy and institutional resources to bear on South Korea’s environmental problems. Although these efforts failed to force the government and its corporate partners to admit wrongdoing in Onsan, they did result in a state-funded rehousing program for tens of thousands of area residents. This did little, however, to assuage the concerns of many working-class Koreans, who began to question whether industrial production quotas came at the expense of their own bodily and communal health. More and more, ordinary Koreans began to view environmental justice and democratization as two sides of the same coin—a point illuminated in many of the chapters to follow.24

It was not toxicity alone that arrested the attention of South Korean environmentalists. The city itself also became the subject of intense scrutiny, as rapid urbanization and a corresponding rural exodus fundamentally transformed South Korea’s environmental politics. Faced with grueling labor conditions in

Three QuesTions wiTh MARTIN SAXER author of Places in Knots

1. How do you wish you could change the field?

While global development agendas in their current incarnation put much emphasis on participation, gender equality and the environment, they are often used as simple templates to address complex and quickly changing socio-environmental problems. I wish that those on the receiving end of these development interventions had more of a say in policies that aim to protect mountains and people.

3. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

That would be having lunch in a trader’s house in Dzang, which is one of the three villages in the Limi Valley close to the Tibetan border in Nepal. The woman of the house commented on the food she is preparing. Food grains like rice and flour, a staple in the old Himalayan exchange of Nepali grain from Tibetan salt, are not imported from China; the salt, instead, now iodized and subsidized, is flown into the valleys from the south. A world upside down. And the dried yak meat she prepares

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I started writing this book during a phase of revival of trans-Himalayan exchange across the Chinese border and I read it as a sign for the resilience of trade as the main source of income in the mountain valleys in northern Nepal. A combination of increasingly strict policies on the Tibetan side of the border and then the global pandemic put, at least for now, a big dent in the livelihoods of these trading communities. I wish I had witnessed the fragility of the entire system earlier in my research.

is probably the last she will ever eat. A local Buddhist leader announced a no-kill zone, pushing pastoralism further to the brink.

Food grains like rice and flour, a staple in the old Himalayan exchange of Nepali grain from Tibetan salt, are not imported from China.

hosTed by JonaThan hall

The TranscripT

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Jay Sarkar, author of the new paperback and open access ebook, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War. Jay Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, and the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. We spoke to Jay about how the history of India’s first nuclear weapons test in 1974 has been overshadowed by the 1998 nuclear tests; why the conventional wisdom that India started off its nuclear program with nuclear energy first, is in fact incorrect; and the strong connections between India’s nuclear program and their space program. Hello, Jay, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

Well, we’re excited to talk about your new book, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War. Tell us what was the backstory to this book? What inspired you to write this book?

Yeah, this book was inspired by real world events that I experienced, while growing up in India in the 1990s. Back in 1998, when I was a teenager, I remember being caught completely by surprise by the 11 nuclear tests in South Asia that took place in the same month, five by India, six by Pakistan. And I remember there was even celebration, a very celebratory mood in the country, celebrating the supposed movement moment when India got its nuclear weapons. But it was only when my grandpa to whom I have dedicated this book, mentioned to me in passing that, actually, that was a nuclear test back in the 1970s. But that was peaceful. You know, it was only then that I realized that there was an important backstory to what we were witnessing in 1998. And yet, no one seemed to be entirely sure what that backstory was. Soon after, there were several books that were published, that focused heavily on 1988, completely ignoring the 74, the 1974 nuclear explosion. So in graduate school, when I had some time to choose a dissertation topic, I picked one that was essentially going to meet three conditions, which I think are important for completing a book and a PhD, and completing a PhD book. And that is, it has to keep me up at night. Get me out of bed and then repeat it for at least a decade. And so here we are with the with the book now.

Fascinating, fascinating. Yeah. What you just said, the story you just told us, it shows the power of propaganda on how they are framing - the majority of people saying Oh, yeah, this this explosion, this nuclear test in

JonaThan

Jay

JonaThan Jay JonaThan

1974 was peaceful, a new a peaceful nuclear explosion shows the power of words. So yeah, so the conventional wisdom, not only in India, but around the world was that India’s nuclear program started out peacefully, and it was focusing on nuclear power. And then as as with other countries that move more into a weapons phase, but your deep research definitely shows that that is not true. Tell us about your research and what you found.

The conventional wisdom, you’re absolutely right divides India’s nuclear program into distinct peaceful and military phases. So the peaceful phase theater have started in 1947, when India became an independent country, all the way until the 1980s. And the so called weaponization phase is said to have started in the 1980s, in response to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, and then consolidated after the 1998 nuclear tests that I just mentioned. Now, what this received wisdom has done is that it has transformed the formative years of India’s nuclear program. So the 1940s to the 1980s as essentially a prehistory of the nuclear weapons project. So what I do in my book is that I challenge that conventional wisdom by showing how the choices made from the 40s to the 80s were pivotal for what followed in the 1990s and thereafter. And so I made three main arguments in the book. The first is very briefly is that India’s nuclear program was a dual use and dever simultaneously surveying the civilian and military hands, not because of the nature of nuclear technologies, but because of deliberate plans and decisions undertaken by the Atomic Energy Commission of India and later on the Department of Atomic Energy. And so I, I argue with historical evidence that the nuclear energy program aim did not develop into a weapons program over time, but it was conceived as both from the onset. And so here I’d like to draw the listeners attention to the title of the book. It is not a story of ploughshares to swords, but it’s ploughshares and swords from the onset. The second argument is about the space program and that is the leaders of India’s nuclear program pursued a deliberate dual use space program, and they kept the research for space separate from the nuclear program and the defense laboratories. Whether the space program was led by Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan, they essentially kept space separate from nuclear at the same time they were they were also entangled the two programs, I mean, and why did they do that they did that to benefit from foreign cooperation in outer space without arousing suspicion of the global Non Proliferation regime. And the third and final argument, and it’s related to the conventional wisdom that you start your question with. The third and final argument is about borders and and the significance of understanding the importance of borderlands. And so I argue that in the US nuclear programs, geopolitical aspects were evident in the intermestic nature of territorial threats and their entanglements of the Cold War. And so here I use, Frederick Logevall and Campbell Craig’s important work on the intermastic, meaning the interface between international and domestic. So argued that securing these borderlands mattered to the postcolonial Indian nation state just as much as protecting the borders itself. And indeed,

JonaThan

policymakers were responding to these threats. As they were doing that we can get a clearer sense of the geopolitical dimensions of the nuclear program. And what that meant to the policymakers. Because as we think about the implication of the conventional wisdom, it is that the first 40 years were peaceful. And as a result, the key motivations for prestige are and/or domestic politics. So what I argue is, it’s not the case, the leaders of India’s nuclear program are pursuing weapons and energy from the onset. And that pure politics was a key motivation. Not the only one. I do say that not the only one, but a significant one during this time period. And we can get a clearer sense of that by expanding our understanding and paying attention to intermerstic and not just interstate wars.

Interesting, interesting. Going...thank you. Going back to that you may have made many points, but one of the points you made that I thought was really very smart and strategic, was this dual track, not only peaceful and, you know, more warfare oriented, but the whole two-tier track of the space program, where they could ask for international assistance? And then oh, yes, this is for the space program, but in reality, they could they can integrate that into the nuclear program. So so this this program that develops since the 40s, who were these, who were these countries and non-state suppliers that were helping India, both in the space program but also with the nuclear program itself?

Jay

Yeah, these suppliers are of various types. Frankly, the suppliers range from foreign Atomic Energy Commission’s private companies, public companies and science societies to just name a few types of suppliers. And they were located in North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Some of the major foreign Atomic Energy Commissions were the French, the CEA, the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique. The UK Atomic Energy Authority, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which is the company that actually exports but it’s close to the Canadian government, and the US Atomic Energy Commission. On the Soviet side, the Soviet Academy of Sciences was also an important partner of India’s nuclear program. And what I found in my research is that the leaders of the nuclear program really adopted this strategy of hyper diversification through these foreign partnerships. And what they were trying to do is that they were trying to get multiple types of research and power reactors. So power reactors will produce electricity research will help them together know how, so that they can become independent over time, independent foreign support, multiple types of research in power reactors, plutonium reprocessing designs, heavy water plants and others. And they were very innovative and you rightly point out it’s very strategic and a very well thought out approach to get New technology and know how to very innovative in the quest of suppliers. And I know we this is gonna be a short interview but I’ll quickly share this fascinating early episode of foreign cooperation. That’s okay. In in late 1948 S. S. Bhatnager, one of the founding members of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, visited East Berlin to meet former personnel of our

Auergesellschaft, which was this company involved in the Nazi nuclear weapons program. And what he was trying to do is that he was trying to know what could be procured or learned from that German company and reported back to Homi Bhabha, who was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India and the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had always taken a keen interest in the nuclear program in general. I do find that in the end, the Indian Atomic Energy Commission signed a contract with the French company STR or Société de Produits Chimiques des Terres Rares, which is the full name. And the French company itself was closely linked to Auergesellschaft during the Second World War, but it did not have a very evident Nazi heritage. And at the end, STR was the first partner of India’s nuclear program. So you can tell how how India’s the leaders of India’s nuclear program from the very beginning are just here to spread their web far and wide and very, very innovative in trying to develop foreign partnerships.

Wow, wow. So I love history, because it, I mean, it, first of all, it’s so fascinating. But secondly, it allows us to see the present more clearly. So with that, with that in mind, knowing what you now know, and knowing through the deep dive of research that you’ve done for this book, what what are some of the, what are some of the things that you follow in the news now that are informed by your research?

Yeah, one of the things that I find in my job through the research in my book is that you know, India’s relationship with the global nonproliferation regime is, is very stable in the sense that India is opposed to it, just like it was during the time period of my research, and the arguments as to why India is opposed to it and shall remain in the future going forward, are essentially the same that were given in the 1960s, it was the same set of arguments provided during the 1998 nuclear tests, same set of arguments in 2008, during the US-India civil nuclear agreement. So I find that that India’s nuclear program, you know, has has a set of milestones as opposed to breaks or, or specific, specific turning points, obviously, there was an explosion in 74, and then five nuclear weapon tests in 1998, I would consider them set of milestones in in this long process. And I don’t see a lot of change in the present time, I see more continuity. And in the context of the 21st century, I would say India’s nuclear program is still very much to all us. One of the things that India was expected to do, because of the 2008, US-India civil nuclear agreement was separate civilian and military facilities, which to an extent it did but not fully. So from a nonproliferation perspective, you know, folks in Vienna or Washington, DC, looking at India’s nuclear program, they still consider the whole nuclear enterprise of India’s, you know, very confusing, ambiguous, very difficult to access. And India has maintained a rather similar position of opposition to the regime on the basis of sovereignty. And it’s, it’s its belief that the regime functions on nuclear apartheid. That’s what Indian policymakers have said throughout the 60s, in some ways still today.

JonaThan

Jay

JonaThan

Okay. And moving to the nuclear energy side of the equation, some proponents of nuclear energy are saying this is this is the way we need to move forward to address global warming and climate change. What’s what do you what is India’s stance on that? Are they moving forward and building more generators and reactors? Or are they staying still? What’s their current policy when in regards to nuclear energy?

Yeah, that’s a great, great question. Here, I would say that I just mentioned the 2008 civil nuclear agreement. Now, that agreement was in the context of this, this believes in a potential nuclear renaissance in the world, that finally because of climate change, countries will find nuclear energy to be the response and they will expand or they will try to build more reactors. So India definitely made several commitments to that effect. In 2008, Fukushima, put a wrench not just in India’s plans, but in the global nuclear industries plans to expand. And now in 2022, as our, I mean, as a historian that I wouldn’t count myself there or I wouldn’t count you because you’re, you would talk to historians all the time. But we tend to forget the effects of Fukushima. And we are. And so I’m seeing a lot of discussion of a nuclear renaissance again, in the context of 2022. And that expansion of nuclear energy production. And so India very much has the current government has recommitted to building more reactors and, you know, putting more emphasis on nuclear energy, again, in the 2020s. They had done that in 2005 2008. With Fukushima, putting a wrench in 2011. I think those calls and those commitments are back again on the agenda.

JonaThan

Great, great. Wow. Well, you are a wealth of information. We’re so grateful and proud to be publishing your book. And we thank you for all the hard work and research that you’ve done, and put into this book, your new book, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War. Thank you so much, Jay.

Thank you so much, Jonathan. It’s a delight to be on the podcast.

JonaThan

That was Jay Sarkar, author of the new paperback and open access ebook, Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War.

THE EXCERPT

JAPAN’S NUCLEAR DISASTER AND REGULATORY POLITICS

Images of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident that assailed Fukushima, Japan, on March 11, 2011 (commonly known in Japan as “3.11”) were broadcast to millions of televisions around the world. Many people watched live as the events unfolded over days, evolving into partial core meltdowns in three of six reactors. In a sequence that became world famous, Unit 1 blew up on March 12, followed by a cloud of white smoke, leaving a skeleton where the reactor building had stood. Japan reported the nuclear accident to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as required. On the day it occurred, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) rated it as a level 4 out of seven levels on the IAEA scale: “accident with local consequences” (IAEA 2011b). In the following days, nuclear safety experts around the world analyzed the camera footage and other available data to gauge the severity of the accident. While the plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and the Japanese government reassured the public that no meltdown had taken place yet, French nuclear safety authorities questioned the validity of the level 4 classification (BBC 2011) and nuclear experts in the United Kingdom warned of nuclear meltdowns as early as March 14 (Guardian 2011a).

One month after 3.11, NISA revised its assessment to a level 7 “major accident” (IAEA 2011a), the highest level on the IAEA accident scale. TEPCO has since admitted that it should have declared a nuclear meltdown much sooner. Second in severity only to Chernobyl in 1986, a disaster of such magnitude in high-tech Japan raised urgent questions about how to govern nuclear safety worldwide.

In 2011 IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano stated that the Japa nese nuclear disaster “caused deep public anxiety throughout the world and damaged

confidence in nuclear power” (UPI 2020). In response, the German government, facing mass public demonstrations and a rapid shift in public opinion against nuclear power (Infratest 2011), appointed an “ethics commission for safe electricity generation” to assess the overall risks and benefits of nuclear power. Comprising diverse societal stakeholders, ranging from academics to church representatives, the commission advised against reliance on nuclear power due to incalculable long-term risks associated with accidents and radioactive waste storage (EthikKommission Sichere Energieversorgung 2011). Following this recommendation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany would phase out nuclear power by 2022. Belgium embarked on a similar stepwise phaseout of nuclear power by a set date in the 2020s. Spain and Switzerland foreclosed the construction of additional nuclear power plants. Other nations, such as the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and France, retained nuclear power as part of their energy policy. Responses to the trust-shattering nuclear accident varied around the world and, to the surprise of many, Japan was one of the countries that decided to retain nuclear power.

However, 3.11 exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance. To begin with, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) failed to prevent the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Shortly before 3.11, it had approved the oldest of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant as safe for another ten years of operation. The inadequacy of safety governance institutions in Japan was further highlighted by NISA’s failure to correctly assess the severity of the accident, evident from its initial rating as level 4 on the IAEA scale of what turned out to be a massive level 7 nuclear meltdown. Moreover, NISA lacked expertise to take on its predetermined role as a government adviser in crisis management (Kushida 2016), forcing then Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto and his government to look elsewhere for expert advice (Kan 2012). The nuclear accident cast a harsh spotlight on nuclear safety governance flaws, a rude awakening for a country that had thought it enjoyed high levels of nuclear safety.

In fact, an accident investigation committee created by the Japanese Diet (parliament) exposed deep-seated flaws in how Japan had hitherto regulated nuclear safety. The Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Committee (NAIIC), the first of its kind in Japan’s postwar history, was equipped with far-reaching competencies to view other w ise confidential documents and to conduct public hearings with persons of interest. It came to a shattering conclusion about Japan’s nuclear safety governance:

The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties (NAIIC 2012, 16). The regulators did

not monitor or supervise nuclear safety. The lack of expertise resulted in “regulatory capture,” and the postponement of the implementation of relevant regulations. They [regulators] avoided their direct responsibilities by letting operators apply regulations on a voluntary basis. Their independence from the political arena, the ministries promoting nuclear energy, and the operators was a mockery. (NAIIC 2012, 20)

The investigation concluded that the accident was not caused by a natural disaster per se, but rather by human failure to address known risks related to natu ral disasters.

To address t hese governance flaws, in September 2012 the Nuclear Regulation Agency (NRA) was created as a so-called independent regulatory commission. The new agency unified diferent functions related to the safety of nuclear power plants, safeguarding nuclear materials and nuclear security. Looking at the safety governance of nuclear power plants, t hese reforms fi nally separated nuclear regulation functions from nuclear power promotion, strengthened public accountability, and imposed rigorous and far-reaching safety regulation visà-v is the nuclear industry. Hence, instead of phasing out nuclear power in response to 3.11, Japan created an independent nuclear safety regulator in order to reinstill domestic and international trust in nuclear safety and to enable the continued operation of Japan’s nuclear power plants.

Contrary to low expectations (Aldrich 2014; Cotton 2014; Vivoda and Graetz 2014; Kingston 2014; Hymans 2015), the NRA defied pronuclear actors’ pressure for a quick and low-cost return to nuclear power. The LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) government made its wishes to reduce some of the new safety requirements clear a fter 2012, but it did not get satisfaction from the NRA. This book aims to explain the puzzling existence of an independent nuclear safety regulator in Japan which did not backslide on the more stringent safety measures introduced, even a fter it became clear that t hose mea sures were going to force numerous reactors into decommissioning.

3.11 Shook Japan’s Nuclear Policy to Its Core

As accidents often do (Birkland 2007; Balleisen et al. 2017), the nuclear meltdowns and revelations about nuclear safety governance flaws led to an intense debate about reforming Japan’s nuclear power policy. Japa nese Prime Minister Kan, head of a government formed by the former opposition party, the Democ ratic Party of Japan (DPJ), championed an unprec edented call for a nuclear

phaseout to achieve “a society that is not dependent on nuclear power” (Prime Minister’s Office 2011). At the same time, Japan saw the largest public demonstrations in decades, which reached their zenith in September 2011, with a rally of sixty thousand people at Meiji Park in Tokyo, including Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo (Hasegawa 2014). In contrast, the old pronuclear power elites, such as the LDP, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), Japan’s leading industry association Keidanren, and nuclear power plant operators, such as TEPCO, sought to return to pre-3.11 levels of nuclear power generation as swiftly as possible.

Next to calls for radical policy change, such as phasing out nuclear power altogether, the post-3.11 debate about the f uture of nuclear power revolved around improving nuclear safety. Prime Minister Kan initiated a process of restructuring of Japan’s nuclear safety institutions and ordered an immediate “stress test” to review the safety of Japan’s nuclear power plants, following the model set by the Eu ropean Union (EU). A fter 3.11, the EU embarked on “comprehensive risk and safety assessments (“stress tests”) of nuclear power plants” (EU Commission 2011).1 In Japan, the stress test was conducted by NISA, the agency that had failed to prevent the accident in the first place, misjudged its severity, and proven unable to take on its assigned crisis management role. When the first nuclear power plants in Ōi passed the stress test and were restarted in the summer of 2012, networks of old and new antinuclear civil society organizations mobilized up to two hundred thousand people protesting in front of the Diet, the Japa nese parliament (Wiemann 2018). In an August 2012 public opinion poll, 69 percent of the Japa nese public regarded nuclear power as either very, somewhat, or slightly dangerous (Shibata and Tomokiyo 2014, 47).

Calls for changes in Japan’s nuclear safety governance not only came from the Kan government but were strongly supported by international actors such as the IAEA. Immediately following 3.11, the IAEA began a process of revising global nuclear safety guidelines. It culminated in the 2016 IAEA Safety Standards for People and the Environment, which came to include “freedom from pol itical pressure” (IAEA 2016a) as a lesson learned from Japan’s pre-3.11 safety governance failure. During the reform process in Japan, IAEA representatives backed the idea of a stronger, more independent nuclear safety agency. Huge numbers of concerned citizens protesting in front of the parliament also lent strong support to the reform process. As the largest opposition party at the time, the LDP held the necessary seats in the Diet to block safety governance reforms, but instead it opted to use its power to push for an independent safety administration with a strong legal framework. As a result of cooperation and compromise between the DPJ government and the LDP opposition, the Diet passed the Nuclear Regulation Authority Establishment Act in June 2012.

Soon a fter, the LDP won the December 2012 general elections with a landslide victory despite its stance being “the most positive of any party and thus the furthest from the majority of an electorate soured on nuclear power” (Endo, Pekkanen, and Reed 2013, 60). The reelection of the LDP and pronuclear Prime Minister Abe Shinzo put an end to calls for a complete nuclear phaseout. Soon a fter, Abe announced that “over the course of roughly three years we w ill assess the f utures of existing nuclear power plants and transition to a new stable energy mix over ten years” (Abe Shinzo 2013). Ahead of the 2014 snap elections, the Abe government adopted a strategy to depoliticize nuclear power with a “shifting of responsibility for decisions about the safety of nuclear restarts to the newly created Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA)” (Hughes 2015, 203). Strikingly, the LDP has won one national election a fter another despite the unpopularity of Abe’s pronuclear stance.

Around the time the LDP returned to government, large-scale antinuclear protest subsided. While the “anti-nuclear movement wave” (Wiemann 2018) marked the end of Japan’s “ice age of social movements” (Pekkanen 2006), it did not translate into a sustained antinuclear movement. As part of the “new protest cycle” that emerged a fter 3.11 (Chiavacci and Obinger 2018), attention turned away from nuclear power and towards the Abe government’s national security policy agenda. Demonstrations focused on protesting against the State Secrecy Law (2013), the Security Laws (2015), and the Conspiracy Law (2017). What remained from the large antinuclear demonstrations of 2011 and 2012 was a small group of people protesting against nuclear power at a street corner in front of the Prime Minister’s Office every Friday.

The turn of the year from 2012 to 2013 seemingly marked a reversion back to nuclear politics as usual: a pronuclear government in power and able to win election a fter election, no large public demonstrations against nuclear power, and a new safety agency in place to ensure a smooth return to nuclear power with better safety standards as a means to regain international and domestic trust lost after 3.11.

Why Did Japan Hold on to Nuclear Power Despite the Obvious Risks?

As LDP Prime Minister Abe explained his government’s stance: “Our resourcepoor country cannot do without nuclear power to secure the stability of energy supply while considering what makes economic sense and the issue of climate change” (Japan Today 2016). Concretely, the Long-Term Energy and Supply Outlook, adopted by the government in April 2015, set a target for nuclear power to

account for 20 to 22 percent of electricity generation in 2030 in order to achieve the triad of energy policy goals: energy security, environmental and climate friendliness, and economic efficiency (known as “3E”). A return to a strong nuclear policy was considered pivotal to Abe’s economic policies to reignite growth, called Abenomics (Kingston 2016; Incerti and Lipscy 2018); to Japan’s eforts to raise its energy self-sufficiency rate, which reached a low point a fter 3.11 (Vivoda 2014); and to lowering green house gas emissions in line with international commitments under the United Nations climate regime (Kameyama 2019). Hence, Japan’s “power elite, and notably the so-called ‘nuclear village’ of big business, the electrical utilities, and key government ministries, wanted to return to business as usual” (Hymans 2015, 113).

The so-called nuclear village,2 a term mainly used by critics to convey the intimate proximity of relations, was centered on METI, the nuclear industry— plant manufacturers and regional electric utilities—a nd the LDP.3 It resembled a classic “iron triangle” of policymaking and implementation. The nuclear iron triangle was dominated by vested interests, had a propensity for making agreements behind closed doors, and promoted a nuclear “safety myth” about the absolute safety of Japa nese nuclear plants (Cotton 2014; Vivoda and Graetz 2014; Kingston 2014). According to the NAIIC, Japan’s pre-3.11 nuclear safety governance setup, designed in the immediate postwar period, was influenced by pronuclear politicians and ministries, and depended on industry expertise, allowing the industry to “capture” regulation and twist it in its favor at the expense of public safety. This regulatory governance design exhibited path dependency for half a century, despite multiple reform attempts in the aftermath of smaller nuclear accidents in Japan.

Japan’s Game- Ch anging Post-3.11 Nuclear Safety Reforms

Many studies of nuclear energy in Japan’s post-3.11 have drawn on the notion of crisis-i nduced change to ask whether it brought about fundamental changes. Early studies failed to anticipate the crucial changes resulting from the creation of the NRA (Samuels 2013; Elliott 2013; Al-Badri and Berends 2013). The new agency took over sta f from the previous captured safety administration, a pronuclear chairman headed the new agency, and most observers expected significant pressure from powerf ul pronuclear actors on the NRA (Aldrich 2014; Cotton 2014; Vivoda and Graetz 2014; Kingston 2014; Hymans 2015). Some scholars attested to the NRA’s strict stance on regulation and its apparent ability to resist political pressure, but they omitted an analysis of the reasons behind it and ex-

Three QuesTions wiTh SEIJI SHIRANE author of Imperial Gateway

1. What is your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

Xu Zhiting illustrates the in-between status many Taiwanese subjects had in Japan’s wartime empire. At the start of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), Xu was detained in South China by Chinese authorities until Japan’s naval occupation of 1938. Upon his release, Xu was hired by the Japanese as a navy interpreter to help administer the region. Over the next few years, he made his way up the imperial ranks in South China’s police and education bureaus. Although Xu and other overseas Taiwanese were still relegated to second-class status below the Japanese, they took advantage of their linguistic skills and colonial subject-

How do you wish you could change your field?

Much of the important scholarship on Japan’s empire has focused on northern expansion in colonial Korea and Manchuria. I want to draw greater attention to colonial Taiwan and its pivotal role in Japan’s southern advance from 1895 to 1945. My book shows how Japanese expansionism in South China and Southeast Asia was shaped not only by Japanese imperialists but also by overseas Taiwanese subjects with their own visions and ambitions. Rather than viewing Japanese empire-building as something exported from the home islands, we need to re-examine colonies as originating sites for imperial policies and practices.

hood to find opportunities that placed them in supervisory positions above local Chinese populations.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

I wish I had located Taiwanese oral histories earlier in my book project. Though some Taiwanese subjects—educated elites and anti-colonial activists—left written records about Japan’s southern expansion, most overseas Taiwanese in South China and Southeast Asia left few contemporary records. Fortunately, in revising my book, I was able to incorporate Taiwanese oral testimonies transcribed by historians of the Institute for Taiwan History (Taipei) in the 1990s. Such sources allowed me to include firsthand experiences of Han and indigenous Taiwanese subjects missing in Japanese official archives.

Fortunately, in revising my book, I was able to incorporate Taiwanese oral testimonies transcribed by historians of the Institute for Taiwan History in the 1990s.

Don’t forget. You can view our entire Asian studies subject catalog by scanning the QR code below with your smartphone camera or clicking on it.

SCAN ME

Three QuesTions wiTh SARAH E. PARKINSON author of Beyond the Lines

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

The research that I did for this book involved conversations with some of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. People often shared stories that involved the most absurd, romantic, terrifying, joyous, and devastating moments in their lives. I value those moments of confidence and reflection for what they allowed me to share with and learn from people. The interlude that opens the book, with Munadileh the battlefield nurse, is a good example; the vignette in Chapter 3 where Abu Wissam and his family fled the 1982 invasion in his

the course of time. There are memoirs by some of the foreign providers who worked in the camps, and I’d love to see a more complete representation of local providers’ experiences as well.

cousin’s wedding car and wound up facing an Israeli tank in an orchard is another. It’s hard to say that there are “favorites” among them.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

Since I’ve written the book, I’ve completed the training to be an emergency medical technician. People I interviewed for this project were part of the inspiration for this decision, as were experiences connected to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. I would love to go back and speak more deliberately to the care providers who worked in the various medical establishments to ask more about how they changed their practices and techniques over

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

People are complicated. They act against their interests. They believe seemingly ridiculous things. They take incomprehensible risks. Political science has frankly struggled as a field to capture that complexity while articulating clear, comprehensible, persuasive arguments.

“There is, quite simply, no armed conflict in the world that does not have a gender component.”

THE EXCERPT

THEORY AND SCOPE

In January 1956, less than three months after the proclamation of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), Ngô Đình Diệm’s government turned its attention toward surveilling civil society. Interior minister Nguyễn Hữu Châu requested an inventory of all voluntary organizations south of the seventeenth parallel. That survey revealed the existence of more than four hundred voluntary associations, ranging from labor unions and philanthropic groups to student associations and cultural clubs.1 According to the classifications used by the officials who compiled the inventory, t here were 150 labor unions, 148 mutual-aid and friendly societies, 94 religious groups, 18 arts and culture organizations, and 17 philanthropic associations. Significantly, only thirty-five were operating with government permission. The officials flagged five organizations that were suspected of harboring communists or supporters of other political rivals.2 Also alarming to the interior minister was the lack of information the government had about t hese four hundred organizations beyond their names and their founders. This prompted the minister to instruct city mayors and provincial heads to be more vigilant in enforcing state regulations when dealing with voluntary organizations and to make sure only registered organizations could operate.

The new government’s concern about voluntary groups—an impor tant component of civil society—is revealing on two counts. First, the government was aware of civil society’s potential power and was therefore eager to control this social realm. As subsequent chapters show, while South Viet namese authorities wanted to harness the energy of voluntary associations to enhance state-building endeavors and supplement the state’s social welfare provisions,

government officials were also wary of civil society’s potential to challenge the state and create dissent. Second, Nguyễn Hữu Châu’s inquiry reveals that South Vietnam’s public life was robust. People’s associational activities were significant enough to attract state attention and surveillance. Over the next two decades, essentially the life span of the RVN, voluntary organizations continued to grow and South Viet name se citizens continued to participate in associational life. Many groups attended to the specific needs of their members, while others aspired to improve living conditions for their communities and to shape the life of the nation.

While there is no lack of books on Vietnam and its wars, few have examined South Vietnam’s civil society, and to my knowledge, none has made this important arena of social interaction its focus in the Republican period.3 This book examines South Vietnam’s extensive associational life and covers an array of groups, from mutual-aid societies and charities to professional and rights organizations. By examining people’s voluntary public activities, this book offers a unique glimpse into South Vietnam, a society grappling with postcolonial changes, territorial division, nation building, civil war, and foreign intervention. The underlying motivation of this book is to understand the wartime experiences of the South Vietnamese people in a way that does not reduce them to mere victims of violence. While many Vietnamese on both sides endured profound suffering and loss, they were not passive victims defined only by wartime adversities. The activities of voluntary organizations provide tangible evidence of how some residents of South Vietnam, mainly in the urban centers, articulated and responded to the dramatic events that shaped the history of the RVN (1955–1975).

Because of its origin, its dependence on US aid, and its eventual defeat, South Vietnam has been overlooked by historians both inside and outside Vietnam. The general view was that South Vietnam did not have a legal basis for governance or existence. Its establishment was supposed to be transitory, and the decision to divide the country was made without consulting the population in either the north or the south. Consequently, South Vietnam was often considered inconsequential in historical narratives of the Vietnam War (circa 1960–1975), or it has been depicted as a shell of a state without a constituency and without a nation.4 Any historical attention it received tended to focus on the corrupt and incompetent political and military leaders, who were dismissed as puppets of the United States.5

In the last twenty years, the scholarship on South Vietnam has been growing because of better access to archival material and because of the recognition that little is known about its people, particularly their motivations, aspirations, and actions. There is now consensus among historians that while the US played a critical role in establishing the RVN and in executing the war, the Vietnamese people were crucial actors who had a hand in shaping the fate of their short-lived state.

By using Vietnamese-language sources and paying attention to the decisions and actions of Vietnamese actors, research has provided a more nuanced treatment of South Vietnam and deepened our understanding of Vietnamese history and the Vietnam War. For the most part, t hese works focus on the South Vietnamese political establishment, the South Vietnamese military, and the communist-led insurgency and its supporters.6 A few offer glimpses into South Vietnamese society, shedding light on diverse and impor tant subjects such as South Vietnam’s antiwar movement, education system, and student activism.7 This book contributes to this growing body of literature by examining the South Vietnamese people’s voluntary social and civic activities. In addition to insights about wartime South Vietnam, the book explores state-society interactions, particularly how civil society navigated the demands of the war, the state, and competing political forces.

Civil Society, Associational Life, and the Public Sphere

By the standard definition, voluntary associations are t hose organi zations that individuals join freely, without coercion. They are the manifestation of civil society, commonly conceived as “the constellation of associational forms that occupy the terrain between individuals and the state.”8 Another component of civil society is the public sphere, idealized as the site where critical, informed engagement about the common good transpires.9 There is still significant debate about the definition and nature of civil society and its components.

The general assumption is that civil society is relatively free from state control and is “an arena occupied by a fluid and loosely bundled assemblage of interests at various stages of institutionalization; civil society is, by nature, plural.” 10 Because it is plural and relatively unrestrained, civil society is sometimes conceptualized as inherently antistate, and its activities are perceived as contrary to the state’s interest. Some scholars, policymakers, and activists therefore believe that civil society can foster democratic development and protect society against authoritarianism. The experiences in Latin America, postcommunist eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa seemed to support this positive view of civil society. In t hese places, voluntary and religious organizations played an instrumental role in spearheading democratic developments.11 By virtue of being components of civil society, associational activities and the public sphere have also been theorized as being autonomous and supportive of democratic development.

Within this positive assessment of civil society’s potential is the notion that not all associational activities fit within the realm of civil society. General criteria that determine whether an organization is a constituent of civil society include

independence from the state, civility toward those with different views, and willingness to “work and interact with the state.” 12 According to these measures, some groups fall outside of civil society, including organizations—such as the Ku Klux Klan—that use violence against those with opposing views and revolutionary organizations that do not recognize the legitimacy of the state and seek its overthrow. Some definitions also imply that civil society aspires to work for the collective good rather than selfish or parochial interests. In this schema, self-help and kin-based organizations would not be considered components of civil society.13 In other words, the quality of a group’s activities is a significant consideration in this positive conceptualization of civil society. These standards are important for theorists who consider civil society the basis for democracy, because to foster an open and democratic society, civil society needs to be “forward-looking and open to rational communication with groups different from themselves.” 14

There are theorists, however, who define civil society more broadly to include groups that do not explicitly set out to perform civic duties but focus instead on members’ shared interests. Robert Putnam, for example, evinces that voluntary associations, including t hose formed to serve narrow interests, have the capacity to build social trust, networks, and norms—k nown collectively as social capital— which in turn promotes and maintains economic development and effective governance.15 Influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville’s work that connected the vibrancy of American associational life to the country’s democratic tradition, Putnam suggests that voluntary tradition builds a foundation for trust and cooperation and develops “the ‘I’ into the ‘we.’ ” 16 In other words, associated participation encourages people to adopt a collective perspective, and the social capital that accrues from associational life can contribute to building a strong civil society.

Countering this positive assessment of civil society’s potential are scholars who contend that civil society has not always been independent, equal, or open. For example, Mary Ryan’s study of religious benevolent associations in nineteenthcentury US cities illustrates that while associational life can build trust and cooperation, it is also instrumental in reinforcing elite dominance and privilege.17 Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu shows that social capital has greater potential to reify hierarchical social relations than to promote horizontal social solidarity. According to Bourdieu, social capital is deeply implicated in the stratified economic and social structure because one needs adequate means and connections to accumulate social capital.18

Foremost among the sober critics of civil society’s emancipatory potential was Antonio Gramsci, who perceived civil society as neither separate nor independent from the state. For Gramsci and other advocates of this school of thought, civil society is an important component of a society’s superstructure wherein the state and the elite maintain hegemony through influence, inducement, and manipula-

tion.19 The other constituent of the superstructure is the political society, which the state dominates through the use (or threat) of violence and force. Civil society in this view includes a wide variety of associative forms that “are non-productionrelated, non-government and non-familial, ranging from recreational groups to trades unions, churches, and political parties.”20 These sociocultural institutions underpin and support the capitalist economy in many modern societies. As such, it cannot be assumed that civil society exists in opposition to the state; in fact, it should be expected that some sectors of civil society, such as the economic and political elite, will share some of the same interests and goals as the state and will cooperate with the state to achieve their common objectives. In addition, the elite depend on the state to protect their hegemony with an “armor of coercion.”21

On the surface, Gramsci’s view of civil society appears bleak, holding little promise for civil society to act independently, defend society’s interests, or oppose the state. Diving even a little below the surface, though, reveals that the dynamics within civil society offer many possible trajectories that could lead to a vast array of fates for any given society and its political system. Gramsci suggests that neither civil society nor the state is unified or uniform in its interests and views. As a result, many competing interests operate in civil society, with a complex and unpredictable constellation of alliances. The state itself “is engaged in a struggle with other actors to dominate popular ideas, values, and norms.”22 Because it is a domain of contestation, plurality, and coalition making, elite hegemony is never complete. The contestation may lead the state to intervene directly to reassert hegemony if the threat to its stability appears imminent. Meanwhile, the plurality and conflict within civil society also present opportunities and space for “counterhegemonic narratives” to be articulated and mobilized.23 Moreover, because the state’s moral authority depends on maintaining a functioning civil society, it may be necessary for the state, even an authoritarian state, to compromise at times.24 Similar limitations have been noted with regard to the democratizing potential of the public sphere. According to Jürgen Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as an arena of open and free debate. Because of its ability to keep the state in check, the public sphere was considered an important element in democratization.25 However, as critics have pointed out, the nature of this idealized public sphere was restrictive, making it inaccessible to marginalized peoples such as women and the working class.26 Historians of nonWestern societies have discovered that the public sphere did not necessarily promote democracy and can in fact coexist with authoritarian rule, as in the cases of French colonial Vietnam and pre–World War II Japan.27 To explain the apparent contradiction, Elizabeth Berry explains that Japan’s public sphere was not “the space where popular sovereignty was claimed but where leadership was scrutinized and disciplined by criticism.”28 In other words, to understand the public

sphere in societies outside of Western democracies, one needs to “detach the public sphere from the telos of democracy.”29 Shawn McHale similarly argues that the public sphere in French colonial Vietnam was not linked to democratization but was a hierarchical domain where “particularistic interests contested their views.”30

Informed by theories about the nature and potential of civil society, this book examines the associational life and public sphere of South Vietnam. In the RVN, many competing forces were at work to influence public life. The authoritarian governments of Ngô Đình Diệm (1954–1963), various military juntas (1963–1967), and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (1967–1975) defined the limits of associational and public activities. The RVN’s police force closely monitored those suspected of supporting communists or other political opponents. The US government and foreign aid organizations also played a role in associational life by dispensing aid and advice in an attempt to win favor and influence. In addition, the Lao Động Party and its southern organizations, the National Liberation Front (NLF) and People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), infiltrated some key organizations in an effort to proselytize members. Along with the multiple forces influencing South Vietnam’s civil society, the exigencies of war circumscribed the content and form of associational life. The war created massive numbers of refugees, orphans, and wounded, and assisting these wartime victims became the focus of many organizations. The interplay of these forces made civil society a highly contested domain, wherein diverse groups and participants vied for influence and advantage. Voluntary organizations had to learn how to navigate these dominant forces and circumstances, adjusting their activities, goals, and membership to ensure their survival.

Methodology and Scope

This book examines an array of voluntary associations and their activities in South Vietnam. The groups discussed include mutual-a id associations, cultural clubs, professional societ ies, charitable organi zations, community development groups, women’s associations, student organ i zations, and rights movements. Where possible, I utilized accounts from personal interviews and memoirs of participants.31 However, for the most part, I relied on archival and textual evidence. As such, my discussion focuses on officially registered and active organizations that left written records, such as registration applications, club charters, correspondence with government officials, and state surveillance reports. Although voluntary associations were required to apply to the government for permission to operate, many did so without official sanction. Moreover, many small and ad hoc groups operated throughout South Vietnam, particularly in small towns and villages, and left few documentary traces. Given the lack of pri-

THE EXCERPT

There is an ominous feeling one gets when reading through Philippine newspapers from the late 1960s and early 1970s. No other period in Philippine journalism quite compares to it. A wide range of dailies and weeklies were in circulation, some of a very high caliber; the quality of their writing and the breadth of their opinions are striking. And then suddenly, abruptly—silence.

The date 22 September 1972 marks the last day of effectively every Filipino newspaper in the archives. Martial law had been declared, and the extraordinary ferment of the preceding period was over. The papers, as well as the radio and television stations, all ceased under executive fiat only to reemerge later, a quiescent media operated by the cronies of the dictator. It was not just the media, however, that were silenced. The streets fell silent as well. On 21 September, fifty thousand people had gathered in Plaza Miranda to denounce the threat of martial law. The day after it was declared, no one assembled and no one rallied; the nation seemingly acquiesced. Alfred McCoy wrote, “In declaring martial law . . . the president would ask the Filipino people to trade their democracy for stability. By their silence and compliance, the majority would tacitly accept his Faustian bargain.”1 That there was silence is irrefutable, but what was its origin? Was it truly tacit consent and the trading of democracy for stability?

Martial law came as a surprise to no one. It was easily the most anticipated event of the decade. People had been warning of it, advocating it, and denouncing

it in the daily press and in mass protests since before the First Quarter Storm of January to March 1970, and yet the opposition to martial law, which had a mass following among workers and youths, was utterly unprepared. It was, above all, this lack of political preparation that allowed Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law. The responsibility for this rests squarely with the Communist parties of the Philippines, which tied the mass opposition to dictatorship to the interests of rival sections of the ruling elite, all of whom were vying to impose military rule.

The historian Donald Berlin details how “the roots of martial law lay in the Philippines’ long colonial experience and in the first decades of independence” and describes it as “a natur al part of the fabric of the Philippine past.”2 The 1935 Philippine constitution clothed the exigencies of US colonial rule in the gaudy, scanty trappings of democracy. The spirit of the country’s democr atic traditions, hard-won in mass anticolonial strug gles, never touched parchment. The Americans ensured that military dictatorship was written into the legal code and that trial by jury was not. Article VII, Section 10, granted the executive branch the power to “suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Philippines or any part thereof under Mar tial Law.” The most basic democratic rights, including that of habeas corpus, the right to challenge unlawful detention, could be stripped away by presidential fiat. Berlin argues that martial law under Marcos was a return to the normal character of civilian-militar y relations that had been established during the colonial period. In this he errs. While the seed of military rule had been planted by the office of the US governor general, the Marcos dictatorship was not the atavistic reemergence of a prior mode of rule. Martial law in 1972 was something qualitatively new and was an expression of global developments.

The impulse to impose military rule had existed within the ruling class since the formal granting of independence in 1946. Plots to that end had been dr awn up by Elpidio Quirino, Carlos Garcia, and Diosdado Macapagal during their terms of office, but none of them succeeded. What distinguished Marcos’s machinations from those of his predecessors was neither his cleverness nor his will to power, but rather the international situation of social and economic crisis. Explosive class strug gles erupted around the globe from the middle of the 1960s to the middle of the 1970s, and the First Quarter Storm of Manila was presaged in the streets of Paris and followed in those of Athens. It is in this context that we see the rise of dictatorship as the preferred mode of bourgeois rule. Suharto and Marcos, Pinochet and Park shared a common geopolitical DNA. Washington facilitated and propped up these br utal regimes. Moscow and Beijing, looking to secure advantage against each other, followed suit. Moscow supported Suharto; Beijing, Pinochet.

The postwar order was collapsing. The restabilization of capitalism in the wake of the Second World War, funded by Washington and carried out on terms that it dictated, had established a temporary equilibrium that rested above all on the unprecedented level of global economic dominance exercised by one nation—the United States. This equilibrium could not be sustained. The economies of Europe and Japan, so necessary as buffers against both the Communist bloc and working-class unrest, had to be rebuilt, and the buffers rapidly became rivals. The hegemony of Washington was built on an economic superiority that, as the 1950s aged, eroded and was sustained by the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which toppled, installed, and propped up leaders around the globe. The massive export of US capital, in conjunction with the establishment of the gold-backed US dollar as the world currency, gave a monetary expression to the relative decline of American capitalism in the early 1960s. Washington’s shrinking stake in the global economy could be assayed in gold at the rate of thirty-five dollars to the ounce and measured by its inability to pay. A crisis was in the offing, and the palace intrigues and little wars of US intelligence could no longer sustain its rule. The year 1965 was the tipping point. Economic dominance had eroded under US hegemony, and the entire edifice threatened to collapse. New forms of rule were required, a mass deployment of the military and a vast apparatus of social repression— war and dictatorship, Vietnam and Indonesia.

At stake in this violent rebalancing were not simply US interests. Capitalism around the globe, from the financial speculations in London to the sugar plantations on Negros, had been rebuilt out of the ashes of the war on the scaffolding of Bretton Woods. The sharp balance of payments crisis in Washington expressed the rot pervading the entire structure; the scaffolding groaned ominously. The British pound sterling was devalued in 1967, and in March of the next year, banks closed in the face of the gold crisis. A two-tier fiction was established by an emergency summit of world banks on 17 March: central banks would honor the thirty-five dollar convertibility; all other dealings would follow the free market price of gold. The transoms and braces had been removed. Massive inflation and a mad scramble to secure profits followed; the living standards of the working class around the globe were slashed to the bone. In August 1971, US president Richard Nixon ended dollar convertibility, and the framework of the postwar order collapsed.3

A component of the postwar hegemony of Washington was the entirely subservient and dependent economy that it chartered of its former colony, the Philippines. Under the ter ms established in par ticular by the Bell Trade Act (1946) and the Laurel-Langley Agreement (1955), the Philippine economy was

tied to the United States as a source of cheap raw materials and a market for finished goods. As the undisputed dominance of the US dollar declined and then spiraled into crisis, Filipino capitalists scr ambled to secure their interests, seeking new markets and the renegotiation of the Laurel-Langley Agreement.

Crisis entailed unrest. Profits were imperiled and needed to be secured through the increased exploitation of workers. The ghetto uprisings in the United States of 1964–65, brutally suppressed, presaged a threatening f uture for world capitalism. Antiwar demonstrations followed. By 1968, the French working class had shut down the country in the largest general strike in history. As the new decade opened, these tensions compounded as the cost of basic necessaries soared; the price of rent and food expanded beyond the reach of an average worker’s pay.4 Immense social strug gles returned to the fore, and the question of revolution was in the air. This was sharply expressed in the Philippines. Mass anger at the brutality of the US war in Vietnam combined with rapidly worsening living conditions to produce a palpable sense that an explosion was imminent.5 In August 1967, Marshall Wright of the National Security Council wrote to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, “It would be nearly impossible to overestimate the gravity of the problems with which our next ambassador to Manila must deal. It has become common-place for people knowledgeable on the Philippines to predict a vast social upheaval in the near f uture. There is widespread talk that the current president will be the last popularly elected Philippine chief executive. Many high-level American officials consider the Philippines to be the most serious and the most bleak threat that we face in Asia.”6

The rival sections of the ruling class, and their leading political representatives, agreed on the need for authoritarian rule, but they could not peaceably select the permanent occupant of the presidential palace of Malacañang. As Marcos took office as president in 1966, the quiet measured steps toward dictatorship commenced. The more astute observers, particularly the young opposition senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, noted this and began preparations of their own. By 1967, the imminent end of popular elections was “widespread talk” among the bourgeoisie. In August 1969, the economic crisis broke: an irremediable balance of payments deficit, massive inflation, and a devastating rice shortage. Months later, Marcos secured reelection, trouncing his opponent and becoming the first incumbent president to retain office in the postcolonial period. With their profits and political offices at stake, the opposition tur ned murderous. Social crisis and political crisis aligned; the cur tain lifted on the drama of dictatorship.

Nixon took office deeply concerned that the United States had overextended itself in Vietnam; neither the bud get nor public opinion would sustain the United States’ current presence in Asia. The Nixon Doctrine, announced in

July 1969, sought to uphold Washington’s interests in the region while reducing its overhead by using targeted aid that “deliberately facilitated the construction and consolidation of repressive, exclusionary regimes in Southeast Asia.”7 Thus, when Marcos imposed martial law, the United States tripled its military aid to the Philippines.8 The mantr a of modernization theory that economic development is the foundation of political stability, Camelot’s vision for the Third World, was upended. Political stability—authoritarian r ule—was the bedrock to which existing economic interests would anchor. The United States boarded up the showcase of democracy in Asia.

Here the tale twists. The Soviet Union and China, in open conflict with each other, shifted policy in the same period in a manner akin to Nixon. Moscow began to promote the Non-Capitalist Path of Development, and Beijing the Three Worlds Theory. These were marketing pitches, theory as ad copy. They touted the geopolitical reorientations of the national bureaucracies in their pursuit of friendly relations with autocrats. The incentives they offered were extended through rival national Communist parties—in the Philippines, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) and Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). These parties proved instrumental in the imposition of dictatorship.

It was a profoundly contradictory affair, bitterly ironic in its development and tragic in its denouement. Communist Party leaders and anti-Communist politicos allied; US imperialism and the Soviet bloc aligned, hostile forces drawn together in plots against democracy. The Moscow-oriented PKP terrorized Manila with bombings, secretly coordinated with Marcos’s military, to justify the imposition of dictatorship. The Beijing-aligned CPP worked with forces tied to the CIA in an attempt to install a rival faction of the capitalist class—similarly bent on dictatorship—by coup d’état. The central pretext for martial law, cited by both Washington and Marcos, was the danger of Communism, and yet martial law was imposed with the support of a Communist party and with the backing of the Soviet Union. How does one untangle this snarl of contradictions?

The opportunism and duplicity of individual leaders doubtless played a role, but it possessed an accidental character, flotsam on the deeper currents of history. A satisfying explanation must account for why there were two Communist parties and not one. It must be rooted in concrete social developments in the Philippines and yet establish why diverging political tendencies in the country found their interests aligned with the positions articulated in the geopolitical rivalry of Moscow and Beijing. Finally, the explanation must, in a logical, causal fashion, demonstrate why these supposedly Marxist tendencies, when refracted through the prism of social upheaval and dictatorship, illuminated the interests of rival factions of the ruling elite. The answer lies in the program of Stalinism. A historical explanation is necessary.

stalinism

The 1917 October revolution created the world’s first workers state—a transitional form, no longer capitalist but not yet socialist. The questions posed and ideas raised by this revolution gripped the political imag ination of the twentieth century. Russian Social Democracy—both its Menshevik and Bolshevik wings— g rappled with the relationship between bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions.9 Georgii Plekhanov, head of the Mensheviks, argued as far back as the 1880s that Russian capitalism’s belated development would necessarily limit a revolution to measures deemed bourgeois and democratic in character, including the overthrow of the czar, the creation of the institutions of democracy, and the ending of feudal relations in agriculture. The objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution did not yet exist in Russia. Only when capitalism had adequately advanced could this second stage of revolution begin. The historically circumscribed character of the first stage assigned a progressive role to a section of the capitalist class; this was, after all, their revolution. The task of the working class in this first stage was to give critical support to the capitalists in their progressive strug gles.10

Plekhanov’s formulas, for all their clarity of thought, remained of an abstract and schematic character. The defeated revolution of 1905 tested his conceptions and showed them wanting. Confronted by a militant general strike of the working class and the formation of soviets, the bourgeoisie retreated; its right wing (the Oktobrists) supported the government crackdown, and its left wing (the Cadets) abandoned the call for a constituent assembly.11 That year, in the thick of developments, Vladimir Lenin elaborated what became the guiding principle of the Bolsheviks until April  1917. The agrarian question, to be resolved through the seizure and nationalization of the estates, was the central problem of the democr atic revolution. These were bourgeois and not socialist measures, Lenin insisted, and yet the capitalist class, tied to landed property and threatened by the growing force of the working class, would oppose all measures of expropriation. History had moved on; the bourgeoisie would no longer play any progressive role. What was needed was the “democr atic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”12 Lenin’s phrase possessed a certain ambivalence, a half step between worlds. The bourgeoisie were excluded, but their separate stage remained.

Leon Trotsky, head of the Petersburg Soviet in 1905, imprisoned in 1906, brought the question to its logical conclusion in his article “The Results of the Revolution and Its Prospects.”13 The insistence on the exclusively democr atic character of the revolution artificially constrained the organically developing strug g les of the working class within the limits of a historically

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