Where Exceptionalism Collides with Universalism…                                    

Jie-Hyun Lim (Hanyang University)

A frequent misunderstanding of nationalism is that nationalism is national. This is not entirely wrong in that nationalism is supposed to haunt the nation state. But a nationalist imagination can be fed only in a transnational space. Marc Bloch’s assertion that ‘all history is comparative history’ hints at the transnationality of the nationalist imagination, for comparative history throws lights on the peculiarities of a given national history and, thus helps to essentialize ‘the national’. National history itself is a product of worldwide cultural interactions and transnational discourses, which demands ‘an attempt at a globalized (not total) description’. It would thus be more appropriate to keep in mind the configuration of national and transnational history, not least because it is in this transnational space that one can figure out the strategic location of the historiographical exceptionalism. Comparative history frequently, although not necessarily, presupposes a hierarchical order of comparison in which the uniqueness of each nation is allegedly based on its presumed location in a linear developmental trajectory of a Eurocentric ‘History’.

Originally, exceptionalism resulted from Eurocentrism. Presuming that rationalism, science, equality, freedom, human rights and industrialism promulgated by the European Enlightenment are the unique by-products of European civilization, this European exceptionalism justified itself by showcasing its self-generating modernization in comparison with the ‘Rest’ for its reliance on the transferred modernization. To that European exceptionalism, non-European historians responded by appealing to universalism. In the ‘peripheries,’ the historian’s task has often been to find symmetrical equivalents to European history. As a consequence, what they repeatedly found throughout investigations of their indigenous history was a history of ‘lack’ in comparison with Europe. Both the nationalist and Marxist non-European historians have tried to overcome this sense of ‘lack’ by finding the missing ingredients such as the middle class, cities, political rights, rationalism and, above all, the capitalist mode of production in their own history. In the domain of historiography, the ‘West’ hailed exceptionalism while the ‘East’ stuck to universalism.

Despite its seemingly antagonistic outlook, exceptionalism does not exclude universalism but cohabits with that. For example the exceptionalist-looking German Sonderweg thesis stood at a crossing of the historiographical exceptionalism and universalism. A postcolonial reading of the Sonderweg thesis would reveal that Sonderweg presupposes the ‘West’ as the normal path to modernization and disregards the ‘East’ as the mere deviation from the normal development of the modernization process. If Britain and France constituted ‘West’ by themselves vis-á-vis Germany, Germany had to refer to France as its own putative ‘West’. The ‘exceptional’ East can exist only on a par with the ‘normal’ West. If one pushes Norbert Elias’s division of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ to its logical conclusion, culture was Germany’s ideological weapon to stand against the superior French civilization. Russian Slavophiles’, Indian nationalists’ and many a peripheral nationalist elites’ discourse of the superiority of the spiritual domain over the material domain occupy the same strategic position as the German Sonderweg. Viewed from the transnational context, Sonderweg remains no more the German peculiarity. The Sonderweg thesis in various ways contributed to essentializing national culture and identity and thus endorsing the racial/ethnic divisions engendered by European exceptionalism.

The ‘East’ and ‘West’ are not geo-positivistic but relational concepts. The ‘East’ and ‘West’ are always in flux. Germany represented the ‘West’ in the Polish discourse of ‘Studia Zachodnie’ (Western Studies) while it signified the ‘East’ vis-á-vis France. Poland signified ‘East’ in German ‘Ostforschung’ (Eastern Studies) while it insisted on its ‘Westernness’ vis-á-vis its eastern neighbors. One can find the discursive parallel between the competing historiographies of Japan and Korea. Japanese modern historiography aimed at removing the Japanese image of the Orient by capturing European elements in Japanese history and inventing its own Orient of China and Chosǒn (Korea). When historicism changed the vertical evolutionary time into the horizontal space of an ‘imaginative geography,’ Japan discovered that it lagged behind the unilinear development scheme of the world history, and it had to be placed in the Orient in comparison with Europe. By inventing Japan’s own Orient, however, Japanese historians could let China and Chosǒn take the place of Japan, and allow Japan to join the West in an imaginative geography. In Korean historical discourses, it was mostly Japan that represented the putative West.

Exceptionalism is not limited to the domain of the historiographical discourses. The exceptionalist mentalité haunts beyond the confines of the academic language and is entrenched in the everyday language. Any visiting historian is familiar with the host country’s outcry that “our own history is very exceptional. A foreign historian, an outsider to the community of the exceptional suffering, would never ever understand our own tragic history!” Engaging a historical conversation with ordinary Poles in either street cafes or train compartments, frequently I found our conversation running into such an exceptionalist cul-de-sac. In so far as I am not entitled to share that Polish experience of unique sufferings, over the Polish history I cannot argue with Poles who, by their inherited suffering, are born to understand their own abysmal past. Very often ‘Western’ historians have found themselves trapped into a similar exceptionalism during their research work or teaching in Korea.

Once alienated from the communal suffering, historians are deprived of ‘empathy’ as their ontological and emotional engagement. The colloquial exceptionalism of the ‘peripheries,’ and especially of the victimized nations, often reinforced by the uniqueness discourse, tends to sacralize collective memories and thus effectively block the skeptical and critical eyes of the outsiders. For any individual victims whose beloved ones were persecuted, tortured and murdered in the tragic history such as genocide, that experience is inherently unique. Perhaps individual experience has the non-transferable subjectivity for interpersonal transmission. As Tzvetan Todorov admits, a certain degree of sacralization of memories is inevitable for individuals. Sacralized memory makes the past into a unique event incommensurable with the others’ experiences. Of course every historical experience is singular. But historical singularity does not necessarily insist on uniqueness.

The sacralizing tendency of the colloquial exceptionalism of the ‘East’ is in stark contrast with the universalist ambition of the historiographical exceptionalism of the ‘West’. But one should not be hoaxed at this seemingly competing landscape. Both exceptionalist and universalist discourses are the head and tail of the same coin that is a nationalist phenomenology, which not only informs but actually determines the construction of historical narratives. If competing national histories of East Asia form the antagonistic complicity at the ideological level, exceptionalism and universalism are complicit at the epistemological level to make the Eurocentrism alive. 

Jie-Hyun Lim is professor of History and Director of Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea. He has been working on the comparative/transnational history of Eastern Europe and East Asia with a focus on nationalism, socialist irredentism and historiography. He is now editing 4 volumes of the ‘mass dictatorship’ series, as a topography of the twentieth century dictatorships with Palgrave Macmillan.

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