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Since the mid-nineteenth century, when Asians began immigrating to the U.S. West in significant numbers, they have played an integral role in developing and shaping the region through such activities as mining, building the transcontinental railroad, farming, creating businesses and communities, and participating in transnational capital flows that connect Asia and the western states. While they have played a constitutive role in the region, Asian Americans have historically been marginalized and excluded from full political and cultural citizenship in the U.S. West and the nation through legal, political, and social means that target their racial and cultural difference. This marginalization and exclusion are exhibited in the relative invisibility of Asian Americans in prominent narratives of the U.S. West and their stereotyping in much U.S. western literature. As Hsuan Hsu asserts, “Although historically the largest concentration of Asian Americans has been in the western states, they have been written out of dominant narratives of the region. When they are represented, it is often through stereotypes such as the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ Charlie Chan, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ the model minority, or the laundrymen, prostitutes, and cooks that infuse western settings with ‘local color.’” Asian American writers address this contradictory situation – of being constitutive yet liminal – in literary works that invoke dominant narratives of the U.S. West about such topics as mobility, freedom, land, gender, and domesticity and that demonstrate the limitations of these western myths for Asian American subjects. Asian American literature also puts western literature in a global, hemispheric context by highlighting the relationship between the U.S. West and the Pacific Rim and the transpacific ties of urban and suburban spaces. This essay examines how selected Asian American literary works create and shape as well as affirm and critique discourses of the U.S. West. Constriction and Mobility Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 frontier thesis locates the distinctive American character in westward movement across the continent. As Sau-ling Wong observes, the frontier thesis links together several key American myths: “[It] regards the availability of free land – presupposing unconstrained mobility to take advantage of it – coupled with equality of opportunity, to be crucial determinants of American character and the source of American democracy.” For Asians in the United States, however, presumed basic American rights such as citizenship, the ability to own land, and freedom of mobility were limited from early on in their history in the nation.

Introduction The transnational production of Japan as a post-imperial nation The Japanese people are often accused of their inability or unwillingness to properly remember and atone for the atrocities they committed as a colonial empire, especially during the Second World War. In the author's view this ethical assessment is fundamentally correct; yet what is being emphasized in this chapter is that the problem of forgetfulness or at least insufficient remorse in post-imperial Japan was not produced by the Japanese people alone, but was rather the result of a mutually convenient transnational collaboration of Japanese nationalists/conservatives with the US led advanced capitalist nations who were victorious in the Second World War. Moreover, this failure to adequately address the matter of Japan's imperialist past has an intimate relationship to the transnational refusal to remember that Japan's imperialism was both enabled by, and enabling the imperialism of the American and European empires. As an entryway into discussing Japan as a transnationally produced post-imperial nation – and by the latter the author means a nation which carries the weight of the imperial past despite the dismantling of its former empire – the author would like to begin by listing some of the major flash points in the national and transnational field of memories that continue to trigger debates about Japan as a forgetful and irresponsible former imperial power. Of course, the author cannot list them all, let alone analyse them in any depth, but here are some of the most hotly contested matters in Japan, East Asia, and North America. The Nanjing Massacre The ‘comfort women’ or sexual slavery issue The territorial disputes (especially Dokto/Takeshima/Liancourt Rocks and Daioyu/Taioyutai/Senkaku) The status of former colonial subjects now residing in Japan, mostly Koreans The status of former colonial subjects who were mobilized as labourers, soldiers, sailors, or military personnel Japanese biological and chemical warfare testing on live human beings. […]

In the space of thirty years the circumstances of Australian nationhood changed irrevocably. The country's strategic dependence on Britain drew it into two wars that both originated in European rivalry and together exhausted European supremacy. The first sapped the political stability of the combatants and cut the flows of trade and investment that sustained their prosperity. The second destroyed their empires, leaving an impoverished rump of a continent divided and bound by the two superpowers to its east and west. Britain, a victor in both wars, was perhaps the most diminished by their cumulative effects and Australia, as the largest British outpost in the Pacific, also incurred heavy losses. The fading of imperial certainties created doubt and division. The nation-building project faltered under the weight of debt and increased dependence. Only as the second war spread to the Pacific, and Australia found itself isolated and in danger of invasion, came a belated recognition of the need to reconstruct the nation for changed circumstances. Those who survived the first of these wars knew it as the Great War; they had never experienced such a catastrophe and could not imagine that another would follow so soon. Europe had enjoyed a century of peace since the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars – although European powers waged repeated wars of colonial conquest, at home there were only occasional and limited conflicts that were quickly settled by a decisive encounter of professional troops. The Great War involved mass conscript armies and absorbed the entire resources of the combatants in a prolonged contest of attrition that lasted from 1914 to 1918. It was sparked in the Balkans, a powder-keg of imperial and national rivalry, when a Serb terrorist assassinated a member of the Austrian royal family as he toured an outlying province. Since Germany supported Austria-Hungary in its ultimatum to Serbia, and Britain and France joined with Russia to resist them, the war extended from the Atlantic seaboard to Europe's eastern borderlands. Soon it drew in Turkey and Italy. The United States came late, but the global reach of the combatants made this a world as well as a continental war. After Germany overran Belgium and repulsed a Russian advance, the initial movement of the combatants bogged down in static trench warfare. On land and sea the application of industrial technology to military conflict gave defenders supremacy over attackers.

Introduction: ???things can only get bitter??? In recent years a number of important postcolonial-inspired readings of post-Cold War IR theory have emerged, arguing that the mainstream has promoted an imperialist vision of world politics. In this and the next chapter I want to push this reading along several notches. Three points are of immediate significance. First, I argue that a significant strand of Western-realism also exhibits an anti-imperialist politics, specifically the cultural realism of Huntington and Lind that I examine at the end of this chapter. Second, in focusing on what I call ‘Western-realism’ in this chapter and ‘Western-liberalism’ in the next – two generic theoretical conglomerates that comprise a variety of component theories – I reveal how they rest on different, albeit complementary, Eurocentric metanarratives, thereby providing a more nuanced picture of mainstream Western neo-imperialist international theory. And third, I argue that whereas Eurocentrism was subliminal and hidden away in the 1945–89 era, it returns in its manifest version after the end of the Cold War. The Western-liberal wing of mainstream international theory relies on a paternalist Eurocentrism that sings the world into existence with the idiom that ‘things can only get better’, and that through paternalist interventionism the East can be culturally converted along Western civilizational lines in order to make the world a better place for all peoples (as I explain in the next chapter). This optimistic and ‘progressive’ vision is countered by Western-realism which sings the world into existence with the idiom that ‘things can only get bitter’, such that the West’s only option is to imperially contain the ‘new barbaric threat’ to civilization and world order. This approach is fuelled and galvanized by a pronounced degree of Western angst and relative degrees of pessimism concerning the challenges allegedly confronting Western civilization. This sensibility is characterized by Samuel Huntington: that ‘this new world is a fearful world and Americans have no choice but to live with fear if not in fear’ (Huntington 2004: 341). Moreover, the title of a significant piece by Daniel Pipes relayed this angst into the Western imagination: ‘The Muslims are Coming! The Muslins are Coming!’ (Pipes 1990). These statements and many others like them reflect the politics of Western anxiety and insecurity that underpin ‘offensive Eurocentric’ and ‘defensive Eurocentric’ international theory.

Introduction: critiquing imperialism, defending the West In certain respects this and the next chapter that cover the 1914–45 era take on a special significance given that this period is conventionally held by IR scholars to be that of the discipline’s ‘infant stage’. For it is a now conventional axiom that the discipline was born in 1919, and that it was furnished with the noble moral purpose of finding ways to solve the universal problem of war for all. Such a purpose derives from the belief that the ‘infant child’ was conceived on the blood-stained battlefields of Europe and whose mother had gone through an extremely traumatic 48-month gestation period. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E. H. Carr in his classic text The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1946/1981), even if it has only been internalized within the historiographical self-imagination of the discipline more recently. In this and the next chapter I want to contribute to the now vibrant revisionist literature, which produces an alternative account and understanding of what might better be called the thirty years’ crisis (i.e., 1914–45). I do so by making five specific revisionist arguments, which hinge on the pivot of my core claim that our conventional image of the birth of IR and of its ‘interwar infancy’ is to an important, though not complete, extent an exercise in myth-making that serves to make IR scholars feel good about themselves and their discipline.

Fleets in European seas Japan played a minor, albeit advantageous role, in the First World War, over-running the German colonies in the Pacific Islands and the Concession on China's Shantung Peninsula. The navy patrolled the Pacific and Indian Oceans and, after much persuasion from the allies, extended its sway into the Mediterranean. Ironically, given Australian attitudes towards Japan, it was the Japanese fleet that protected the troopships conveying the Australian and New Zealand armies to the Middle East. The demands of war greatly stimulated Japanese industry and available markets expanded with the temporary eclipse of British and German competitors. When the world's nations gathered to formalise the peace treaty and create a League of Nations, Japan was accorded the status of one of the great powers alongside the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy, each with two representatives on the Committee. Still virtually invisible to Charles Pearson in 1893, Japan had yet, in a quarter of a century, seemed to fulfil his prophesy about the challenge to the West posed by the rise of the ‘yellow races’. The Japanese Empire had been invited into alliances with European powers, was ‘represented by fleets in European seas’, ‘circumscribing the industry of Europeans’ and invited to participate as an equal in international conferences. Japanese race discourse The long crusade to achieve equality with the Western powers appeared to have been finally successful.

‘The 24 th of July 1905 is a cornerstone in European politics’, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared in a letter to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia on the 27th of the same month, ‘and turns over a new leaf in the history of the world’. The occasion to which Wilhelm referred was the signing of a treaty of alliance between Germany and Russia by himself and Nicholas at Bjorko, off the southern coast of Finland. The treaty, although restricted to Europe, would have had the effect of neutralising the Dual Alliance between France and Russia which had been concluded in 1894, thus freeing Germany from the danger of a war on two fronts. In addition, it was designed to pave the way for a continental league, involving the participation of all the Great Powers of the European mainland, including France, against the British Empire. The aim of the treaty was therefore to effect a diplomatic revolution that would have left Germany with de facto mastery of the European continent. The Kaiser would have achieved the objective that he had set himself early in his reign, when he had declared to his closest friend and political confidant Philipp Count zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld that the ‘fundamental principle’ of his European policy was ‘ leadership in the peaceful sense – a sort of Napoleonic supremacy’. Wilhelm was therefore correct in relation to the potential importance of the agreement which he had concluded with the Tsar.