In want of a nation: State, institutions and globalization in Taiwan

This dissertation has two goals. On the theoretical level, it intends to explain why so many people are “in want of” a nation at a time when the significance and efficacy of the nation-state is open to question due to the impacts of globalization. On the case level, it intends to analyze recent nationalist politics in Taiwan, which has been characterized by puzzles, paradoxes and oddities. Employing an institutionalist approach with a global perspective, this study highlights “institutions” and “global/international contexts” as two key nexuses of analysis. Institutions of the nation are classified into civic-territorial and ethno-cultural types, while globalization is analyzed in terms of transnational flows of mobile subjects and objects. The central argument holds that Taiwan's nationalist politics has deep roots in institutional structures, which have resulted in intrinsic predicaments and external crises. The “supra-state nation” of the Republic of China (ROC) maintained by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) state has made the national question endemic to Taiwan due to the incongruence between civic-territorial and entho-cultural institutions. Furthermore, both sets of institutions have undergone deepening crises in global/international settings after 1971 when the ROC was expelled from the United Nations. The impacts of globalization have been Janus-faced. On the one hand, intensified global interconnectedness and interdependence has made the ROC's institutional crises widespread and less tolerable. On the other hand, globalization has also opened up new opportunities in that economic leverage and the universalist idea of human rights have empowered both the state and the non-state nationalists in their efforts of pursuing nationhood, albeit their imaginings of the nation have been mutually conflicting.; The theoretical relevance of this case study is understood in the light of Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Roy Bhaskar's critical realism. By “making troubles” with our taken-for-granted classification system, the Taiwanese case helps us scrutinize those institutional prescriptions of “banal nationalism,” which have otherwise gone unnoticed and undertheorized. Nationalism in its institutionalized form has constituted the “reality” of our world through the ubiquity and promiscuity of mutually-implicating institutions, which, in turn, explains why nationalism/nation-states are unlikely to diminish even in this global era.