Nation, Knowledge, and Imagined Futures: Science, Technology, and Nation-Building, Post-1945

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With the collapse of colonial power beginning in 1945 and the emergence of new sovereign states – by 1965 the membership of the UN had increased from 51 to 117 – the post-World War II era affirmed the primacy of the nation-state, and bestowed legitimacy on local elites who secured the power to govern, and on their representatives who defended their sovereignty in international affairs. Nation-building became a watchword of the era, not just in terms of development efforts sponsored by cold war hegemons, but as an emblem of peoples’ own quest for self-determination, national liberation, and prosperity in whatever forms those always-contested objectives might take. Science and technology, emerging from WWII as major forces for destruction – and liberation – propelled their practitioners into positions of influence, and granted them new and heady access to the corridors of power at home and abroad. Political elites who sought to take advantage of the new opportunities created by the changing world order to refashion the identities and trajectories of their nations turned to the transformative potential of science and technology to fill out the contours of imagined futures. This volume examines how this process unfolded by exploring the diverse meanings and projects attached to science and technology in contexts tied to nation-building, state formation, and the long-term struggles of societies to meet human hopes and needs within the confines of the nation-state structure and a contentious international order.¹

A great deal has of course been written about the engagement of science and technology with state power after World War II. Existing accounts have tended to concentrate on the quests for advanced weaponry, high technology, and large scientific establishments that came to define the symbolic and literal meanings of power in the nuclear age. Cold war competition has loomed large in these histories, given the significance of atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, rockets, and satellites as quintessential markers of security, modernity, and national prowess. Powerful states deployed such dual-use systems both to defend the realm and as forms of technological spectacle intended to secure allegiances in a dangerously divided and fluid international order. More recent scholarship on development has also drawn attention to agriculture, public health, scientific and technical aid, industrial policy, and myriad forms of social scientific investigation as modes of endeavor tied to cold war objectives.²

This work has shed much light on the scientific and technological drivers of the global reach of the superpowers, particularly from the U.S. side. We know less about how newly empowered national elites, and their ‘technocratic’ collaborators and lobbyists, called upon science and technology to express their aspirations for social improvement (sometimes understood as ‘development’). Filled with optimism about the universal potential of science and technology to enhance the human condition, major fractions of national elites sought to bend them to local needs in order to secure political stability, improved economic prospects, and a refashioned identity in a world rent with conflicts that were simultaneously local, national, and global.

The essays in this volume take national contexts of resistance to the imperialisms of both colonialism and the cold war as their starting points. Nation-building took place amid the upheaval of cold war superpower rivalry, struggles for national independence, colonial and neocolonial assertions of power, and the search for a political third way. Throughout the world, ideas of nationhood served to unite, integrate, and manifest diverse forms of affiliation, organization, and competition. As Benedict Anderson so effectively articulated in his classic treatise, for individuals and localized communities, the affective appeal of the nation created collective bonds and new forms of identity and community across vast geographical ranges.³ State formation also became bound up with national identity, through the explicit efforts of state builders to conflate successfully the categories of nation and nation-state and thereby establish the state as the key institutional entity for the realization of national development. Moreover, relations with bordering states and broader international circumstances shaped national claims in crucial respects, contrary to origin myths about the organic coalescence of national feeling from the supposedly eternal ties between peoples and places. In particular, the post-World War I settlement launched a shift in norms away from empires and towards an international system composed of nation-states, thereby establishing national independence as the prerequisite for recognition and participation in international affairs.⁴

Post-colonial studies has drawn particularly close attention to decolonization and struggles for national independence amid collapsing empires and the reconfiguration of power structures that produced the U.S.-Soviet conflict of the cold war. But older patterns of power also shaped the post-World War II world. Latin America, for example, has always fit uneasily in postcolonial discourses designed for the post-1945 era, given the independence of the region’s countries dating back to the early nineteenth century. Recent studies, however, have called for reconceptualizing the period from the American revolution of 1775–1783 to the emergence of independent nations throughout North, Central, and South America by the 1820s as the first post-colonial era.⁵ Moreover, anxieties about American imperial power, from the American conquest and seizure of half of Mexico’s territory in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–1848 to the frequent interventionism that defined U.S. policy in the Caribbean from the late nineteenth century onwards, combined with potential reassertions of European power in an era of high colonialism, made struggles over modernity and nation particularly fraught throughout much of Latin America long after independence.⁶ In Mexico, the relationship between technoscience, modernity, and the status of the nation has remained a perpetual conundrum, as we can see from the contributions by Gabriela Soto Laveaga and co-authors Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez in this volume.⁷ Other Latin-American nation-states have grappled similarly with the possibilities, limitations, hidden assumptions, and blinders involved in the appeal of technoscience as a means of claiming modernity, promoting nationhood, and attempting to ward off imperial incursions since the late nineteenth century, in a history that subsequently aligned the region geopolitically with the newer postcolonialisms of other parts of the world after World War II.⁸

Although the recent vogue of transnationalism has sought to diminish or even do away with the primacy of ‘nation-ness,’ no single concept better captures or refracts the multiplicity of competing global processes that have shaped states and societies throughout most of the twentieth century. As Marilyn Young has pointed out, one can decenter America in one’s head. But that ‘does not of itself create a world free of its overwhelming military and economic power […].’⁹ The same applies to the dying European empires. Indeed, the essays in this volume underscore how the global distribution of power at the end of WWII and afterwards was asymmetrical and lived as brutal reality by Vietnamese dying of hunger induced by Japanese and French policy, by Micronesians suffering the transformation of their territory into nuclear testing grounds, by Zimbabweans fighting for their freedom from white minority rule, and by Indians modernizing their country in the shadow of poverty-stricken millions.

The tormented entanglements of science, technology, and nationhood, as indicated by several of the contributions here, remind us not to romanticize the liberationist claims of national projects, even when they offered themselves as much-needed alternatives to the abuses of imperial power. As one of us has written elsewhere, the imperial and national projects have had more in common historically than their respective advocates have cared to admit. Arguably, ‘nation-building and colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted flip sides of the same coin of modernist developmentalism,’ and as much as the nation represented an alternative to colonial rule, both forms of governance shared the modern state’s drive to lay claim over peoples in distant locales and assert direct authority over their lives by making their societies legible and controllable.¹⁰ Recent studies of right-wing nationalisms in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bolivia during the 1950s and 1960s have also drawn attention to the forms of agency that tied authoritarian rule to localized commitments to nation-building, and not just cold war American imperialism.¹¹

Empires struck back with efforts to preserve colonial rule in some form well into the 1950s, and indigenous elites did not necessarily reject overtures that promised reform and greater autonomy within imperial structures.¹² The cold war further shaped a tortured dynamic between national priorities and international pressures in both imperial metropoles and newly independent states. Even with the most generous, high-minded intentions, there was, of course, no ‘one best way’ to modernize, particularly within a turbulent international environment in which diverse states and societies confronted dramatically different political, economic, and technoscientific circumstances. As the essays in this volume show, science and technology connoted very different needs and possibilities to the inhabitants of the tiny Marshall Islands or to anti-colonial insurgents in Zimbabwe-in-the-making, for example, than they did to national elites in the aspiring behemoths of China or India. Amid widely varying settings, the terms of the engagement between science, technology, and nation-building were sometimes set by already available knowledge that established power structures mobilized and adapted to local conditions. At the other extreme, opposition to existing or externally imposed norms, values, and structures of power drew on local knowledge to forge alternative visions of the future. Their realization called for the pursuit of diverse strategies, from staking claims to sovereignty in a postwar international system that was committed to upholding national autonomy, to bloody armed struggle when that same system collapsed under the weight of internal contradictions. Knowledge in myriad forms was essential to the performance of power in nation building and to the fashioning of ‘legitimate’ and legitimizing new national identities. Spectacular representations of advanced technologies, sophisticated exploitation of new politico-legal sources of legitimation, everyday but crucial practices of survival under bombardment – all will be found here, defining a meaning of development, improvement, modernization, liberation, call it what you will, that was built from the bottom up rather than being derived from teleological visions of the future imposed from without.

To capture the immense variety of modes of nation-building, and the multiple registers in which knowledge was deployed to that end, we have favored a multidisciplinary approach to our theme. We have also sought to range widely in space and time across the postwar globe, and to contemplate the past in ways that refine, augment, and challenge the dominant historiographical view through the cold war lens. Of course, it would not do to efface the cold war entirely: it was inscribed in weapons systems, in the transnational movement of those who developed them, and in the bodies of those who directly experienced their lethal production, testing and use. Cold war tropes also proliferated in fiction, in art, in architecture. Indeed, the papers in this volume reveal a world saturated with the material and ideological stuff of the cold war. But by adopting a pluralist approach that emphasizes perspectives outside of the immediate exigencies of global superpower conflict, and by giving primacy of place to the construction of the nation as both a political and cultural project, the essays presented here shed light on multiple purposes and cross-purposes at work that generally remain invisible in U.S.-centric histories of science, technology, and international relations.¹³ Our authors address novel questions about high politics, the nuclear age, and a diverse set of ‘nuclear nationalisms’; health, the body, and the maintenance of human life in moments of crisis, struggle, and hope; and the intersections of science, technology, and medicine with the realm of mind and national imagination.

Essays by Zuoyue Wang and Jenny Smith set the stage with state-centered analyses that highlight the intersections between science, technology, and projects of state management. Wang examines the internal contradictions and political turmoil surrounding nation-building and state formation in post-revolutionary China by examining the creation in 1956 of a long-term development plan for science and technology, while Smith’s account of famine relief efforts in the mid-1940s captures a calculating logic of the modern state that stretched across the ideological divides of colonial rule, military occupations by fascist or liberal democratic states, and Soviet governance. The papers by Stuart W. Leslie, Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez, and Lauren Hirshberg treat nuclear matters from unusual angles – the architectural representation of nuclear power as a bearer of modernity in India and Pakistan, the rejection of nuclear weapons as a leadership strategy in 1960s Mexico, and the legacy of US nuclear testing in shaping visions for national sovereignty in the Marshall Islands. The contributions of Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Clapperton Mavhunga focus on the terrain of human life and health as national and nation-building projects, whether in the form of forward-looking visions of hospitals as symbols of national progress in mid-twentieth century Mexico, or the innovative and syncretic medical practices that accompanied revolutionary national struggle in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Mavhunga’s and Hirshberg’s contributions also underscore the centrality of local knowledge and suffering in the struggle for liberation from external rule, be it waged by the guerilla movement in Rhodesia, or by the Marshallese in the Pacific, and along with Smith’s essay, provide stark reminders of the violence and desolation inflicted by statist and imperial projects in their drive to sustain legitimacy from the mid-1940s onward. Finally, Projit Bihari Mukharji’s account of the Masud Rana spy thrillers and popular geopolitics in East Pakistan in the late 1960s and early 1970s, along with Leslie’s and Soto Laveaga’s essays, move away from the material practices of power to understand how science, technology, and medicine have provided cultural resources for tapping into the promise of modernity and reinventing identity, space, and national belonging.

Other themes cut across the essays in this volume as well: the creative tension between what different historical protagonists perceived as ‘tradition’ or ‘modern,’ the roles of science and technology in nation-building beyond standard developmental accounts of large scientific and industrial infrastructures, the dynamic between national and international, and the necessary role of the international – as both a set of concrete political relations and as a conceptual frame – in constructing the nation. Architects who designed nuclear power projects in India and Pakistan, local muralists who critically celebrated new public hospitals built by a ‘welfare state’ in Mexico, and novelists in Bangladesh who excited the fears and fantasies of the local population all played a role in building new national identities that mobilized all-too familiar images to fashion modernities that broke with the past even as they recognized the importance of tradition.

Carl Becker once described the academic’s creed as the challenge to ‘think otherwise.’ We have tried to do so by taking the coupling between knowledge/power as our guiding thread – be that in the hands of imperial overlords, nationalist leaders, or the oppressed and disabused fighting for their freedom. Our authors have valorized that dyad by drawing on multiple representations of it, whether in art, architecture, literature, state practices, the practices of bush warfare, or resistance to missile testing. To combat the weight of history requires courage and imagination. To do so in the name of ‘improvement’ is to mobilize a potent instrument that carries asymmetry within it, that reorganizes power around a new pole, and that has not led automatically to a more humane existence for all, notwithstanding the ‘universal’ promise of science and technology. The diverse historical actors described in this volume, along with the authors of these essays, exemplify these tensions. We commend this collection to the reader for its geographical scope, for its multi-disciplinarity, and above all for the new and important questions that it asks about the place of science, technology, and medicine in the construction of a new world order in the decades after 1945.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the SSHRC-supported ‘Situating Science’ cluster grant, the Liu Institute for Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, the UBC Department of History, and the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech for sponsoring the workshop ‘Dark Matters II: Science and the Cold War in a Decolonizing World,’ which convened in Vancouver in September 2014. We are particularly indebted to Patty Gallivan and the rest of the Liu Institute staff for their logistical aid, and to Hank Trim, who rendered invaluable service as our conference ‘runner.’ In addition to the contributors to this volume, we are also grateful to the other workshop participants, particularly Nick Cullather for his always stimulating interventions, and also John Beatty, Jeffrey Byrne, John Di Moia, John Harriss, Alexei Kojevnikov, Steven Lee, Hiromi Mizuno, Suzanne Moon and Carla Nappi, who animated a memorable series of discussions. Finally, we thank Martin Collins for his enthusiastic support in bringing this volume to publication.

Notes

1. Consider, for example, Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb; Anderson, Nucleus and Nation; Barker, “Engineers and Political Dreams”; Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft; Krige et al., NASA in the World; McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth; Medhurst, “Atoms for Peace and Nuclear Hegemony”; Osgood, Total Cold War; Phalkey, Atomic State; and Redfield, Space in the Tropics.

2. On the history of development, particularly in the cold war era, and its blend of social knowledge and high modernism, see, for example, Latham, Modernization as Ideology; Engerman et al., Staging Growth; Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Simpson, Economists with Guns; Cullather, The Hungry World; Ekbladh, The Great American Mission; McVety, Enlightened Aid; Hecht, Entangled Geographies; and Wang, “Colonial Crossings.”

3. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

4. For examples of the assertion of national identities and strengthened conceptions of nation-ness in response to threats from perceived outsiders, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 135–6 and 138 and Winichakul, Siam Mapped, esp. chaps. 4–7. Hobsbawm, 136–8 notes the impact of the Versailles treaty in encouraging the nationalist claims of anti-colonial movements post-WWI, and the ironies involved in multiple nationalist claims that reflected imperialist divisions of territory. Consider also Timothy Mitchell’s observation about international organizations’ demands for economic statistics, particularly after World War I, and their power to turn statistical self-representation into a new national norm. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 100–01. Recent studies of social knowledge in China also underscore the extent to which the nationalism of Chinese elites from the late nineteenth century to the Republican period drew upon colonial power and foreign claims that associated modernity with medical and statistical knowledge. Lam, A Passion for Facts and Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity.

5. On the risks and pitfalls of postcolonialism as a frame for understanding the history of technoscience in Latin America, as well as the limitations of the concept of “Latin America” itself, see Medina et al., “Introduction” to Beyond Imported Magic. On recent efforts at reframing, in which the United States figures as the first post-colonial nation, see, for example, Yokota, Unbecoming British and Saler, The Settler’s Empire.

6. For example, from 1900 onward, writer José Enrique Rodó’s famous essay, Ariel, crystallized anxieties about modernity, civilization, and identity for intellectuals throughout the Spanish-speaking world in the western hemisphere. Such ruminations reflected long-term efforts to grapple with the status of Latin America in a world of imperial powers.

7. Such concerns about science, technology, and the project of the nation have resonated throughout much of Mexico’s history, whether in the context of steam engines and technological development during the era of the Porfiriato, the project of Deweyan progressive education, modernization, and the incorporation of the indigenous into the Mexican nation in the immediate post-Revolutionary decades, ambitious public health projects and their associated notions of nation-building and uplift in post-Revolutionary, 1920s Mexico, or the post-World War II effort to develop a Mexican pharmaceutical industry. Aviles-Galan, “A Todo Vapor”; Rodriguez, “The Practical Man”; Birn, “Revolution, the Scatological Way” and Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories.

8. For example, the ties between technoscience and nationhood have featured prominently in the history of medicine and public health in Latin America and the place of Rockefeller philanthropy in the development of public health in the region. See, for example Palmer, “Central American Encounters”; Brannstrom, “Polluted Soil, Polluted Souls”; Abel, “External Philanthropy and Domestic Change in Columbian Health Care” and Williams, “Nationalism and Public Health.” Consider also the case of Cuba, where after the American occupation, nominal national independence under the Platt Amendment was conditioned, in significant part, upon the Cuban government’s ability to ensure sanitary standards and satisfy American demands that the island nation not serve as a source of yellow fever outbreaks that could threaten the United States. Hence Cuban physician Carlos Finlay’s status as a national hero (and hero throughout Latin America) for his identification of the mosquito as the key vector of yellow fever, as well as the particularly prominent place of medicine and public health in the history of the Cuban state throughout the twentieth century. Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions, esp. chaps. 5–7. Diana Obregón’s account of leprosy control, state power, and aspirations for modern nationhood in Colombia in the early twentieth century also speaks to the intimate ties between public health and nation-building in Latin America. Obregón, “The State, Physicians, and Leprosy in Modern Colombia.”

9. Young, “The Age of Global Power,” 291.

10. Wang, “Colonial Crossings,” 189. For example, as Wang’s essay quickly outlines, racial hierarchy and racism were not confined to colonial and imperial governance. Notions about the necessity of racial uplift and the challenge of incorporating the indigenous into the nation strongly shaped public health and other national projects in multiple Latin American contexts. Eric Andrew Stein, in an essay on medicine, public health, and Indonesian nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, has observed that “biomedicine is itself a colonizing process” – hence its colonizing functions within nation-building contexts. Stein, “Hygiene and decolonization,” 65. James C. Scott’s somewhat unwieldly references to ‘domestic colonization’ or ‘internal colonization’ also capture the extent to which self-proclaimed projects of national belonging can be essentially colonial in form. See, for example, Scott, Seeing Like a State, chap. 2, in which practices such as the creation of cadastral maps, the imposition of surnames, and the reorganization of urban space served the common objectives of state simplification and legibility whether in colonial or ostensibly national settings. The phrase ‘domestic colonization’ appears on p. 72, and ‘internal colonization’ on p. 82.

11. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance; Miller, Misalliance; Simpson, Economists with Guns and Field, From Development to Dictatorship.

12. Frederick Cooper’s recent study of French colonialism in Africa post-1945, by contrast, points out that the transition from colonial subjugation to national autonomy did not occur overnight. Leaders in ‘francophone’ Africa, for example, sought a variety of intermediate solutions with metropolitan France immediately after WWII, including federalism, before rejecting modes of governance that circumscribed their sovereignty. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.

13. Westad, “Exploring the Histories of the Cold War.”