Between provincial independence and an “Asian central government”

The chapter surveys uses of the “Monroe Doctrine” and associated political slogans in East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Expanding on previous research, which has focused on uses of the Monroe Doctrine for imperialist purposes, the present chapter shows that East Asian actors repurposed the idea “America for the Americans” not only on a continental but also on various national and subnational levels and used it to propose novel models of vertical and horizontal political organization. The Monroe Doctrine was an ambivalent instrument: it could serve imperialist ambitions or empower lower-level political units to resist external intervention. Provincialists maintained that provinces belonged to their own inhabitants and should be the primary unit of identification. Yet, provincial Monroe Doctrines aimed not merely at the formation of provincial nationalisms: in most regions of China, intellectuals envisaged that their provinces would form a federative China with other provinces, eventually creating a nested modular nationalism in which independent lower-level units would coalesce into more cohesive higher-level units, up to pan-Asianist ideas. The chapter also introduces other appropriations of the Monroe Doctrine, most notably the attempt to carve out a space of autonomy for Taiwan within the Japanese Empire.