Letter From the Editors

Welcome to the August 2023 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

This month, we focus on the still-heavy legacy of colonialism in the Asia-Pacific, from the Central Asian states struggling to reclaim their pre-Soviet identities to the imperialist notions of marking out territorial claims in the South China Sea. It’s impossible to overstate the impact colonialism had on states in the Asia-Pacific, which still echoes today in core aspects of statebuilding and national identity from Kazakhstan to the Paracel Islands, India to Hong Kong.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the states of Central Asia became technically independent countries but clung tightly to the Soviet roots of their political systems. The Soviet-era shame of not being Russian enough persisted, with the Russian language prized as a mark of education and high culture, as well as an economic necessity. Meanwhile, local culture was seen as backward. But as Dr. Erica Marat writes in our cover story, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine energized and broadened decolonial discussions that had long been relegated to academic circles. Marat, a professor at the College of Security Affairs of the National Defense University, charts decolonial trends in Central Asia, encompassing both progress and pushback, and concludes that whatever happens, grassroots initiatives to rethink the Soviet past will invariably change Central Asia’s relations with Russia.

Next, Florence Mok, a historian and professor at Nanyang Technological University, explores the odd phenomenon of “colonial nostalgia” in Hong Kong. Over the past decade, as Hong Kong becomes farther removed in time from British rule, some Hong Kongers have taken to holding up the colonial period as a high-water mark for the city – usually in contrast to the erosion of rights seen under Beijing’s rule. But as Mok demonstrates, these narratives bear little resemblance to the reality of British colonial rule, which was neither as politically enlightened nor as peaceful and prosperous as it is imagined today.

Colonial legacies also shaped the territorial disputes wracking the South China Sea today, as Bill Hayton, an associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House, details. For most of the colonial period, neither the invading imperialists nor the native empires took much interest in the islets and reefs of the South China Sea. That began to change in the 19th century, when imperial competition between France, Britain, China, and Japan seized on the various maritime features as a means of exerting maritime control and proving sovereignty – much in the same way the disputes still function today. Hayton traces the evolution from disinterest to halfhearted claims and eventually to the virulently nationalistic narratives that mark the disputes today.

And finally, we turn to South Asia where India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh all inherited over-centralized state monoliths with unitary ideologies of sovereignty from their colonial predecessor, the British Empire. The post-colonial state in South Asia, Ayesha Jalal writes, perpetuated many of the colonial state’s authoritarian features – to the detriment of post-colonial political development. Even in India, “the world’s largest democracy,” colonial legacies permeate the state, from the defining of majority and minority along religious lines (and the demonization of those who challenge the status quo) to the continuation of colonial-era “lawless laws.” Jalal, the Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University, argues that “Freedom from the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule needs to be re-imagined 75 years after formal political independence.”

We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more in the following pages.