ABSTRACT
In his discussion of Maruyama Masao’s Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (1969), Naoki Sakai presents an alternative that would account for the modern difference, or the difference of modernity. In Sakai’s rendering, Maruyama opposes a premodern “missionary-style universalism” to the modern and largely European notion of nationalism that organized the later prevalent interstate system on a juridical basis of political equality:
Nationalism, the guiding principle for the modern nation-state, and its essential moment, the concept of “sovereignty,” are based on the premise that sovereign nation-states coexist on the same plane as equals, even if they might on occasion endorse the state’s unconditional adventurism: by no means are they compatible with the centrism of the civilized center versus the savage periphery, which would never admit the true center of the world but for itself.
