Asia: what's in a name?
construct without racial or cultural meaning... paradoxically, the notion of Asia strengthened the farther one moved away from it and receded as one entered into it'.[5]
Given that the legal systems covered in this book are all in jurisdictions on the eastern side of the continent of Asia, there was some exploration of recent terms used in the literature that may better describe these 11 jurisdictions: terms such as East Asia and Asia Pacific or the Asia-Pacific basin or rim.
These formulations, however, remain recent constructs, each with its own ideological parameters. In many ways they are the descendants of the old â€?Far East', â€?Eurasia’ and â€?Orient’, which dominated 19th- and early 20th-century discourses on Asia. The new formulations still come with dimensions of pejorativeness, and the collective groupings may not necessarily coincide with how people do identify. East Asia is a case in point. East Asia was never a geographical expression but is one that developed in the 1970s. It first arose in the organisational thinking of Western foreign ministries[6] and then was applied more generally to encompass nations that primarily shared a legacy of China’s cultural influence and European impeÂrialism. Therein lies the problem. Malays and Indonesians (and other â€?Southeast Asians’) do not self-identify as East Asians and regard that categorisation to be the preserve of nations to their north where Chinese values and traditions hold greater sway. Again, this would be a contested notion in the North. PeoÂple in Japan would not necessarily identify with Chinese cultural dominance, which further highlights the limitation and paradoxes inherent in any such conÂstructions. There are similar difficulties with Asia Pacific (hyphenated or not) which is preferred by some writers such as Kaup[7] who uses it in the narrower sense to mean the â€?Eurasian’ nations on the Asian side of the Pacific. Others, especially writers and academics in Australia, use the term more broadly to also include the Melanesian and Polynesian nation states of the South Pacific.[8] Used at its broadest, with an implied â€?and’ (Asia [and the] Pacific), and seen often in American political and economic discourse, Asia Pacific encompasses all nations that border the Pacific Ocean, including not only Asian countries but also Australia, New Zealand and the nations of North and Latin America.[9] Some formulations also include Russia. Beeson cautions that boundaries and constituent parts of the Asia Pacific are uncertain and unsettled[10] and remain open to challenge. So, given this identification minefield, the editors felt comÂfortable using the simpler term, Asia, while acknowledging that not all possibleAsian nations were covered in this book but that those selected would provide a valid and valuable cross-section of the laws and legal institutions in parts of this region.
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