The mid-twentieth century marked one of the greatest watersheds of Asian history. The relatively brief Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and much of China, and its sudden ending with the atomic bombs of August 1945, telescoped what might have been a long-term transition into a dramatic and violent revolution. In essence, imperial constructs were declared to be nation-states, the sole legitimate model of twentieth century politics, sanctioned in the ‘sovereign equality’ principle of the United Nations charter (1945).

The world system of competitive, theoretically equal sovereign states, inadequately labelled the ‘Westphalia system’, had been carried into Asia over several centuries under the ‘organised hypocrisy’ of imperialism (Krasner 2001), which held that only ‘civilised states’ could be full members of the sovereign equality club. After 1945 that exclusivist hypocrisy was replaced by a more optimistic one, which held that every corner of the planet should be divided into theoretically equal sovereign states, in reality an extension to the planet of the system of sovereign equality which European states had painfully learned to practise among themselves. In Asia, which had very different experience of international relations of a largely unequal kind, what units would emerge to play this game of nominally equal sovereign states?

The growing literature on nationalism would suggest that the winners from the collapse of empires would have to be ethnically homogeneous nation-states.