Northeast Asia’s Future

As late as around the middle of the nineteenth century, Germany was fragmented into a large number of small countries, the number being in comparably larger than the 300 domains of Tokugawa Japan, so that the question of unification was the most important issue in Germany. Unity is strength; this was emphasized by Adam Smith, 1776, before the German issue.1 Then the two scholars who made statements on the issue — List in 1841 and Marx-Engels in 1848 — held very different views. For List it was a question of the unification of a host of small medieval countries, while Marx and Engels were concerned with international solidarity between the workers of different countries. Marx and Engels argued for the solidarity of the working class across national boundaries on the basis of sharp insights into the future of society, but their vision ultimately failed to materialize. By the time it became an issue, the host of small medieval countries had been unified into a sufficiently large nation state, and the power of those countries had become sufficiently great to overcome the influence of the workers who were attempting to work together. Thus the internationalist workers’ movement of Marxism was suppressed by the power of the nation-state. In fact, in China too, which has successfully moved towards socialism and communism, the power of the nation-state controls the working class.