Nation, Knowledge, and Imagined Futures: Science, Technology, and Nation-Building, Post-1945

Krige, J., & Wang, J. (2015). Nation, Knowledge, and Imagined Futures: Science, Technology, and Nation-Building, Post-
1945. History and Technology, 31(3), 171–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2015.1126022

With the collapse of colonial power beginning in 1945 and the emergence of new sovereign states – by 1965 the
membership of the UN had increased from 51 to 117 – the post-World War II era affirmed the primacy of the nation-state,
and bestowed legitimacy on local elites who secured the power to govern, and on their representatives who defended their
sovereignty in international affairs. Nation-building became a watchword of the era, not just in terms of development efforts
sponsored by cold war hegemons, but as an emblem of peoples’ own quest for self-determination, national liberation, and
prosperity in whatever forms those always-contested objectives might take. Science and technology, emerging from WWII
as major forces for destruction – and liberation – propelled their practitioners into positions of influence, and granted them
new and heady access to the corridors of power at home and abroad. Political elites who sought to take advantage of the
new opportunities created by the changing world order to refashion the identities and trajectories of their nations turned to
the transformative potential of science and technology to fill out the contours of imagined futures. This volume examines
how this process unfolded by exploring the diverse meanings and projects attached to science and technology in contexts
tied to nation-building, state formation, and the long-term struggles of societies to meet human hopes and needs within the
confines of the nation-state structure and a contentious international order. A great deal has of course been written about
the engagement of science and technology with state power after World War II. Existing accounts have tended to
concentrate on the quests for advanced weaponry, high technology, and large scientific establishments that came to define
the symbolic and literal meanings of power in the nuclear age. Cold war competition has loomed large in these histories,
given the significance of atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, rockets, and satellites as quintessential markers of security,
modernity, and national prowess. Powerful states deployed such dual-use systems both to defend the realm and as forms
of technological spectacle intended to secure allegiances in a dangerously divided and fluid international order. More recent
scholarship on development has also drawn attention to agriculture, public health, scientific and technical aid, industrial
policy, and myriad forms of social scientific investigation as modes of endeavor tied to cold war objectives. This work has
shed much light on the scientific and technological drivers of the global reach of the superpowers, particularly from the U.S.
side. We know less about how newly empowered national elites, and their ‘technocratic’ collaborators and lobbyists, called
upon science and technology to express their aspirations for social improvement (sometimes understood as ‘development’).
Filled with optimism about the universal potential of science and technology to enhance the human condition, major
fractions of national elites sought to bend them to local needs in order to secure political stability, improved economic
prospects, and a refashioned identity in a world rent with conflicts that were simultaneously local, national, and global.
The essays in this volume take national contexts of resistance to the imperialisms of both colonialism and the cold
war as their starting points. Nation-building took place amid the upheaval of cold war superpower rivalry, struggles for
national independence, colonial and neocolonial assertions of power, and the search for a political third way. Throughout
the world, ideas of nationhood served to unite, integrate, and manifest diverse forms of affiliation, organization, and
competition. As Benedict Anderson so effectively articulated in his classic treatise, for individuals and localized
communities, the affective appeal of the nation created collective bonds and new forms of identity and community across
vast geographical ranges.3 State formation also became bound up with national identity, through the explicit efforts of state
builders to conflate successfully the categories of nation and nation-state and thereby establish the state as the key
institutional entity for the realization of national development. Moreover, relations with bordering states and broader
international circumstances shaped national claims in crucial respects, contrary to origin myths about the organic
coalescence of national feeling from the supposedly eternal ties between peoples and places. In particular, the post-World
War I settlement launched a shift in norms away from empires and towards an international system composed of nation-
states, thereby establishing national independence as the prerequisite for recognition and participation in international
affairs. Post-colonial studies have drawn particularly close attention to decolonization and struggles for national
independence amid collapsing empires and the reconfiguration of power structures that produced the U.S.-Soviet conflict of
the cold war. But older patterns of power also shaped the post-World War II world. Latin America, for example, has always
fit uneasily in postcolonial discourses designed for the post-1945 era, given the independence of the region’s countries
dating back to the early nineteenth century. Recent studies, however, have called for reconceptualizing the period from the
American revolution of 1775–1783 to the emergence of independent nations throughout North, Central, and South America
by the 1820s as the first post-colonial era.5 Moreover, anxieties about American imperial power, from the American
conquest and seizure of half of Mexico’s territory in the U.S.- Mexico War of 1846–1848 to the frequent interventionism that
defined U.S. policy in the Caribbean from the late nineteenth century onwards, combined with potential reassertions of
European power in an era of high colonialism, made struggles over modernity and nation particularly fraught throughout
much of Latin America long after independence.
 In Mexico, the relationship between technoscience, modernity, and the status of the nation has remained a
perpetual conundrum, as we can see from the contributions by Gabriela Soto Laveaga and co-authors Gisela Mateos and
Edna Suárez in this volume.7 Other Latin- American nation-states have grappled similarly with the possibilities, limitations,
hidden assumptions, and blinders involved in the appeal of technoscience as a means of claiming modernity, promoting
nationhood, and attempting to ward off imperial incursions since the late nineteenth century, in a history that subsequently
aligned the region geopolitically with the newer postcolonialisms of other parts of the world after World War II.8 Although the
recent vogue of transnationalism has sought to diminish or even do away with the primacy of ‘nation-ness,’ no single
concept better captures or refracts the multiplicity of competing global processes that have shaped states and societies
throughout most of the twentieth century. As Marilyn Young has pointed out, one can decenter America in one’s head. But
that ‘does not of itself create a world free of its overwhelming military and economic power. The same applies to the dying
European empires. Indeed, the essays in this volume underscore how the global distribution of power at the end of WWII
and afterwards was asymmetrical and lived as brutal reality by Vietnamese dying of hunger induced by Japanese and
French policy, by Micronesians suffering the transformation of their territory into nuclear testing grounds, by Zimbabweans
fighting for their freedom from white minority rule, and by Indians modernizing their country in the shadow of poverty-
stricken millions.
The tormented entanglements of science, technology, and nationhood, as indicated by several of the contributions
here, remind us not to romanticize the liberationist claims of national projects, even when they offered themselves as much-
needed alternatives to the abuses of imperial power. As one of us has written elsewhere, the imperial and national projects
have had more in common historically than their respective advocates have cared to admit. Arguably, ‘nation-building and
colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted flip sides of the same coin of modernist
developmentalism,’ and as much as the nation represented an alternative to colonial rule, both forms of governance shared
the modern state’s drive to lay claim over peoples in distant locales and assert direct authority over their lives by making
their societies legible and controllable. Recent studies of right-wing nationalists in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bolivia during the
1950s and 1960s have also drawn attention to the forms of agency that tied authoritarian rule to localized commitments to
nation-building, and not just cold war American imperialism. Empires struck back with efforts to preserve colonial rule in
some form well into the 1950s, and indigenous elites did not necessarily reject overtures that promised reform and greater
autonomy within imperial structures.12 The cold war further shaped a tortured dynamic between national priorities and
international pressures in both imperial metropoles and newly independent states. Even with the most generous, high-
minded intentions, there was, of course, no ‘one best way’ to modernize, particularly within a turbulent international
environment in which diverse states and societies confronted dramatically different political, economic, and technoscientific
circumstances. As the essays in this volume show, science and technology connoted very different needs and possibilities
to the inhabitants of the tiny Marshall Islands or to anti-colonial insurgents in Zimbabwe-in-the-making, for example, than
they did to national elites in the aspiring behemoths of China or India.
Amid widely varying settings, the terms of the engagement between science, technology, and nation-building were
sometimes set by already available knowledge that established power structures mobilized and adapted to local conditions.
At the other extreme, opposition to existing or externally imposed norms, values, and structures of power drew on local
knowledge to forge alternative visions of the future. Their realization called for the pursuit of diverse strategies, from staking
claims to sovereignty in a postwar international system that was committed to upholding national autonomy, to bloody
armed struggle when that same system collapsed under the weight of internal contradictions. Knowledge in myriad forms
was essential to the performance of power in nation building and to the fashioning of ‘legitimate’ and legitimizing new
national identities. Spectacular representations of advanced technologies, sophisticated exploitation of new politico-legal
sources of legitimation, everyday but crucial practices of survival under bombardment – all will be found here, defining a
meaning of development, improvement, modernization, liberation, call it what you will, that was built from the bottom up
rather than being derived from teleological visions of the future imposed from without.
To capture the immense variety of modes of nation-building, and the multiple registers in which knowledge was
deployed to that end, we have favored a multidisciplinary approach to our theme. We have also sought to range widely in
space and time across the postwar globe, and to contemplate the past in ways that refine, augment, and challenge the
dominant historiographical view through the cold war lens. Of course, it would not do to efface the cold war entirely: it was
inscribed in weapons systems, in the transnational movement of those who developed them, and in the bodies of those who
directly experienced their lethal production, testing and use. Cold war tropes also proliferated in fiction, in art, in architecture.
Indeed, the papers in this volume reveal a world saturated with the material and ideological stuff of the cold war. But by
adopting a pluralist approach that emphasizes perspectives outside of the immediate exigencies of global superpower
conflict, and by giving primacy of place to the construction of the nation as both a political and cultural project, the essays
presented here shed light on multiple purposes and cross-purposes at work that generally remain invisible in U.S.-centric
histories of science, technology, and international relations.13 Our authors address novel questions about high politics, the
nuclear age, and a diverse set of ‘nuclear nationalisms’; health, the body, and the maintenance of human life in moments of
crisis, struggle, and hope; and the intersections of science, technology, and medicine with the realm of mind and national
imagination.
Essays by Zuoyue Wang and Jenny Smith set the stage with state-centered analyses that highlight the
intersections between science, technology, and projects of state management. Wang examines the internal contradictions
and political turmoil surrounding nation-building and state formation in post-revolutionary China by examining the creation in
1956 of a long-term development plan for science and technology, while Smith’s account of famine relief efforts in the mid-
1940s captures a calculating logic of the modern state that stretched across the ideological divides of colonial rule, military
occupations by fascist or liberal democratic states, and Soviet governance. The papers by Stuart W. Leslie, Gisela Mateos
and Edna Suárez, and Lauren Hirshberg treat nuclear matters from unusual angles – the architectural representation of
nuclear power as a bearer of modernity in India and Pakistan, the rejection of nuclear weapons as a leadership strategy in
1960s Mexico, and the legacy of US nuclear testing in shaping visions for national sovereignty in the Marshall Islands. The
contributions of Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Clapperton Mavhunga focus on the terrain of human life and health as national
and nation-building projects, whether in the form of for- ward-looking visions of hospitals as symbols of national progress in
mid-twentieth century Mexico, or the innovative and syncretic medical practices that accompanied revolutionary national
struggle in Zimbabwe in the 1970s. Mavhunga’s and Hirshberg’s contributions also underscore the centrality of local
knowledge and suffering in the struggle for liberation from external rule, be it waged by the guerilla movement in Rhodesia,
or by the Marshallese in the Pacific, and along with Smith’s essay, provide stark reminders of the violence and desolation
inflicted by statist and imperial projects in their drive to sustain legitimacy from the mid- 1940s onward. Finally, Projit Bihari
Mukharji’s account of the Masud Rana spy thrillers and popular geopolitics in East Pakistan in the late 1960s and early
1970s, along with Leslie’s and Soto Laveaga’s essays, move away from the material practices of power to understand how
science, technology, and medicine have provided cultural resources for tapping into the promise of modernity and
reinventing identity, space, and national belonging.
Other themes cut across the essays in this volume as well: the creative tension between what different historical
protagonists perceived as ‘tradition’ or ‘modern,’ the roles of science and technology in nation-building beyond standard
developmental accounts of large scientific and industrial infrastructures, the dynamic between national and international,
and the necessary role of the international – as both a set of concrete political relations and as a conceptual frame – in
constructing the nation. Architects who designed nuclear power projects in India and Pakistan, local muralists who critically
celebrated new public hospitals built by a ‘welfare state’ in Mexico, and novelists in Bangladesh who excited the fears and
fantasies of the local population all played a role in building new national identities that mobilized all-too familiar images to
fashion modernity’s that broke with the past even as they recognized the importance of tradition. Carl Becker once
described the academic’s creed as the challenge to ‘think otherwise.’ We have tried to do so by taking the coupling between
knowledge/power as our guiding thread – be that in the hands of imperial overlords, nationalist leaders, or the oppressed
and disabused fighting for their freedom. Our authors have valorized that dyad by drawing on multiple representations of it,
whether in art, architecture, literature, state practices, the practices of bush warfare, or resistance to missile testing. To
combat the weight of history requires courage and imagination. To do so in the name of ‘improvement’ is to mobilize a
potent instrument that carries asymmetry within it, that reorganizes power around a new pole, and that has not led
automatically to a more humane existence for all, notwithstanding the ‘universal’ promise of science and technology. The
diverse historical actors described in this volume, along with the authors of these essays, exemplify these tensions. We
commend this collection to the reader for its geographical scope, for its multi-disciplinarity, and above all for the new and
important questions that it asks about the place of science, technology, and medicine in the construction of a new world
order in the decades after 1945.