Abstract
In historical fact, while the diverse cultures of Asia areeach to some degree
multicultural (that is, the products of long cultural interactions), there was, until modem
times, no consciousness among them of a shared Asian identity. Even as a defensive
reaction to pressures from the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, PanAsianism has mostly been adjunct to modem nationalism and instrumentally
subservient to it, rather than constituting anything like an Asian people's cultural
bedrock.