ASIAN STUDIES IN EUROPE WITH EMPHASIS ON GERMANY

By B. Dahm

When asked to speak on the state-of-the-art of Asian Studies in Europe at an
occasion like this, one feels honoured but, at the same time, very uneasy.
Asian Studies? All of Europe? And this in twenty minutes? - I can assure you
it was due to my naivety, rather than to any ambitions, that I finally
accepted. Doing justice to the great variety of Asian Studies in so many
different countries would be impossible; the only thing one can do, indeed,
is to concentrate on some issues that one considers important. But even this
has to be done in a rather simplistic manner, holzschnittartig, as we Germans
say. Therefore, please, consider this contribution in the first place as an
attempt to depict some trends in Asian Studies in Europe mainly as a kind of
contrast to Asian Studies in other parts of the world: What are the
distinctive features? What are the differences if they are compared with Asian
Studies elsewhere? And, as a historian, do allow me to look back briefly for
the reasons behind these differences. Thereafter I want to relate some
present-day developments in the field of Asian Studies in Germany and other
European countries.

LONG TRADITION
I think the most distinctive  of all differences, if compared with the state
of the art in other parts of the world, is the long tradition of Asian Studies
in Europe. If we include the Near East, which was an essential topic in
Orientalism, out of which Asian Studies developed, we could speak about a 350
year old tradition, taking into account, that chairs for Arabic Studies were 
already created at Cambridge in 1632 and in Oxford in 1636. But if we restrict
our area to the world east of the Hindukush - and that is what I want to do
- we still have a tradition of almost 200 years, considering the fact that our
French colleagues at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations
Orientales (INALCO) in Paris, are now actually preparing the bicentenary
celebrations of the foundation of the institute in Paris in 1795.
European-Asiatic Societies were even older, but the regular teaching of Asian
languages and cultures started in the early 19th century, with chairs of
Indology in Paris in 1815, Bonn 1818, and Oxford 1833.

ORIENTALISM & COLONIALISM
The second distinct difference, namely that Asian Studies in Europe were (at
least so it is maintained in a number of critical studies on Orientalism)
designed and practised as part and parcel of colonial expansion. The attacks,
for instance by Edward Said in his Orientalism (1978), or by Asaf Hussain in
his Orientalism, Islam and Islamists (1984) have become part of Asian Studies
in Europe and are the subject of much discussion. These attacks are well known
and they not only come from outside; they are a part of the
decolonization-process in the societies of former colonial powers. I think in
most European countries we will find these attempts to come to terms with
one's own imperialist past, in particular among the younger generation who are
extremely critical of the negative aspects of colonial expansion. Being in
Leiden, some among us might recall that even a great scholar with worldwide
fame in the field of Asian Studies, Snouck Hurgronje, has not escaped this
fate of a critical re-evaluation. These attempts to come to terms with one's
own past are not unfounded attacks easily dismissed like some of the
accusations of Said and Hussain, they are scholarly works. The young Dutch
scholar Van Koningsveld might have been biased when he wrote his critical
articles about Snouck. But he knew his sources and his editions of Snouck
Hurgronje's correspondence with N”ldecke and Goldziher are important new
contributions to this field.

QUALITY OF ASIAN STUDIES
I think it cannot be denied that Asian Studies in Europe aided colonialism and
imperialism to no small degree. But the co-operation with colonial authorities
is only one side of the coin: the other, equally, if not more important side,
is the development of what came to be known as classical Indology, Sinology
or Japanology in various European countries. If there is a third specific
characteristic of European Asian Studies it is the high quality of these
philological studies unparalleled up to the end of the colonial period which
continued to make deep imprints on Asian Studies in Europe thereafter.
In colonial times the results of this dedicated research were already
appreciated not only by European academia, but also by the emerging new elite
in the various colonies. They quoted proudly from the texts of their own
cultural tradition, edited by the Orientalists, for instance the texts of the
Vedic religion by Max Mller, the famous German Professor in Oxford. They
pointed to the Temples at Angkor, Pagan, Borobudur, rediscovered and rebuilt
by the French, the Dutch, or the British as important monuments of their own
cultural tradition and they spoke with pride about their glorious past,
extolled by Krom, Stutterheim, Coedes or by Gordon Luce, G.E. Harvey, or other
British experts on Burmese history.
Maybe their efforts to reconstruct the glorious past were exaggerated, but
this tradition, as you all know, survived well into the post World War II
period, when new nations required new attention and when the American Area
Studies Programmes showed the way to go about it. This tradition of shunning
rather than dealing with the new political developments in Asia lasted
longest, if I am not mistaken, in countries with no colonial past in Asia,
such as Germany or the Scandinavian countries. The British, the Dutch, and the
French, in spite - or should one say because of - their decolonization
problems, followed the American example. After some initial hesitations here
or there they transformed their former colonial institutes without any great
difficulty into Modern Asian Studies Centres.
These changes did not pass unnoticed. But when a request was made by the
German Science Council to create something similar in Germany in the early
1960s - the result was that the 27 or so new professorships were practically
all intended for the traditional disciplines of the so-called
"Orchideen-F„cher" in Germany. It was only in Heidelberg where a South Asia
Institute was also founded in the 1960s, that the focus was on modern
developments. By the way, a Nordic Asian Studies Centre was founded 1967 in
Copenhagen - so both of them, Heidelberg and Copenhagen, are now already
celebrating their 25th anniversary of Modern Asian Studies. But in their
countries they were the exception rather than the rule.

GERMANY AND ITS AUTONOMOUS STATES
Having set the stage I will now address the situation of Asian Studies in
Germany: What are its features today, where are the differences as compared
with other parts of Europe? The most important observation about the situation
in Germany is that we do not have a concentration of Asian Studies in a few
places - like in England at SOAS or Hull, like Paris in France, like Leiden
and Amsterdam in The Netherlands or like Copenhagen in Scandinavia. Heidelberg
has not lost its potential of the 1960s, but five of the 15 or so
professorships in Asian Studies are vacant at present. This is perhaps a sad
coincidence, but in one way or the other it is symptomatic of the
unsatisfactory situation in Germany.
The state of affairs is thus: up to 1990 we had about 30 German universities
- out of a total of more than 100 - which were engaged in one or more subjects
pertaining to Asian Studies. These universities were spread over all parts of
Germany, from Kiel to Freiburg, from Hamburg to Passau, and from Trier to
Berlin. German reunification did not cause a major revision in our system.
After the painful process of restructuring three more universities of the
former DDR they can now be added to the list, namely Humboldt University in
Berlin, and the Universities in Leipzig and Halle. In these 33 universities
we find 23 Institutes of Sinology, the same number (20+3) - there are several
new institutes, see below - are engaged in Japanese Studies, 17 institutes
teach Indology, and in 18 institutes we find some activities in Southeast
Asian Studies.

ASIEN AND HAMBURG
Thirteen universities have chairs for at least 3 of the major Asian regions.
These are the universities in Berlin, Bochum, Bonn, Frankfurt, Freiburg,
G”ttingen, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Cologne, Marburg, Munich and Tbingen. This
sounds a lot, but if one counts the chairs in other countries where there is
a concentration of Asian Studies in a few places there is not much difference.
The major reason for this dispersion is the cultural autonomy of the various
German states; the Federal State does finance some research activities via the
German Research Association (DFG), but the universities are paid by the L„nder
(states) and they, of course, mainly support studies which they consider
necessary for the needs of their state.
A German Association of Asian Studies tries to provide some co-ordination.
Under its 'umbrella' there are scientific advisory councils for South- and
Southeast Asia, for Japan, Korea, and for China. The Association also provides
a forum in the form of the journal Asien, a quarterly. One of the distinctive
features of Asien is the publication of the teaching programme of all German
institutes engaged in Asian studies twice a year, per semester. The councils
are supposed to arrange colloquia about their respective areas at least for
the biennial national conventions of the Association, but more could be done
in this respect. An encouraging sign is the annual voluntary gathering of
young scholars with a regional specialization from all over Germany, for
instance the regular meeting of 80 to 100 young Southeast Asianists. The
established scholars prefer their national or international professional
associations. There is little interest in "interregional" co-operation! The
Indologists know little about the Japanologists and so on. Because of this,
it is not easy to present a complete picture of Asian Studies in Germany.
There might always be some activity going on somewhere, of which the compiler
and his informants are not aware. 
The best source of information is still the well known Institute of Asian
Affairs in Hamburg with its documentation- and publication-activities about
modern developments in Asia. Indeed it often functions as an clearing house
of Asian Studies in Germany. However, since we are dealing with the situation
in German universities, the Hamburg-based Institute like other
extra-university research institutes dealing with Asian developments (like the
Bundesinstitut fr Ostwissenschaftliche Forschung in K”ln or the Stiftung
Politik und Wissenschaft in Ebenhausen near Munich) cannot be discussed in
detail. Something like the Livre Blanc, reflecting the state of the art of
Asian Studies in France cannot so easily be matched in Germany, mainly because
of the lack of national centres of Asian Studies.

TRADITION
Another observation which should be made with regard to Asian Studies in
Germany is the gradual retreat of the formerly dominant concentration on
Linguistics and on Philology. In the early 1960s an opening for more
recognition of modern developments in Asian Studies was still clearly
rejected. In the meantime, most of the new chair-holders have created such
possibilities, but they themselves still have to stick to the classical
programme. This generation of lasts and firsts is now in their early sixties
and they will be replaced in the next few years. This is also true of major
traditional Asian Studies Centres such as Bochum, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne,
Munich and Tbingen.
The question of in what direction Asian Studies in Germany will develop in the
future depends largely on the successors to the present chair-holders. Above
all in Indology and Sinology, but also in Japanology, voices can be heard at
the national conventions warning about abandoning the field of classical
studies too soon. I was unable to find out in how far this concern is also
felt by other European countries. Maybe it is a typical German concern because
of the geographical isolation of most of the chair-holders. This at least
makes the wish to stick to traditional orientations understandable.
In one discipline, however, the dice seem to have been cast in favour of rapid
modernization. This is the field of the formerly no less conservative
discipline of Japanology, of which the first chairs were established in the
mid-19th century, the very first in Leiden in 1855. Accounts of the history
of Japanese Studies in Europe show that, in spite of Japan's rise to being a
superpower, up to World War II modern developments were paid little attention
in the curricula of Japanese Studies.

JAPAN BOOM
In fact, it was only in the early 1980s that universities in Germany and in
other European countries as well suddenly experienced a rush of students to
the formerly rather small departments. Student numbers in Germany trebled,
even new universities such as Koblenz, Herdecke, or Hagen created centres of
Japanese Studies. In Berlin a Japanese-German Centre was established in 1985,
the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo was opened in 1987,
followed by an Association of Social Science Research on Japan in Berlin in
the same year. 1990 finally saw the foundation of the German Society for
Research on Japan, replacing formerly loosely structured associations of
Japanologists, publishing its own newsletter and a journal on research about
Japan. Its programme includes conferences and support of research; improvement
of communication and information with regard to Japan studies in Germany and
strengthening of institutional representation.
About the same period, 1985-1990, the Dutch Japanologist J. van Bremen wrote
a report mentioning similar developments of Japanese Studies in the
Netherlands. He sees the most conspicuous trends in: 
the growth in the number of students and academic staff, and in the variety
of specialities and disciplines comprising Japanese studies;
the spread of modern Japanese Studies in The Netherlands;
the increase in the number of institutes offering Japanese or Japan-related
courses and;
the creation and operation of a new network for co-operation and exchange in
Japanese Studies in Europe. 
This development, if not explosion, of Japanese Studies in Europe in the 1980s
- there are similar reports from France and other countries - shows the latent
potential inherent in the old institutes of Asian Studies. Even if they
formerly concentrated almost exclusively on philology and more classical
pursuits, the old institutes are obviously able to fulfil new requirements,
if there is a real or a conceived need in Europe to better understand modern
developments in that part of the world. The reasons for the rush into Japanese
studies in the mid-1980s are not known - at least not to me - most probably
it had something to do with Japan as the new economic superpower, threatening
the old established economies. 
Similar "reaction" in Asian Studies can be seen in other parts of Europe. At
present in Great Britain there is obviously a preoccupation with the
potentials of the Pacific Rim. I. Brown, from SOAS in London, speaks about a
"spectacular growth" in the study of the rapidly growing economies on this
area. His explanation of the phenomenon is: "Research on the Pacific Rim is
largely driven by the wish to 'discover' the reasons for the rapid industrial
growth which has been experienced by many parts of that region, to establish
a model which might be applied by others...". 

NEW DYNAMICS AND THE EUROPEAN ASSOCIATIONS OF ASIAN STUDIES
Whether Japanese Studies, or studies on the Pacific Rim, or studies of the
potentials of the ASEAN-countries, wherever we look in Europe in recent years
we have seen new dynamics unfolding in Asian Studies. A representative
selection of activities on the European scene is published in the first issue
of the IIAS Newsletter. There are reports about the steadily increasing
activities of the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies in Copenhagen, or about
the development of the "Baby Krishna Project" and various other initiatives
in The Netherlands. Leiden, seems to be developing into an European Centre of
Asian Studies. Those of us who come here regularly for our research on
Indonesia, are truly impressed by all these activities. They include "Eden",
the Indonesian Environmental History-Project, the Erasmus Programme on
Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and the foundation as well as the
management of the European Association of Southeast Asian Studies(EUROSEAS).
Let me just mention one more - perhaps the most important - aspect of Asian
Studies in contemporary Europe: the activities and regular conferences of the
various European Associations of Asian Studies. The European Conferences on
Modern South Asian Studies (convening biennially since 1968) or the meetings
of the European Association of Chinese Studies (convening biennially since
1975) or the European Colloquium on Indonesian and Malay Studies (convening
biennially since 1978) and, of course, the European Association of Japanese
Studies (convening tri-annually since 1978) with its secretariat presently
here at Leiden, have spread the issues of Modern Asian Studies throughout
Europe. They all developed out of private initiatives, participants in
conferences pay their travel expenses themselves, the organizers determine the
themes of the conferences, there is little bureaucracy involved. And yet, the
conferences are getting bigger and bigger in size from convention to
convention: there is quite obviously a need for this.
In my opinion this is a very healthy development. These associations are
creating networks for the discussion of issues of general concern but, at the
same time,they  allow participants to maintain their respective identities,
their own school of thought, and their individual approach to the problem
without the prospect of compulsory integration into a larger body. The variety
of the cultural backgrounds of European scholars has provided new insights
into and perceptions of the past and will do so in the future as well.