Resistance to alien rule in Taiwan and Korea n MICHAEL HECHTER, n IOANA EMY MATESAN nn AND CHRIS HALE nnn n School of Global Studies, Arizona State University, USA nn Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, USA nnn Department of Political Science, Arizona State University, USA ABSTRACT. Although alien rule is widely assumed to be illegitimate, nationalist resistance to it varies across time and space. This article explores why there was greater nationalist resistance to Japanese colonial rule in Korea than Taiwan from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of World War II. Resistance to alien rulers requires both a supply of participants in nationalist collective action and a demand for national self-determination. The article assesses two principal propositions: (1) that the supply of participants increases to the degree that native elites are stripped of their traditional authority and offered few incentives to collaborate; and (2) that the demand for national self-determination decreases to the degree that alien rule is fair and effective. A comparative analysis of the effects of Japanese alien rule in Taiwan and Korea suggests that nationalist resistance is greater in the earliest phases of occupation, that the greater native elites’ opportunities, the weaker the resistance to alien rule; and that the fairer the governance, the weaker the resistance to alien rule. KEYWORDS: collective action, indirect rule, Japanese colonialism, legitimacy, nationalism, occupation regimes. The bungled American occupation of Iraq has rekindled a scholarly debate about the effects of alien rule on native populations. Until recently in modern history, alien rule was regarded as commonplace, but following the League of Nations conference at Versailles, all this began to change. The norm of national self-determination – first espoused as a progressive, if destabilising, by-product of the revolution in France (Kedourie 1960) – was upheld at Versailles as a universal ideal (Hechter and Borland 2001) and later enshrined in the United Nations Charter (Article 1 (2)). Less than a decade later, a cascade of anti-colonial liberation movements swept across the globe. Nations and Nationalism 15 (1), 2009, 36–59. r The authors 2009. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2009 n Previous versions of this essay were presented at the School of Global Studies, Arizona State University, and the US State Department Foreign Service Institute, Yokohama, Japan. We are grateful for the comments of Sun-ki Chai and several anonymous reviewers.