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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
9. The Nation-State:
Sovereignty Reimagined
Through colonialism European states transferred the idea of the state to their colonies, which laid the foundation of the present global system of sovereign territorial states. A strong congruity exists between the boundary lines of the present system of independent, sovereign states and the boundaries of the administrative units of the European colonial empires, most of which were fortuitous and arbitrary markers of the limits of European conquest.
A crucial force that transformed the world of colonial empires into the world of independent territorial states was nationalism, which arose in connection with popular sovereignty and liberalism and helped generate independence movements in the colonial empires. Nationalism began to connect states with “nations” by inscribing the sovereign territorial state as the dominant form of political organization throughout the world and by generating a variety of particular experiences of nationhood, depending on specific historical situations. In short, nationalism re-formed the state in an ordering of the political world that was nearly global, and created a range of challenges to European supremacy and dominance within the emerging global grid of territorial states.
Imagining Nationhood
Originally, the word nation (from the Latin natio, meaning birth or place of origin) was a derogatory term that referred to groups of foreigners from the same place whose status was below that of Roman citizens. During the Middle Ages, the word was used to designate groups of students from the same geographical locations attending Europe’s medieval universities. Because students from the same regions often took sides as a group against students from different regions in scholastic debates, the word nation came to mean an elite community of scholars who shared an opinion or had a common purpose. 1
As was discussed in Chapter 3, the medieval state was stratified into the estates of the realm and other corporate groups that did not see themselves as belonging to a common people. Medieval monarchies were ruled by kings and nobilities who spoke languages and lived lives that were quite different from those of the ordinary people they governed. This was also true of the clergy. The king and nobles of the medieval monarchy had a common outlook and culture that they shared with the king and nobles of other monarchies, despite the dynastic wars they fought against each other. The ordinary people took no part in governance, which was the affair of the king and nobility, often spoke different languages from them and the clergy, and strongly identified with their locales. The medieval state was culturally and linguistically heterogeneous. Its subjects did not share a common monarchy-wide identity. In the words of one historian,
Medieval Europeans were conscious of belonging to their native village or town, and to a group possessing a local language whose members could communicate without recourse to Latin or Greek. They were aware of belonging to a body of men and women who acknowledged the same feudal lord; to a social estate, which shared the same privilege; above all, to the great corporation of Christendom. 2
During the early sixteenth century, the word nation began to be applied to a whole population of people from a particular geographical locale rather than to a student elite. Entire populations were elevated and made into the bearer of sovereignty, the basis of political solidarity, and the ultimate object of loyalty. One’s national identity, therefore, came from being a member of a certain people, which was defined as homogeneously distinct in language, culture, race, and history from other peoples. Thus, nation came to have its contemporary meaning: “a uniquely sovereign people readily distinguishable from other uniquely defined sovereign peoples who are bound together by a sense of solidarity, common culture, language, religion, and geographical location.” 3
Scholars once thought that national identity was a natural human emotion and that the world was fundamentally divided into nations based on common cultures, languages, religions, and histories. These scholars saw nationalism as the awakening of long dormant feelings of national identity. In this understanding of nationalism the nation is awakened by its irrepressible desire for freedom, self-government, and a state of its own. 4
Such “Sleeping Beauty” views of nationalism have served the function of justificatory ideologies. On the contrary, we follow recent scholars who view nations not as natural and primordial but as created, imagined, and invented. 5 We view the nation as consciously invented in order to create the cultural, sociological, and psychological conditions necessary to sustain the sovereign territorial state. The development of a full-blown national identity that overrides regional, class, and religious loyalties requires the systematic effort of the state. Creating a sense of nationhood requires the breakdown of the individual’s attunements to local languages and cultures in order to create a common national culture (language, values, norms of behavior) that inculcates in the state’s subject population a common national frame of reference across space (i.e., territory) and time (i.e., a single national history). Therefore, creating a national identity is closely connected to the formation of territorial states.
Moreover, nationalism not only re-creates the local as the national, it mediates the local and the global. Nationalism, therefore, could only have arisen in the context of the globalizing of the European state. Historically, the process of nationalizing the subject population began, as one scholar puts it,
at the very time in which Europe was torn apart by the War of the Atlantic, that is, the visceral struggle between Britain and France during the long eighteenth century. . . . States were forced to extract historically unprecedented amounts from their societies. 6
During the eighteenth century, creating a common national community to which all subjects of the state belonged—that is, a nation bound together by a common language, culture, religion, and shared history—enabled states to raise huge armies without creating a threat to the state. Thus, the process of state formation in Europe in the eighteenth century created nations where none had previously existed in order to mobilize resources and survive in a world of competitive states.
The French Revolution formally fused the idea of the nation to the state. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was written by liberal revolutionaries, declares that all sovereignty resides with the people. This declaration heightened feelings among the French that they were a unique people who had liberated themselves from the tyranny of absolute monarchy and were destined to liberate the rest of Europe as well. Napoléon’s armies spread the radical ideology of liberalism and the idea of the liberated nation as they marched across Europe. The peoples that the French defeated and occupied in the Napoleonic Wars (1804–1815), such as Germans, Russians, Spanish, and Portuguese, grew to hate the French occupiers and developed feelings of national consciousness of their own. These feelings were encouraged by aspiring state-makers, who saw them as a way of mobilizing their people more easily.
Initially, monarchs were reluctant to encourage nationalist sentiments, because they could subvert the existing order. Already in the seventeenth century in England claims of “the rights of Englishmen” by the gentry and commercial class were used to establish the supremacy of Parliament against the king. In the colonies, rising national sentiment was linked to challenges to the supremacy of the central monarchy and even led to calls for independence. However, kings gradually learned how to separate nationalist feelings from liberalism’s claims of popular sovereignty. Therefore, states could remain monarchies and still retain sentiments of national identity, and armies loyal to the monarchical state for which they fought could be fielded.
Nations and Intellectuals
The process of creating nations was assisted by the rise in all states of a class of intellectuals who began to imagine and propagate the idea of a historically unique people conjoined to its own state. 7 Nationalism, a self-conscious discourse of unitary national identity, was a central element of the liberal public sphere, which we discussed in Chapter 5. Although the creation and sustaining of a nation require the systematic activities of the centralized, territorial state, the specific idea of a particular nation materializes out of the preoccupations of a small number of educated elites. Nationalist intellectuals often paint a heroic picture of the nation’s past and present and hide the inequalities, exploitation, and patterns of domination and subordination that the creation and maintenance of a state inevitably involve. 8
Intellectuals in general had become important with the rise of ideology in the liberal state and with the development of printing, which, by making widely available mass-produced books, magazines, and newspapers, created an audience for the discussion of ideas among the general population. 9 Early forms of nationalism appeared in the arts, such as opera, which became a popular form of entertainment throughout Europe during the eighteenth century. 10
Nationalism was, then, an important element in the rise of mass markets. Initially, at least, it was compatible with, and even partly responsible for, the spread of the liberal state, inscribed, as it were, as a central element of the “marketplace of ideas.” It is as difficult to imagine the nation emerging without the creation of a mass market in literature, news, and culture as to imagine the mass market emerging without symbols of national identity through which its products could be sold.
Moreover, the nations envisioned by nation-imagining intellectuals, the vast majority of whom have been men, have been invariably familial in form, and representations of nationhood have been ordered around conceptions of masculinity and femininity, such as “Uncle Sam” in the masculinized U.S. version, and “John Bull” in the British. In feminized versions, women are praised and revered as objects to be protected, but not as equally participating citizens. Women appear as mistresses, rape victims, “pinup girls” on patriotic calenders, wives, girlfriends, and daughters waiting dutifully at home. In these versions, women are a subordinated and disempowered national commodity needing protection. In masculinized versions, women appear as conquerors and soldier-heroes, such as “Marianne” in the French version. Both types of representations of nationhood involve subtle and complex relationships between gender politics in the state in question and how men and women properly belong to the nation. 11
By the middle of the nineteenth century, intellectuals across Europe were defining nationalism as the highest human value and the source of all that is good. Nationalism became an ideology in its own right. Its basic tenet was the idea that a state should share a common culture and be governed only by individuals of the same culture. The invention of a nation required hard intellectual work: dictionaries of national languages had to be compiled; a body of national poetry, literature, theater, music, opera, painting, and popular festivals had to be created; and, most significant, a distinction was necessary from other national cultures as well as “deviant” cultures within the state that resisted identity with the nation as intellectuals had fashioned it. National rituals, symbols, and insignia, such as flags, seals, and commemorations of heroic events, had to be designed. Although the task of inventing the nation rested with intellectuals, it was by propaganda and systematic political education by the state that the local identities of the subject population were shifted to the newly imagined nation. 12
Types of Nationalism
It is useful to distinguish different types of nationalism in order to show how nationalism helped generate and undergird different states. Three different types can be distinguished: liberal nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and anticolonial nationalism. We will discuss each of them in turn.
Liberal Nationalism
As we saw above, the Enlightenment imaginary of liberalism and popular sovereignty along with the French Revolution and its aftermath were crucial catalysts for the development of nationalism, both in Europe and in Europe’s overseas colonies. Although not all nationalists were liberals, liberal intellectuals began to organize nationalist movements. In certain cases, liberal movements demanded changes in such extant absolutist states as France, Portugal, and Spain. In others they demanded the creation of new unified states based on liberal principles where none had previously existed, as in Germany and Italy. In still others they demanded independence from a colonial power and the formation of a republic, as in the Americas. Thus, initially, nationalism went hand in glove with the spread of liberalism.
Liberal ideas spread from Europe to the Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonies in the Americas, where they were accepted by educated, locally born elites. When combined with local conditions and circumstances, they produced nationalist movements. The first nationalist movement for independence was born in the thirteen British colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America. As we discussed in Chapter 5, a colonial elite composed of locally born, prosperous New England merchants and southern planters, who had been strongly influenced by the principles of liberalism and were strenuously opposed to the taxes that had been levied on their commercial interests by the British parliament, took the opportunity created by the war in the Atlantic and organized a movement for independence that produced the first new sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the rest of the original 13 colonies.
Although the Constitution of 1789 brought these states together into a single federal state, it took nearly a century more for the American “nation” to be created. From the Founding to the Civil War (1860–1864), ordinary people of the United States primarily identified with their respective states or regions. It was only after the Civil War that individuals became loyal to a national political community beyond their states and began to think of themselves as Americans. This American identity was bound up with Protestant ideals of an exceptional people with a unique mission in the world, which in turn convinced Americans they had the right to conquer the entire continent. 13 Eventually, this new nation-state itself became an imperial power that imposed its sovereignty across the landmass of North America and beyond: to Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea and to certain islands in the Pacific Ocean, such as Hawaii, Guam, and, eventually, the Philippines.
As described in Chapter 8, Spain’s colonial holdings in the Americas were divided into viceroyalties, which were subdivided into audiencias. Viceroys were always peninsulares, individuals born in Spain, and audiencias were staffed by locally born administrators of Spanish descent known as criollos (creoles). Gradually, the elongated shape, variation in topography and climate, and communications difficulties of Spain’s vast land-based empire imparted to the criollo elite in each of its audiencias a sense that they were inhabiting distinct communities. Encouraged by the success of the independence movement in the British colonies to the north, criollo elites formed a broad movement for independence from Spain. 14
Discontent with and resentment against Spain was mostly economic. The colonies were a source of gold and silver and were a market for Spain’s manufactured goods. Both markets were monopolized by Spaniards, who overcharged for imports and underpaid for exports. The spark that ignited rebellion was struck by Carlos III (r. 1759–1788), who in an effort to modernize the administration of the empire introduced new senior officials from Spain, whose task was to execute colonial policy more efficiently and improve the collection of taxes. The better-educated criollo elite resented the new administrators and were particularly aggrieved by the policy of promoting the importation of goods manufactured in Spain by Spanish merchants to the detriment of goods locally produced. 15
Napoléon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula (between 1807 and 1810) encouraged criollos in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Santiago, and Mexico City to take up arms against Spain. Unlike the short, relatively bloodless war fought by the North American colonies, the war for independence from Spain lasted 20 years and produced heavy casualties. The war was not a united effort by a single army. Rather, it was fought by various armies commanded by regional leaders such as Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), who liberated most of the viceroyalty of New Granada; José de San Martin (1778–1850), who liberated the viceroyalty of La Plata and, with the help of Bernardo O’Higgins (1778–1842), defeated the Spanish in the audiencia of Chile. San Martin and Bolivar also liberated the viceroyalty of Peru. Numerous risings against Spain in the viceroyalty of New Spain, beginning in 1810, resulted in Mexico’s independence in 1824. These events sparked the creation of the United Provinces of Central America in 1823, which separated into five independent states, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, by 1838. When the wars for independence were over, all that remained of the Spanish empire in the Americas were Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo in the Caribbean. 16 In its stead were 15 new sovereign territorial states, the boundaries of which conformed very closely to the empire’s original administrative subdivisions.
The commitment of the criollo elite to the ideals of liberalism was limited, however, by its social conservatism, which was based on its fear of insurrection from below. The criollo elite governed large Native American and slave populations that, if imbued with liberal values and mobilized politically against Spain, would have in all likelihood revolted against criollo domination as well. The massive and bloody Indian revolt led by the Inca descendant Tupac Amurú (1742–1781) in 1780, and the slave rebellion in 1791 on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo (which created the new state of Haiti) led by Toussaint l’Ouverture (1743–1803), were very much in the minds of many criollos as they challenged Spanish rule. Therefore, nationalist movements in Latin America vigorously avoided mobilizing nonelites, a pattern of politics that continues to this day in the states of the region. 17
In contrast to Spanish America, the nationalist movement in Portugal’s only colony in the Americas, Brazil, remained unified. A territory-wide mentality was present among the colonial elite because the Portuguese required their locally born administrators to circulate throughout Brazil, which prevented them from developing a strong identification with a particular locale. Unity was also favored by the displacement of the Portuguese crown to Brazil during the invasion and occupation of Portugal by Napoléon’s armies from 1807 to 1810. After the Portuguese, with British help, expelled the French from Portugal, the Portuguese king stayed in Brazil until 1820. When the king finally departed for Portugal, he left his son Pedro behind to rule Brazil as regent. Pedro, who because of his long years in Brazil had been imbued with the liberal nationalism of the local elite, decided not to return to Portugal. On September 7, 1822, he declared Brazil independent and made himself constitutional emperor, Pedro I (r. 1822–1831). Brazilian independence was recognized by Portugal and no war of independence was necessary. Brazil became a republic in 1898. 18
In Europe, liberal nationalism animated the creation of a new sovereign state, Italy, and played a role in the creation of another, Germany. We have already seen in Chapter 6 that the German-speaking region of Europe was fragmented into a multiplicity of small kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and free cities. The defeat and occupation of these entities by Napoléon’s armies produced a reaction by German intellectuals, who began to demand a unified German state that would be able to defend itself against foreign foes and be based, paradoxically, on the liberal principles that the French had helped to spread. For German liberals, the demand for unity could not be separated from the demand for political rights. Because nationalism and liberalism were intertwined, German kings and princes initially resisted the demands for unity and discouraged feelings of national consciousness from developing among subject populations. This resistance was overcome to some degree during the early nineteenth century, however. The accession to the Prussian throne of Friedrich Wilhelm IV (r. 1840–1861), who was sympathetic to nationalism and liberalism, and the establishment of the short-lived Second French Republic (1848–1852), encouraged the formation of liberal governments in a number of German states.
As we also discussed in Chapter 6, the dream of a unified German constitutional monarchy failed, having been disabled by the dispute between those who wanted a greater Germany that would have included all the German-speaking territories of the Habsburgs, and those who were satisfied with a lesser Germany, which would have excluded Austria. Germany was eventually unified by Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, in 1870, who proclaimed Germany an empire. 19 Nationalism in Germany became increasingly antiliberal and exclusionary, considering Germans to be a unique people defined by race and culture.
The Italian movement for national unity was, like the German, the result of foreign occupation. At the Congress of Vienna (1815), which concluded the Napoleonic Wars, the victors placed the many small Italian-speaking kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and city-states of the peninsula under Austrian domination and protection. Owing to the presence of French troops in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars, liberal ideas had spread among Italian intellectuals and professionals. An Italian nationalist movement, organized primarily by liberals, began to agitate against Austrian domination and for the creation of a unified Italian state. A series of insurrections against the Austrians and for a unified constitutional state took place during the 1820s and 1830s. These were successfully suppressed by Austrian troops. In 1848, inspired by the Second French Republic, Italian liberals were able to persuade the rulers of several of the peninsula’s kingdoms and duchies (Naples, Piedmont, Tuscany, and the Papal States) to grant constitutions. A liberal uprising in Vienna (the capital of Austria) that same year sparked liberal uprisings and rebellions against foreign rule along the length of the peninsula, which, after achieving some military success, were again eventually suppressed by the Austrians. During the next 20 years, Austrian hegemony over the peninsula waned and a unified Italian state was created, with French assistance, by Piedmontese armed force and diplomacy. The Risorgimento (Resurgence), as Italy’s unification is known, did not, however, produce the republic desired by the liberals, but a constitutional monarchy instead. 20
Ethnic Nationalism
In contrast to liberal nationalism, ethnic nationalism imagines a sovereign territorial state based on a shared culture, which is assumed to be primordial. Ethnic nationalism appeared within the great multilingual and multireligious empires of the Ottomans, Habsburgs, and Romanovs during the nineteenth century, and was made possible by a notable increase in literacy as well as by industrialization, which destroyed traditional ways of life and caused a massive movement of people from the countryside to the cities. 21 Pasts were imagined and reimagined as singular cultures. Religion, language, and history were fused together in the minds of nationalist intellectuals, who made their respective communities within these empires appear to constitute nations deserving of their own sovereign states.
Within the Ottoman Empire (1453–1918), Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Romanian, Armenian, and Serbo-Croatian-speaking intellectuals, along with merchants, priests, teachers, and university students, became interested in their own languages. They wrote dictionaries and began to publish poetry and histories of their communities, creating a national identity among the literate elements of these communities. Eventually, such sentiments were transformed into a political demand for independence. Many achieved success, however, only when forces outside of the empire intervened on the side of the nationalists. Thus, Greek intellectuals who had demanded an independent Greece as early as 1798, and had instigated numerous uprisings in subsequent years, were eventually successful in 1828 thanks to Russian intervention. Bulgarian Orthodox priests, who were, in effect, nationalists in ecclesiastical robes, achieved a separate Orthodox Church, with a Bulgarian-speaking oxarch as its head, after a decade of effort. A nationalist uprising in 1876 was savagely put down by the Turks. Two years later, Russia went to war with the Ottomans, which resulted in the creation of the sovereign state of Bulgaria. 22 The empire was finally dissolved by the Allies after World War I, the Ottomans having sided with imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Turkey, the core of the Ottoman imperial territory, became a sovereign state in 1923. The Middle Eastern provinces of the empire were placed under British and French control and were ruled under mandates granted by the newly organized League of Nations. 23
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been gradually built up by the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family through war and dynastic marriage, was a polyglot realm that stretched from Gibraltar to Hungary, and from Sicily to Holland. Within it, the idea of nationality was officially rejected, the unity of the empire being maintained by the principle of loyalty to the emperor, who was seen as above ethnic differences. In 1784, a decision to conduct all of the empire’s official business in German instead of Latin suddenly placed non-German-speaking intellectuals from among the Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian communities at a disadvantage with regard to social, economic, and political advancement within the imperial system. This disadvantage engendered nationalist movements throughout the empire.
The strongest nationalist movement was in the Magyar (Hungarian)-speaking provinces, where a Magyar language movement was already well developed. Budapest, with its university and parliament, was the center of intellectual and political life. There, Hungarian nationalists agitated for a public education system in which instruction would be in Magyar. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Hungarian parliament passed laws that made Magyar the language of government, administration, and public instruction within the province. Defeated by the French in 1859 and the Prussians in 1866, the emperor was forced to relax his rule, and in 1867 Hungary essentially became a semisovereign state within the empire, hence the name Austro-Hungarian empire. 24
Nationalist forces representing other linguistic communities steadily gained ground within the empire. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand (1863–1914), while on an official visit to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, by a Serbian nationalist in June 1914 precipitated World War I. After being defeated by the Allies, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up into five sovereign states: Austria; Hungary; Poland; Czechoslovakia, which brought together Czechs and Slovaks; and Yugoslavia, which was composed of Slovenians, Croatians, Bosnians, Serbians, Montenegrans, and Macedonians.
The overthrow of the czar in Russia, the turmoil caused by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and the subsequent civil war created conditions that permitted a number of territories within the Russian Empire to become independent states: Finland ; the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; Georgia ; and Ukraine. The last two were reincorporated into the Soviet Union after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the civil war as were the Baltic states with Hitler’s consent in 1940.
Anticolonial Nationalism
A third type of nationalism that demanded independence arose in the large number of anticolonial nationalist movements in the twentieth century. Independence was often granted without the need for armed struggle, although there were many exceptions. For 30 years or so after the end of World War II, a flood of new sovereign states appeared on the globe in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
The legacy of World War II and the subsequent Cold War enabled the achievement of independence by many colonial states. First, European states had been weakened significantly by the war, making maintenance of colonial empires expensive and logistically difficult, especially against increasingly organized nationalist opposition. Second, the determination of the United States to rebuild a capitalist world economy favorable to its own economic expansion led it to support independence, provided the new states would remain open to U.S. influence and investment. The hegemonic position of the United States in the world economy enabled it to informally dominate postcolonial states. When nationalists threatened to forge real independence in states that the United States considered economically or strategically important, it installed more compliant indigenous rulers, often through direct military intervention.
Third, nationalism in colonial states itself was a “derivative discourse.” 25 That is, having originated among Western-educated elites in the colonies, it was reflexively incorporated into the local experience. This resulted in political programs among the revolutionaries that sought to build states along the lines of European models. Hence, nationalist revolutionaries sought to build states suited to the conditions of their own societies and cultures as they saw them, but usually within the territorial boundaries and conceptual parameters of the European system.
Creating independent states in colonial areas according to nationalist programs involved a particular dilemma that led to attempts to produce highly centralized states. On the one hand, newly independent states had to ensure their autonomy from former colonial powers and to counter attempts to both reassert the direct colonial control and to assert more informal dominance that would render independence and sovereignty moot. This led not only to a central role for the military in the new states, but to politico-military strategies needed to confront the often overwhelming military forces of the former colonial powers. Insurgencies, which included political organization of sympathetic civilian populations, charted not only new rules of military engagement but also conditioned new forms of state power. The most significant such case was in Vietnam, where nationalists first defeated French attempts to reassert colonial control after World War II, and then U.S. attempts to impose de facto control over a nominally independent state. Once imagined, the nation had to be promoted and maintained against alternative imaginaries of social and political life that did not self-consciously stake the future to a centralized nation-state or participation in a world order of nation-states.
In Asia the first colony to become independent under these terms was British India, where Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) became the first post–World War II nationalist leader to attract a mass following. Educated in London in law, he initially practiced in South Africa, where he organized the Indian community against British racial policies. Upon returning to India in the 1920s, he began to agitate for independence. Using campaigns of nonviolent, passive resistance, hunger strikes, and peaceful protest marches rooted in a particular blending of Hindu and Western ideas and practices, his movement forced the British to quit India in June 1948. As a parting gesture of colonial power, and in an attempt to limit widespread ethnic bloodshed, which the British had earlier encouraged in order to divide Hindus and Muslims, the British partitioned India into two new states: the northwest and most of Bengal in the east becoming Pakistan, led by its own nationalist leader, the Western-educated Muslim lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), and the remainder becoming India. 26
In southeast Asia nationalist movements appeared in the British colonies of Burma (now Myanmar ), which was granted independence in 1948, and Malaya, which contained a sizable Chinese population that had immigrated to the colony during the nineteenth century and had concentrated themselves in the city of Singapore. The Chinese were linguistically and culturally distinct from the indigenous Malays, spawning two rival nationalist movements that nevertheless cooperated with each other in ousting the British in 1957. Independent Malaya did not initially include Singapore, which remained under British rule. But six years after independence, in 1963, a new and larger state was created, called Malaysia, which included Singapore and two former British territories on the island of Borneo. This arrangement lasted only until 1965, when Singapore, led by Lee Kuan Yew, seceded and became an independent state.
The forerunners of the nationalist movement in the Philippines were Spanish-educated, liberal intellectuals who lobbied for the Philippines to become a regular province of Spain and for certain civil liberties and reforms of the civil service. The leading light among this group, known as the Propagandist, was José Rizal (1861–1896), a physician, sculptor, novelist, and poet. His execution in December 1896, after being falsely accused by the Spanish of leading an armed uprising, sparked rebellions in several provinces, which the Spanish suppressed. The nationalist uprising continued after the United States defeated Spain in 1898 and took control of the Philippines. Fighting between the United States and Filipino rebels lasted from 1899 until 1901, when the nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964) was captured. The United States began to prepare the Philippines for independence, ensuring that an independent regime would be favorable to U.S. interests. Although progress toward independence was interrupted by Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1944, the Philippines became a sovereign state on July 4, 1946.
In the Dutch East Indies several small nationalist groups appeared in the 1920s, led by Dutch-educated Javanese. The most outstanding of these was Ahmed Sukarno (1901–1970), who was imprisoned by the Dutch but released by the Japanese when they occupied the Dutch East Indies during World War II. After the war, the efforts by the Dutch to restore their rule were vigorously resisted. Sukarno established a stronghold on the island of Java and defeated Dutch attempts to reunify the islands. Indonesia, including all the islands of the Dutch East Indies, became independent in 1950.
The nationalist movement in French Indochina began among French-educated Vietnamese intellectuals between World War I and World War II. Encouraged by the Vichy regime in France, the nationalists resisted the Japanese occupation of Indochina in 1940. The leader of this resistance was Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), who had been educated in France and had lived many years in various European states and the United States. When the Japanese were defeated, the Vietminh, as the Vietnamese nationalist movement was known, were in a strong position, especially in the north, which they controlled. The French hoped to create a federated Indochina composed of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Negotiations failed to produce an agreement, however, and in December 1946 the Vietminh attacked French military forces.
After seven years of war, which culminated with the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, an international conference, which met in Geneva in 1954, granted independence to Cambodia and Laos, and divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. This division produced two rival governments in Vietnam: a communist one in the north, led by Ho Chi Minh and supported by China and the Soviet Union, and an authoritarian one in the south, led by Ngo Dinh Diem (1901–1963) and supported by the United States. Although the Geneva Conference called for reunification of north and south in an internationally supervised election, this election was never held because of the active opposition to it by the southern government, which was almost certain to lose. In 1958 the Vietcong, a southern communist and nationalist group wanting unification, rebelled against the government of the south, whose armed forces were lavishly supported by the United States. In 1964, fearing a collapse of the southern government, the United States sent its own armed forces to Vietnam. Despite a massive military effort, the United States was unable to defeat the combined forces of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In 1973 the United States abandoned the southern government, and two years later, in 1975, the whole of Vietnam became independent under the government of the north, which had successfully linked communism to the idea of Vietnamese nationhood.
In Africa south of the Sahara, nationalism was influenced by pan-Africanism, a movement initiated by well-educated blacks from the West Indies, such as Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), George Padmore (1902?–1959), and the black U.S. scholar and academic W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963). Pan-Africanism encouraged pride in African heritage and organized a number of conferences in the 1920s, which brought together African American and African intellectuals, writers, poets, and painters to discuss common concerns. Aimé Césaire, a poet from Martinique, developed the concept of Négritude around which an impressive literature and poetry developed in French-speaking colonies. The sixth Pan-African Conference held in Manchester, England, in 1945 was attended by many African intellectuals, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who were destined to lead nationalist movements in their respective colonies.
In 1945 three independent states existed in Africa south of the Sahara: Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa. Ethiopia had never been colonized; Liberia had been founded in the 1840s as a haven for freed American slaves; and South Africa, which had come under British hegemony at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been granted independence in 1931. It was subsequently led by a minority, racist government of elite descendants of Dutch colonizers.
The first effective African nationalist movement in the postwar period appeared in the Gold Coast, a British colony, which had a relatively large class of well-educated Africans. The movement for independence in the Gold Coast was led by Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), who, inspired by Gandhi in India, launched a campaign of civil disobedience and passive resistance in 1950. Nkrumah’s movement won the elections held in 1951 called for by constitutional reforms instituted by Britain in 1949; these reforms had allowed the Gold Coast to prepare itself for independence by becoming internally self-governing. In March 1957 the Gold Coast became the first African colony to become an independent state, and its name was changed to Ghana.
Within a few years nationalist movements in other British African colonies achieved independence. In Nigeria, three regional and ethnic nationalist movements had appeared: one founded by Nnamdi Azikiwi (1904–1996) with support from educated Ibos in the colony’s southeast; another, founded in 1951 by Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1907–1987), drew support from the Yoruba people in the west; and the third was supported by the Muslim Hausa-Fulani people, located in the north. In October 1960 Nigeria became independent as a federal state. Additional British colonies in West Africa followed: Sierra Leone in 1961 and The Gambia in 1965.
In the East African British colony of Kenya the nationalist movement was blocked by resistance from a large European settler population, which owned large plantations situated on land taken from the Kikuyu people. The nationalist movement, which was founded by educated Kikuyus such as Jomo Kenyatta (1894–1978), who had earned a doctorate in anthropology in Britain, began to agitate for the return of their lands. In 1952 a Kikuyu uprising, known as Mau Mau, broke out. The resulting crackdown led to the imprisonment of Kenyatta, a ruthless policy of repression, and the forced resettlement of native peoples into British-controlled villages. Such “pacification” continued until 1959, when Kenyatta was released from prison; he became president of a newly independent Kenya in 1963. The other British colonies in East Africa also achieved independence: Tanganyika, which the British had taken over from Germany after World War I, became independent in 1961 under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, a Western-educated Methodist minister; Uganda followed in 1962.
British colonies in southern Africa included three territories—Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland—which had been joined in 1953 in the Central African Federation. A substantial number of European settlers in the Rhodesias bitterly opposed the African nationalist movements that had sprung up. In Nyasaland, where there were few white settlers, the U.S.-educated physician Hastings Banda won widespread African support. Despite white resistance, Britain yielded to the demands of the African nationalists: Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia became the sovereign states of Malawi and Zambia, respectively, in 1964.
Southern Rhodesia remained a colony and the African nationalist leader, Joshua Nkomo, was jailed. The whites in Rhodesia, from whose name “Southern” was dropped, were determined to maintain themselves in power, whereas the British government insisted on independence under African majority rule. In November 1965 the leader of the white community, Ian Smith, unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent from Britain and under white rule. The British and the international community imposed economic sanctions, which lasted for 11 years. At the same time African nationalists, now led by Robert Mugabe, took up arms and waged a low-grade guerrilla war against the white minority regime from sanctuaries in the newly independent states of Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi. Finally, in September 1976 the Smith government capitulated and agreed to constitutional revisions designed to give Rhodesia an African government within two years. In 1980 Robert Mugabe became president of the sovereign state of Zimbabwe.
In the Congo, little had been done to prepare the African population for independence, which had never even been contemplated by the Belgians. By the end of the 1950s there was only a handful of university-educated Africans in the colony. In 1959 riots, organized by various nationalist groups, broke out. The Belgian government reacted by attempting to rapidly prepare the colony for independence. Elections were quickly held for rural and town councils. In 1960 the Belgians hastily granted the Congo its independence, but the Congo fell into civil war as various nationalist leaders, aided and abetted by rivalry among the European states, fought to gain control of the central government. Eventually, Joseph Mobutu (1930–1997), the commander of the Congolese armed forces, achieved ascendancy over the others and in 1965 changed the former Belgian colony’s name to Zaire. (We will have more to say about Congo/Zaire in the next chapter.)
Although the French never considered independence for their African colonies, the situation after World War II made their cultural position untenable. During the 1950s, elections were held for assemblies in the eight territories of French West Africa : for a territory-wide assembly located in Dakar and for deputies to the French National Assembly in Paris. In 1958 the French offered the territories of French West Africa the choice of complete independence or membership in a new confederation of French-speaking states tied to France. Initially, only the territory of Guinea accepted the offer; it became independent in 1958. By 1960 six additional territories— Senegal, Mali, Niger, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso ), Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire —followed Guinea’s lead and became independent. Mauritania, the eighth territory, chose independence as well, although formal recognition was delayed by a claim by Morocco that it had been historically part of Moroccan territory. Togo, a former German colony governed by France under League of Nations’ and United Nations’ mandates, was given independence in 1960. The island of Madagascar, which became the Malagasy Republic, and the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, which became Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, and Gabon, were also given independence in 1960. Cameroon, also a former German colony governed by the French under League of Nations’ and United Nations’ mandates, was also granted independence in that year.
Portugal was the last European imperial state to leave Africa. Portugal steadfastly clung to the doctrine that its colonies in Africa were an integral part of Portugal and refused to contemplate independence. Nationalist movements led by well-educated African elites sprung up in every Portuguese colony. Faced with Portuguese intransigence, these movements had to take up arms in order to achieve independence. In Mozambique, the U.S.-educated college professor Eduardo Mondlane (1920–1969) led the armed nationalist struggle from sanctuaries in Tanzania until he was killed by a letter bomb sent by the Portuguese secret police in 1969. His death did not deter the African nationalists, who continued the struggle. In Angola three rival elite-led nationalist movements sprung up, each drawing support from different ethnic groups. One was led by José Eduardo dos Santos, and was supported by the well-educated intelligentsia in the capital city of Luanda; another was led by Holden Roberto and was supported by the Bakongo people; and the third was led by Jonas Savimbi and supported by the Ovimbundu. All three movements waged war against the Portuguese and each other from safe havens in neighboring Zaire and Zambia. In Portuguese Guinea the nationalist movement was led by the agronomist Amílcar Cabral (1921–1973). His assassination by the Portuguese in 1973 did not deter the nationalists, who continued the armed struggle under new leadership.
Despite the commitment of 200,000 troops, the Portuguese were not able to stamp out the independence movements. Eventually, war-weariness in Portugal and discontent within the armed forces resulted in the overthrow of the authoritarian civilian government in Lisbon on April 25, 1974. Portugal’s new democratic government granted independence in 1975 to Guinea (Bissau), Mozambique, and Angola. Angola was plunged into a civil war as fighting continued among the above-mentioned rival nationalist movements, which, aided and abetted by outside states, has continued to the present, despite the imposition of 12,000 Cuban troops from late 1975 to May 1991, and several truces brokered by the Portuguese.
All but a handful of the newly independent African states contained a medley of different ethnic groups lumped together into new political units, the boundaries of which paid no heed to indigenous ones. The only cases where the territorial boundaries of the new African states conformed to the traditional boundaries of ethnic groups were Swaziland, Lesotho, and Botswana, all three of which had been British colonies and achieved their independence in 1967, 1966, and 1966, respectively. One new state, Somalia (1960), which had been an Italian colony, also contains only one ethnic group; this group, the Somalis, also live in neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya.
In Africa north of the Sahara and in the Middle East, only Iran (Persia) had never been colonized and only the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iraq, which we will examine in more detail in the next chapter, had achieved independence between World War I and II, the last two under treaties with Britain that greatly restricted their sovereignty. The basis of nationalism in North Africa and the Middle East was rooted in the idea of a single Arabic-speaking nation transcending the borders imposed by European colonization, which was articulated by a small elite between World War I and II. The idea of a pan-Arab nation was strongest in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. During this period, pan-Arab nationalism was intensified by the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, caused by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and where Jewish immigration from Germany was on the rise because of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. Arabs saw their lands being taken and given to European settlers. With the outbreak of World War II, Arab nationalists looked to the fascist states of Italy and Germany as future liberators. In the immediate postwar period, pan-Arab nationalism became even stronger owing to the partitioning of Palestine by the United Nations into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. The Arabs rejected this decision and attacked the Jewish state of Israel when its independence was proclaimed in 1948. When the Israelis defeated the Arabs, an armistice was concluded in 1949 under United Nations auspices. The Arabs never accepted this settlement and refused to recognize Israel, which they attacked again in 1967 (the Six-Day War ) and 1973 (the Yom Kippur War ).
The defeat of the Arabs by Israel accelerated the spread of pan-Arab nationalism. In Egypt the Free Officers Movement led by Lt. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), who supported pan-Arabism, toppled King Farouk in 1952. In North Africa in the early 1950s, the French attempted to stop the spread of Arab nationalism by taking repressive measures. In 1951 they arrested Tunisian nationalist leaders and in 1953 they deposed Morocco’s sultan, who was sympathetic to the pan-Arab cause. As these measures did not bring about the desired results, the French were forced to grant independence to Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. In Algeria, which the French considered to be an integral part of France, an insurrection led by the nationalist Ben Bella broke out in 1954. A savage guerrilla war, intensified by the presence of nearly a million French settlers, many of whom had been born in Algeria, raged until 1958. Algeria was granted independence in 1962.
In 1962 the British abandoned the South Arabian Protectorate, which became South Yemen ; in 1971 they unilaterally abrogated the protective treaties with the southern Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, which became sovereign states.
Summary
Nationalism can be a progressive force, supportive of liberal rights and independence. It should not be mistaken as an “emotional” response to European colonialism; it arose as part of rational and often scholarly discourses about language, history, and law; it was transferred to non-Western states by Western-educated elites who viewed national independence as a rationally grounded right of their people. The creation of new states out of colonial empires created a new ruling class of nationalist elites, usually educated in Europe, who promoted the state as the logical consequence of national autonomy.
Endnotes
Note 1: Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 4. Back.
Note 2: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 382. Back.
Note 4: Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1944). See also John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); and Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Back.
Note 5: On this view of nationalism see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1983); and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 6: John A. Hall, “Nationalisms: Classified and Explained,” Daedalus 122 (summer 1993), p. 6. Back.
Note 7: Anderson, Imagined Communities. Back.
Note 9: On the social and political importance of mechanical printing, see Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London: New Left Books, 1976). Back.
Note 10: By the middle of the nineteenth century, opera, in the hands of Wagner in Germany and Verdi in Italy, who were both active in promoting national unification, became a central tool of nationalist movements, especially among the commercial middle classes. Back.
Note 11: Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Introduction: From the Movement of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation,” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 26. See also Andrew Parker, et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992). For the development of the dual imagery of representations of woman and the nation in Western political theory, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Back.
Note 12: See Eugin Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). Back.
Note 13: See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). Back.
Note 14: Hall, “Nationalisms: Classified and Explained,” 9-10; and Anderson, Imagined Communities, 50-65. Back.
Note 15: Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Inquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 201. Back.
Note 16: Ibid., 196-226. Back.
Note 17: Hall, “Nationalisms: Classified and Explained,” 9. Back.
Note 18: J. G. Merquior, “The Patterns of State-building in Brazil and Argentina,” in John A. Hall ed., States in History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 264-288. Back.
Note 19: Hugh Seton-Watson, Nation and States, 89-101. Back.
Note 20: Ibid., 102-110. Back.
Note 21: On the importance of industrialization for nationalism, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 22: Huge Seton Watson, Nations and States, 143-191. Back.
Note 25: Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Back.
Note 26: The details on the Indian nationalist movement and those below on Asia, Africa, and the Middle East are from Hugh Seton Watson, Nations and Nationalism, passim. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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