The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Volume 2: Nationalism's Fields of Interaction 9781108427067, 9781108551458, 9781108781237, 9781108427050

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the cambridge history of

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM

This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. In Volume I I, leading scholars explore the dynamics of nationhood and nationalism’s interactions with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon’s crucial political dimensions. The relationships between imperialism and nationhood/nationalism and between major world religions and ethnonational identities are among the key themes explained and explored. The wide range of case studies from around the world brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field, the study of which was long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions. C A T H I E C A R M I C H A E L is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia. She has authored and edited several previous books including Language and Nationalism in Europe, coedited with the late Stephen Barbour (2000) and Genocide before the Holocaust (2009). M A T T H E W D ’ A U R I A is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830 (2020). A V I E L R O S H W A L D is Professor of History at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. His publications include Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (2001) and The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (2006).

t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM Edited by cathie carmichael, matthew d’auria, and aviel roshwald The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. The History also explores nationhood and nationalism’s relationships with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions, in addition to the phenomenon’s crucial political dimensions. Its wide range of regional case studies brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions. Volume I tracks turning points in the history of nationhood and nationalism from ancient times to the twentieth century. Volume I I theorizes the connections between nationhood/nationalism and ideology, religion, and culture. Together, they enable readers to understand the roots of how nationhood and nationalism function in the present day. The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Volume I EDITED BY CATHIE CARMICHAEL, MATTHEW D’AURIA, AND AVIEL ROSHWALD

The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Volume I I EDITED BY CATHIE CARMICHAEL, MATTHEW D’AURIA, AND AVIEL ROSHWALD

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM *

VOLUME

II

Nationalism’s Fields of Interaction *

Edited by

CATHIE CARMICHAEL University of East Anglia MATTHEW D’AURIA University of East Anglia and AVIEL ROSHWALD Georgetown University, Washington DC

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108427067 DOI:

10.1017/9781108551458

© Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress – 2 Volume Set 978–1–108–78123–7 Hardback – Volume I 978–1–108–42705–0 Hardback I S B N – Volume II 978–1–108–42706–7 Hardback

ISBN

ISBN

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures page xi List of Tables xii List of Contributors xiii

part one IMPERIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SETTINGS 1 . Building Nation-Empires in the Eighteenth-Century Iberian Atlantic fidel j. tava´ rez 2 . Nations and Nationalisms in the Late Ottoman Empire ebru boyar 3 . The Dutch Empire 43 michael wintle 4 . The Habsburg Monarchy 64 ba´ lint varga 5 . The British Empire 88 krishan kumar 6 . The French Empire 108 eric t. jennings 7 . Germany as a “Global Nation,” 1840–1930 129 mark hewitson 8 . The Russian and Soviet Empire 158 ronald grigor suny and valerie a. kivelson

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9 . The Japanese Empire 179 sherzod muminov 210

10 . American Internationalism andrew preston

11 . The Indian Subcontinent: From Raj to Partition swarupa gupta

233

12 . Middle Eastern and North African Nationalisms 257 jonathan d. wyrtzen 280

13 . African Nationalisms emma hunter

14 . Bringing Empires Back in: The Imperial Origins of Nations in Indochina 300 tuong vu Conclusion to Part I

323

part two TRANSNATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS MISSIONS AND IDENTITIES 15 . Liberalism and Nationalism: Trajectories of an Entangled Relationship 331 jo¨ rn leonhard 16 . Marxism and the National Question enzo traverso

351

17 . The Catholic Church 372 lawrence c. reardon 18 . Islam and Nationalism john o. voll

395

19 . On Jewish Nationhood and Nationalism: A Historical Survey from Antiquity to the Establishment of the State of Israel 417 allon gal

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Contents

20 . Buddhism 437 matthew j. walton Conclusion to Part I I

459

part three INTERSECTIONS: NATIONAL(IST) SYNERGIES AND TENSIONS WITH OTHER SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND CULTURAL CATEGORIES, IDENTITIES, AND PRACTICES 21 . Self-Determination and National Sovereignty alain dieckhoff

467

22 . Citizenship and Nationhood: From Antiquity to Gaia Citizenship 485 daniele conversi 23 . Religion and Nationhood peter van der veer 24 . Nationalism and Capitalism jerry z. muller

503 523

25 . Economic Nationalism in an Imperial Age, 1846–1946 marc-william palen

538

26 . National Identity and the Idea of Race in the Dinaric Region cathie carmichael

559

27 . Nationalism, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide: A View from Below omer bartov

578

28 . Warfare, Nation Formation, and the Legitimacy of States: An Ethnosymbolic Perspective 597 john hutchinson 29 . Nationalism, Terrorism, and the State: Historical Perspectives bernhard blumenau

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30 . Negotiating National Identity through Tourism in Colonial South Asia and Beyond 640 eric g. e. zuelow 31 . Gendered Nations and Institutions 661 joane nagel 32 . Historiographies and Commemorative Practices stefan berger 33 . Nation and Literature theo d’haen

682

706

34 . Foodways and Nationhood peter scholliers

727

35 . The Dynamics of National Music: Opera and Classical Music in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century 749 rutger helmers 36 . Media and Nationalism: Europe and the USA, 1500–2000 frank bo¨ sch Conclusion to Part I I I Index 796

x

789

768

Figures

3.1 3.2 7.1 7.2 12.1 17.1 19.1 21.1 26.1 28.1 29.1 31.1 34.1 36.1

The Dutch golden state coach, 1898 page 44 Albert Hahn, “Indië in de Tweede Kamer,” Het Volk, 27 November 1904 54 “Imperator, the biggest ship in the world, blessed by Henkell Dry (Sekt),” Simplicissimus, 27 May 1912 138 “The African Menace (Die afrikanische Gefahr),” Simplicissimus, 19 April 1904 148 French Algerian demonstrators with Algerian and Amazigh flags, Place de la République, Paris, 10 March 2019 274 Michelangelo, “The Creation of Adam,” Sistine Chapel 379 The arch of Titus in Rome, portraying sacred artifacts from the destroyed Jewish Temple 423 Woodrow Wilson attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 476 Stećci (marble tombstones) from a necropolis near Stolac in Bosnia and Hercegovina 563 Entry of Joan the Maid into Orleans, 1429 C E 604 Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Sarajevo, 28 June 1914 625 US military recruitment poster 668 George Frederick Keller, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” The Wasp, 1877 728 “Hambacher Fest,” drawn by F. Massler 777

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Tables

34.1 Features according to three levels of national sentiments, in relation to time

xii

page 746

Contributors

O M E R B A R T O V is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. His most recent books include Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007) and Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). S T E F A N B E R G E R is Professor of History at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany. He is the author of six monographs on comparative labor history, nationalism, historiography, and deindustrialization as well as heritage studies. B E R N H A R D B L U M E N A U is a senior lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. His publications include The United Nations and Terrorism: Germany, Multilateralism, and Antiterrorism Efforts in the 1970s (2014). F R A N K B O¨ S C H is Professor of Twentieth–Century European History at the University of Potsdam and director of the Center for Contemporary History (ZZF). His publications include Mass Media and Historical Change: Germany in International Perspective, 1400 to the Present (2015). E B R U B O Y A R is Professor in the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara. Her publications include Ottomans, Turks, and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (2007). C A T H I E C A R M I C H A E L is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia. Her publications include Genocide before the Holocaust (2009). D A N I E L E C O N V E R S I is Research Professor at the Ikerbasque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Euskadi (Spain). He sits on the editorial and advisory boards of more than ten scholarly journals, including Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Ethnicities, Ethnopolitics, and Nations and Nationalism. T H E O D’ HA E N is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at KU Leuven (Catholic University of Louvain, Flemish) and Leiden University. He has published widely on American literature, European literature, (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, world literature, and crime fiction.

xiii

list of contributors A L A I N D I E C K H O F F is CNRS Research Professor, Centre for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris. His books include The Invention of a Nation: Zionist Thought and the Making of Modern Israel (2003) and Nationalism and the Multination State (2016). A L L O N G A L (Goldberg) is Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Jewish History and the Ben-Gurion Research Institute at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His work on Judaism, Zionism, Israel, and nationhood and nationalism has been published in both English and Hebrew by leading scholarly presses. S W A R U P A G U P T A received her Ph.D. from SOAS, London and is a member of the Institute of Historical Studies, Calcutta. Her publications include Notions of Nationhood in Bengal (2009), Cultural Constellations (2017), Nationhood and Identity Movements: Colonial and Post-Colonial Times (as editor, 2012), and articles in Modern Asian Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, and Studies in History. R U T G E R H E L M E R S is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (2014). M A R K H E W I T S O N is Professor of German History and Politics at University College London. His most recent books are Germany and the Modern World, 1880–1914 (2018) and Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820 (2017). E M M A H U N T E R is Professor of Global and African History in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (2015). J O H N H U T C H I N S O N is Visiting Fellow at LSE IDEAS. Among his publications are Nations as Zones of Conflict (2005) and Nationalism and War (2017). E R I C T. J E N N I N G S is Distinguished Professor of the History of France and the Francophonie at the University of Toronto. His most recent books are Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (2018) and Perspectives on French Colonial Madagascar (2017). V A L E R I E A . K I V E L S O N is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan. Her books include Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013) and Russia’s Empires (coauthored with Ronald Suny, 2017). K R I S H A N K U M A R is University Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. His most recent publications include Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (2017) and Empires: A Historical and Political Sociology (2020). J O¨ R N L E O N H A R D is Professor in Modern European History at Freiburg University. His many publications include Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War (2018).

xiv

List of Contributors J E R R Y Z . M U L L E R is Professor Emeritus of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His many books include The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (2002). S H E R Z O D M U M I N O V is Associate Professor of Japanese History at the University of East Anglia. His first book, entitled Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan, 1945–1956, was published by Harvard University Press in January 2022. J O A N E N A G E L is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas. Her recent publications include Gender and Climate Change (2016). M A R C - W I L L I A M P A L E N is a historian at the University of Exeter. His works include The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (2016). A N D R E W P R E S T O N is Professor of American History and a Fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University. He is the author, most recently, of American Foreign Relations: A Very Short Introduction (2019) and co-editor of Rethinking American Grand Strategy (2021). L A W R E N C E C . R E A R D O N is Professor of Political Science teaching Chinese politics and international relations at the University of New Hampshire. He has published several studies on religion and the Catholic Church, as well as four monographs on China’s economic development strategy. P E T E R S C H O L L I E R S is Professor Emeritus in the History Department of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. He is the author of numerous articles and co-edited the sixvolume A Cultural History of Food (2012) among many other publications. R O N A L D G R I G O R S U N Y is William H. Sewell, Jr., Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Co-author with Valerie Kivelson of Russia’s Empires (2017), his most recent book is Stalin: Passage to Revolution (2020). F I D E L J . T A V A´ R E Z is Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, City University of New York, where he teaches Latin American, Atlantic, and global history. E N Z O T R A V E R S O is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the author of Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (2016), among other books. P E T E R V A N D E R V E E R is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen and University Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University. He has undertaken comparative work on religion and nationalism in India, Britain, and China. B A´ L I N T V A R G A is a research fellow at the University of Graz. A historian specializing in the history of the Habsburg Monarchy, currently he is working on a book on the reception of colonialism in the Habsburg peripheries.

xv

list of contributors J O H N O. V O L L is Professor Emeritus of Islamic History at Georgetown University. His many publications include Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (1994) and Islam and Democracy after the Arab Spring (co-authored with John L. Esposito and Tamara Sonn, 2015). T U O N G V U is Professor and Head of the Political Science Department at the University of Oregon. He is the author or editor of five books, including, most recently, Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (2017). M A T T H E W J . W A L T O N is Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His publications include Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar (2016). M I C H A E L W I N T L E held the Chair of Modern European History from 2002 to 2019 at the University of Amsterdam, where he was head of the Department of European Studies. His most recent book is Eurocentrism: History, Identity, White Man’s Burden (2020). J O N A T H A N D. W Y R T Z E N is Associate Professor of Sociology, International Affairs, and History at Yale University. His book, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (2015), won the Social Science History Association’s President’s Book Award. E R I C G . E . Z U E L O W is Professor of Modern European History at the University of New England. He is the author of A History of Modern Tourism (2015) and Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (2009).

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part i *

IMPERIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL SETTINGS

1

Building Nation-Empires in the Eighteenth-Century Iberian Atlantic fi d e l j . t a v a´ r e z

On 19 March 1812, after much deliberation, the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, promulgated Spain’s first written constitution, the celebrated Constitution of Cádiz.1 Seen in the context of the Age of Revolutions, a time when political revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies, France, and Haiti were accompanied by written constitutions, the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz was not exactly at the vanguard of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, the importance and peculiarity of this constitution lay not in the content or nature of the document but in who was involved in its design. The constitution of the United States of America, the many French constitutions during the revolutionary period, and the various Haitian constitutions written beginning in 1801 were primarily a product of one hemisphere or the other, but not both. In contrast, Spain’s Constitution of 1812 came about as a result of an imperial parliament with deputies representing the multiplicity of territories of Spain’s oceanic empire.2 Unlike any other previous or contemporaneous example, Spain’s constitutional experiment was, therefore, a genuinely Atlantic experiment.3 The impetus behind this Atlantic experiment was an attempt to create what I call a nation-empire, a kind of polity that sought to incorporate and integrate Spain’s extra-European territories into a project of political and economic modernization. Certainly, this was an unprecedented experiment, 1

2

3

Roberto Breña (ed.), Cádiz a debate: Actualidad, contexto y legado (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Internacionales, 2014); Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (eds.), The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “‘Equality! The Sacred Right of Equality’; Representation under the Constitution of 1812,” Revista de Indias, 68/242 (2008), 97–122. For the most cogent discussion of this perspective, see José M. Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica: Autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid: Fundación Carolina; Centro de Estudios Hispánicos e Iberoamericanos; Marcial Pons Historia, 2006).

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not least because of its underlying assumptions, in particular the idea that Spanish American territories were “not properly colonies or factories, such as those of other nations, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy.”4 While Spain’s experiment was, by all accounts, much more ambitious, the Portuguese Atlantic also witnessed a similar experiment, especially after 1807, when the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula forced the Portuguese court to relocate to Rio de Janeiro.5 By 1815, King Dom João VI affirmed his commitment to rethinking the political foundations of the Portuguese Empire when he declared that Brazil was not a colony but a coequal kingdom of the Portuguese “united kingdom.”6 The Luso-Brazilian world, thus, also witnessed a kind of imperial reinvention, though in this case without a constitution, guided by the principle that the Portuguese monarchy was composed of subjects from both sides of the Atlantic, without distinguishing, at least nominally, between colonial and metropolitan subjects. The fact that Spain and Portugal chose to resolve, at least in the first instance, their respective Atlantic crises in this particular manner begs the question of why it was the Iberian world, and not the Anglophone or the Francophone, that made a deliberate attempt to integrate its overseas territories, politically and economically, with the metropoles. As this chapter will show, the Iberian solution to the imperial crisis provoked by the Napoleonic invasion must be understood in the context of a particular brand of empire building that took place during the 1780s and 1790s. While this brand of empire building took center stage after the American Revolution taught Spanish imperial officials that overseas territories could secede from their mother countries if the relationship was no longer beneficial, the Iberian projects to create nation-empires had earlier origins among a group of Enlightenment officials and political economists who warned, as early as 1768 in the Spanish case, that the only viable way to integrate the American territories was not as “pure colon[ies]” but as “powerful provinces of the Spanish Empire.” To do so, it was necessary to govern with “gentleness,” 4

5

6

This statement was issued on 22 January 1809 by the temporary government of Spain, the Junta Suprema Central y Gubernativa del Reino, just a few months after the unprecedented crisis generated by the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808. Cited in Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60. Kristen Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001). Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 99–101.

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thus allowing all the territories of the monarchy to become united as “a single national body.”7 In Portugal, this realization would come much later, in the 1790s, but it arose, nonetheless, from a similar conviction: to retain its colonies, Portugal had to integrate, not alienate, its overseas possessions. The idea that the Spanish and Portuguese empires sought to create a new kind of nation-empire during the last two decades of the eighteenth century is not a particularly new claim. In an insightful article, Manuel Lucena Giraldo has reconstructed how leading Spanish ministers sought to unite Spain’s Atlantic territories more tightly by creating an imperial nation.8 In his book on the Portuguese Atlantic during the Age of Revolutions, Gabriel Paquette has also argued that Portugal made great efforts to integrate its empire without alienating colonial elites during the 1790s.9 More recently, Brian Hamnett has studied the Spanish and Portuguese empires in tandem, suggesting that both made deliberate attempts to bring the colonies and the metropoles into some form of union just before the Napoleonic invasion plunged them into unprecedented Atlantic crises. In fact, Hamnett has suggested that the disintegration of both empires must be explained not by the rise of anticolonial nationalist ideologies, but by a failure to solve internal disputes that were exacerbated by the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, a perspective that is shared by the earlier works of François-Xavier Guerra, Jaime E. Rodríguez, Jeremy Adelman, and José M. Portillo Valdés.10 In a wide-ranging book concerning the evolution of race and nation in the Spanish Empire, Antonio Feros proposed that, though the eighteenth century saw the rise of a particular brand of scientific racism that held whiteness to be the embodiment of civilization, during the crisis triggered by the Napoleonic invasion, Spaniards opted for a concept of nation that included all free subjects across the empire, with the

7

8

9 10

Cited in Fidel J. Tavárez, “Colonial Economic Improvement: How Spain Created New Consulados to Preserve and Develop Its American Empire, 1778–1795,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 98/4 (2018), 614–615. Manuel Lucena Giraldo, “La nación imperial española: Crisis y recomposición en el mundo Atlántico,” Cuadernos Dieciochistas: Salamanca, Universidad de SalamancaSociedad Española de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 12 (2011), 67–78. Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, 17–83. Brian R. Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencies: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993); Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America; Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Portillo Valdés, Crisis atlántica.

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exception of people of African descent, who were not automatically granted Spanish citizenship.11 Throughout this chapter, I draw on this insightful historiography, but I also make a different claim. In contrast to the extant perspectives, this chapter argues that the brand of empire building that surfaced in the Iberian world during the 1780s and 1790s was not simply or mainly based on political or administrative centralization. Rather, the key to this project of unification was economic integration and the creation of reciprocal economic bonds between subjects across the Spanish and Portuguese empires, respectively. As I show in the first section of the chapter, while both Spain and Portugal made deliberate attempts to centralize their respective empires and increase authority in the colonies, they changed course during the 1780s and 1790s. The earlier centralizing experiments of the marquis of Pombal in Portugal (1750–1777) and a host of ministers in Spain, of whom José de Gálvez was perhaps the most important, came to an end during the last two decades of the century. This earlier strategy of centralization did improve royal authority and revenue extraction in the colonies, but it also posed some dangers, especially after the American Revolution showed that colonies could in fact choose to secede from their mother countries. As a result, a coterie of leading eighteenth-century Iberian ministers and political economists focused instead on economic integration, commercial liberalization, and the reduction of consumption taxes and customs duties across their respective empires. In Spain, this form of economic nation-building was supported by ministers like Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes and José Moñino (later count of Floridablanca), to mention two of the most important, and in Portugal by the likes of Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho. Rather than unify the empire by way of a heavy political authority, the goal was to unite the economic interests of subjects across both empires by softer, commercial means.12 It is the existence of this project, I suggest, that explains why Spain and Portugal responded in similar ways to the Napoleonic invasion, namely by proclaiming the equality and integration of Spanish America and Brazil, respectively. To be fair, in the context of the French invasion of the Iberian peninsula starting in 1808, economic reform was no longer enough to prevent imperial dissolution, especially in Spain. This unprecedented crisis drove both empires to pursue 11

12

Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). On the notion of “doux commerce,” the idea that commerce softens human mores, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

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novel political experiments, including the transference of the entire Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro or, as in the case of Spain, the creation of an imperial parliament with representatives from across the empire. Nevertheless, the impetus to integrate the colonies, I suggest, was already evident in the project of economic integration that is the subject of this chapter.

Imperial Centralization and Colonial Extraction In spite of Spain’s and Portugal’s integrationist projects of imperial nationbuilding during the late eighteenth century, both Iberian empires began their reforming trajectories with more centralizing aims. Rather than the incorporation and integration of their colonial territories, the Iberian empires initially sought to gain greater control of the colonies’ royal finances in order to defend the integrity of their respective empires. What is more, these Iberian centralizing efforts usually began as a response to a real and perceived threat of British incursions, through trade and military occupations, into Spain’s and Portugal’s colonies in the Americas. In Spain, the main triggers of reform were the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which exposed just how vulnerable to occupation Spain’s colonies were. In Portugal, the impetus did not stem from wars, as Portugal and Britain were faithful allies for most of the century, but from the arrival of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, marquis of Pombal, to the court in 1750, and especially after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. Like his Spanish counterparts, Pombal made a deliberate and concerted effort to increase the metropole’s control over commerce, politics, and religion across Portugal’s overseas territories.13 Let us begin with Pombal’s reforms in Portugal. Pombal’s program of reform stemmed in great part from his conviction that Britain had managed to emasculate Portugal and its empire. In fact, for Pombal, it seemed as though Portugal had become a British colony. It should, therefore, be no surprise that Pombal developed these incipient ideas during his time as an ambassador in London. He was in London from 1739 to 1743, a period that coincided with the War of Jenkins’ Ear between Britain and Spain. During these years, Pombal was able to appreciate the extent of Britain’s designs, which above all entailed maintaining and gaining access to Spain’s colonial markets.14 In fact, Britain had launched the war primarily 13

14

For the most complete overview in English of Pombal’s reforms, see Kenneth Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Ibid., 4–6.

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to maintain the commercial concessions it had gained from Spain after the War of Spanish Succession and the settlement of Utrecht (1713).15 In this context, Pombal became concerned that Britain would continue to make bold moves, including war and invasions, in order to gain greater access to both Spanish American and Brazilian markets. And even though Portugal and Britain were close allies, Pombal was convinced that Britain would not hesitate to do everything in its power to capture Brazilian markets.16 Pombal’s concern was entirely well-placed. Britain, in fact, already enjoyed privileged access to Portuguese markets, particularly since the Methuen Treaty of 1703. While the aforementioned treaty cemented a military alliance between Britain and Portugal, it also established that British woolen textiles would be exempt from tariffs, a provision that allowed Britain to secure markets for its textiles across the Portuguese Empire. To be sure, the Methuen Treaty also enabled Portugal to sell its wine in Britain unencumbered by significant tariffs. In fact, the treaty established that Portuguese wine would receive preferential treatment over French wine, which was taxed more heavily in Britain. While some scholars have criticized the Methuen Treaty because it purportedly subordinated the Portuguese economy to British desires, others have suggested instead that the treaty actually benefited the Portuguese economy by allowing the Iberian monarchy to sell its wine in the British market.17 Whether the treaty benefited the Portuguese economy is not the subject of this chapter. Instead, what is important to recognize is that Pombal interpreted the treaty as a product of British machinations. His subsequent strategy primarily hinged on curtailing British access to Brazilian markets without altogether violating the Methuen Treaty. Posterity has come to recognize Pombal for his involvement in the reconstruction of Lisbon after the devastating earthquake of 1755 and for his intransigent regalism (the assertion of the rights of the crown vis-à-vis the church), which culminated in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759. But, as Kenneth Maxwell demonstrated some time ago in a seminal article, Pombal wished nothing more than the nationalization of the Luso-Brazilian 15

16 17

On the War of Jenkins’ Ear, see Adrian Finucane, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), ch. 4. See Maxwell, Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment. José Luís Cardoso, “The Anglo-Portuguese Methuen Treaty of 1703: Opportunities and Constraints of Economic Development,” in Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek (eds.), The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 105–124.

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economy, with a particular focus on maintaining a favorable balance of trade for the metropole. To this effect, in the early 1750s, Pombal, as Portugal’s new secretary of state, turned his attention to Minas Gerais, Brazil’s most important gold-producing region. He particularly focused on systematizing the collection of the royal fifth. Almost concurrently, he also focused on protecting Brazil’s most important commodities, sugar and tobacco. To nationalize Portugal’s trade and economy, Pombal then created the Company of Grão Pará in 1755, guaranteeing a monopoly of navigation and the slave trade for twenty years. In 1759, he also moved to create the Company of Pernambuco, which, in addition to trading in sugar and slaves, was charged with stimulating Pernambuco’s sugar mills. For all his concern with Brazil, however, Pombal’s project of economic nationalization primarily cared about securing a favorable balance of trade for the metropole, while increasing the king’s royal revenue.18 As Spain’s American empire was much larger, more diverse, and more complex than Portugal’s, its extractive project was also much more wideranging and ambitious. While the pivotal moment began after the Seven Years’ War, important debates and discussions began earlier, during and after the War of Jenkins’ Ear.19 Above all, these wars exposed Spain’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities vis-à-vis Britain. While Britain managed to launch significant, though ultimately unsuccessful, attacks against Portobello and Cartagena in 1739 and 1741, respectively, its efforts were much more threatening in 1762, during the successful British occupations of Havana and Manila. Although Spain regained control of Havana and Manila and acquired Louisiana from France at the conclusion of the war in 1763, it also lost Florida to Britain. In spite of Spain’s ability to retain its territories almost intact, it became clear that things needed to change if the Iberian polity were to remain competitive against Britain. As a result of this realization, Spain launched a series of general visitations to determine how to raise more funds from the colonies to improve imperial defense in the event of future 18

19

Kenneth Maxwell, “Pombal and the Nationalization of the Luso-Brazilian Economy,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 48/4 (1968), 608–631. For an account that emphasizes the period of the 1760s, see Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For more recent accounts that emphasize the earlier period, see Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso and Ainara Vázquez Varela (eds.), Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759) (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Kenneth Andrien and Allan Kuethe, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Adrian J. Pearce, The Origins of Bourbon Reform in Spanish South America, 1700–1763 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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invasions. During the 1760s, the key stages of this extractive enterprise took place in Cuba and New Spain (roughly modern-day Mexico). Soon after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the Seven Years’ War to an end in 1763, the marquis of Esquilache, the Sicilian minister whom Charles III brought from Naples in 1759, appointed the count of Ricla as captain-general and governor of the island of Cuba. Ricla’s main task, which he accomplished with Alejandro O’Reilly’s help, was to determine whether it was possible to raise the alcabala (consumption tax) from 2 percent to 6 percent in order to improve the island’s military defense. Cuban hacendados (elite landowners) protested almost immediately, claiming that such a radical increase far surpassed the island’s economic abilities. In spite of their objections, they were not entirely unwilling to negotiate. In fact, Cuban hacendados agreed to a 4 percent alcabala, as long as the crown instituted a system of free trade between the island and peninsular Spain, which would allow the Cuban elite to sell their sugar more easily in the metropole. Spain partially acquiesced to the demands, as Esquilache ultimately raised the alcabala to 6 percent but also implemented comercio libre (free trade) between the Caribbean islands and Spain in 1765 to satisfy the Cuban elite.20 While Esquilache succeeded in raising the alcabala in Cuba, he had more ambitious plans. In 1764, he appointed Francisco Armona as visitor-general of New Spain with the intention of extracting more revenue from Spain’s largest, most populous, and wealthiest overseas territory. Armona died on his way to the Indies, but soon after, Esquilache appointed the later-to-be infamous José de Gálvez as visitor-general of New Spain.21 According to the instructions that he received from Esquilache in 1765, Gálvez’s task was “to collect all legitimate duties as legally provided without altering established practice or dispensing voluntary favors, and to prevent abuses and all superfluous expenses not absolutely indispensable for the best administration of the revenues.”22 Gálvez’s efforts became even more ambitious than his instructions prescribed. While Esquilache fell from power in 1766, Gálvez continued until 1771 to serve as visitor-general in New Spain, where he 20

21

22

Allan Kuethe and G. Douglas Inglis, “Absolutism and Enlightened Reform: Charles III, the Establishment of the Alcabala, and Commercial Reorganization in Cuba,” Past and Present, 109 (1985), 118–143; Allan Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986). Jesús Varela Marcos, “Los prolegómenos de la visita de José de Gálvez a la Nueva España (1766): Don Francisco de Armona y la instrucción secreta del Marqués de Esquilache,” Revista de Indias, 46/178 (1986), 178–195. “Instructions to José de Gálvez,” in Herbert Ingram Priestley, José de Gálvez: Visitor-General of New Spain (1765–1771) (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980 [1916]), 404.

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attempted to improve the state’s extractive capacity by curtailing the misappropriation of royal funds, by removing allegedly corrupt officials, and by creating state monopolies for tobacco, brandy, playing cards, and gunpowder.23 In 1768, he went even further, submitting to the court a plan to institute the intendancy system as a replacement for the corregimientos (Castilian administrative subdivisions that were implemented in Spanish America after the conquest), an institution that he deemed prone to corruption because it was plagued by venal officials who colluded with monopolistic merchants.24 In contrast to corregidores, the new intendants were to be salaried officials who were appointed on the basis of merit, talents, and service to the crown.25 Gálvez was convinced that the intendancy system would secure both the health of the royal treasury and the fairness and justice of Spanish imperial rule. In spite of Gálvez’s seemingly bureaucratic reasoning, he had other reasons for implementing the intendancy system as well. More specifically, he had come to believe that, unless Spanish American subjects were governed with a stern hand, they would engage in corruption, particularly the misappropriation of royal funds, to the detriment of the metropole. Hence, Gálvez’s commitment to increasing imperial authority stemmed not simply from his attempt to centralize the empire and improve the collection of taxes – though this was certainly an important component – but also from his assumptions regarding the “degenerate” nature of New World peoples.26 These negative portrayals of New World peoples were commonplace among European philosophical historians of the eighteenth century, but Gálvez probably learned this perspective most directly from Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, scientists and naval officers who accompanied French academicians to Quito during the Geodesic Expedition starting in 1735.27 Among many more observations, Ulloa and Juan noted that during their sojourn in

23 24

25

26

27

Ibid. Luis Navarro García, Las reformas borbónicas en América: El plan de intendencias y su aplicación (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1995). On the notion of merit in the Spanish Empire, see Mónica Ricketts, “Merit and Its Subversive New Roles,” in Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 34–61. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). On the expedition, see Larrie D. Ferreiro, Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition That Reshaped Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

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South America they had learned that American Spaniards (the creoles) were plagued by “innate sloth and indolence.”28 Between 1765 and 1771, Gálvez conducted his general visitation in New Spain with these assumptions in mind. He would also continue to govern with these prejudices against creoles during his tenure as the minister of the Indies between 1776 and 1787. Almost as soon as he became minister of the Indies in 1776, he appointed José Antonio de Areche, a close collaborator during the visitation in New Spain, as visitor-general of Peru, Chile, and Río de la Plata. In addition to the standard instructions about how to investigate the state of the royal treasuries and the administration of justice, Gálvez gave Areche a separate instruction in which he warned that Peruvian creoles were haughty, indolent, and deceitful.29 In quick succession, Gálvez then appointed Juan Francisco Gutiérrez de Piñeres as visitor-general of New Granada and José Garcia de Leon y Pizarro as visitor-general of the Audiencia (high court and district) of Quito. Like Gálvez’s visitation in New Spain, the subsequent visitations in the rest of Spain’s American empire resulted in the reorganization of the royal treasuries and tax collection, and the institution of new estancos (state monopolies) for tobacco, aguardiente (brandy or liquor), playing cards, and gun powder.30 Like Pombal in the Portuguese Empire between 1750 and 1777, Gálvez had effectively put into place a new administrative apparatus designed to increase royal authority and extract more revenue from the colonies.

Toward a Nation-Empire For much of the 1770s, it was Gálvez who controlled policymaking for the Spanish American colonies. Nonetheless, from the sidelines, an assembly of ministers began to propose an alternative to his extractive model, one based on creating “a single national body.” The latter term, in fact, appeared in 1768, in the same document of the Council of Castile where Campomanes and 28 29

30

Cited in Tavárez, “Colonial Economic Improvement,” 613. For a discussion of this issue, see Patricia Gutiérrez Rivas, “José Antonio de Areche y la Visita General a la Audiencia de Lima,” Ph.D. diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2015, 133–134. John R. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, 1750–1824 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003); Jacques A. Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755–1796 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980); Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Kenneth Andrien, “The Politics of Reform in Spain’s Atlantic Empire during the Late Bourbon Period: The Visita of José García de León y Pizarro in Quito,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 41/4(2009), 637–662.

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Floridablanca had claimed that Spain’s American territories were not pure colonies, but “essential provinces of the Spanish Empire.” The events that drove the aforementioned ministers to proclaim the need to unite Spain and Spanish America as a single nation began shortly after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767. The expulsion provoked an especially strong reaction in New Spain, where Gálvez served as visitor-general. During the rebellions of 1767, Gálvez had come to the conclusion that a host of Mexican intellectual elites were using the expulsion of the Jesuits as a pretext to launch a project for independence.31 Campomanes and Floridablanca, as fiscales (crown lawyers) of the Council of Castile, agreed with Gálvez that the issue of a supposed project for independence in Mexico was a serious matter. They also confirmed, to the dismay of Gálvez’s critics in New Spain, that the visitor-general had the authority to fix and reform New Spain’s fiscal, administrative, and judicial institutions. But, unlike Gálvez, who was convinced that the colonies must remain dependent on the metropole, Campomanes and Floridablanca called for a “gentle” form of government. “How can they love a government which they rebuke and accuse of attempting to extract profits and utilities without employing some of those earnings in cultivating love for the nation, and whose subjects [peninsular Spaniards] only go there to become rich at their expense?” they asked. This extractive logic, these ministers cautioned, was illegitimate, for it was impossible to treat “those territories as a pure colony.” Rather, Spain had to govern Spanish American territories “like powerful and significant provinces of the Spanish Empire.” This, in turn, would allow Spain to create “a single national body” with its vast Atlantic territories.32 At first sight, the idea of “a single national body” may have seemed even more threatening to creoles than Gálvez’s centralizing impulse. Spain, to put it simplistically, was a monarchy of many nations, each of which retained its historical constitution, customs, and political autonomy. As John H. Elliott has suggested, Spain was a composite monarchy composed of multiple kingdoms.33 A new generation of scholars has even suggested that what explains Spain’s and Portugal’s longevity as imperial powers is their polycentric nature. Both of these Iberian empires not only allowed the kingdoms 31

32 33

Among others, Gálvez decided to accuse, before the Council of Castile, the most important legal mind in Mexico, Francisco Xavier de Gamboa. On Gamboa, see Christopher Peter Albi, “Contested Legalities in Colonial Mexico: Francisco Xavier Gamboa and the Defense of Derecho Indiano,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009. Cited in Tavárez, “Colonial Economic Improvement,” 614. John H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present, 137 (1992), 48–71.

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and territories under one sovereign to retain a certain degree of autonomy, but actually allowed multiple political centers to coexist. In other words, rather than projecting sovereignty from the court to the rest of the empire, Spain and Portugal allowed regional political strongholds to become centers in their own right, which included decision-making powers usually restricted to kings.34 Thus, in claiming that Spain had to become “a single national body,” Campomanes and Floridablanca seemed to be threatening the composite and polycentric nature of the empire. Nonetheless, Campomanes’s and Floridablanca’s project for a “single national body,” in contrast to Gálvez’s project, was primarily based on economic, rather than administrative and fiscal, integration. In fact, most of the solutions proposed by the fiscales in 1768 entailed economic reform. Of the nine measures proposed, seven were of an economic nature. First and foremost, the fiscales called for the implementation of comercio libre as a replacement for the fleet and galleon system. Only then would the territories of the empire become commercially integrated. Second, the fiscales warned that, if Spain was to prevent rebellion among its subjects, it had to avoid imposing new taxes and focus instead on eliminating superfluous expenses. Next, the fiscales recommended abolishing the panoply of taxes that affected trade within the empire, which effectively served as a barrier for trade. In addition to lowering taxes and duties on trade more generally, the fiscales particularly recommended lowering duties on national commodities in order to stimulate their production. To be fair, the fiscales did recommend the creation of an imperial parliament with representatives from across the Hispanic world, which might suggest an effort to centralize the empire’s administration. However, their intention was not the assertion of one territory over another, but their close association and integration, which formed the basis for a coherent nation-empire, bound by common economic interests.35 While this project to create “a single national body” through economic integration was thwarted by José de Gálvez’s extractive methods during his tenure as minister of the Indies (1776–1787), officials like Campomanes and Floridablanca continued to push for their project of imperial nation-building. In fact, Campomanes, as a founding member of the Economic Society of Madrid (1775), encouraged Spanish officials to adopt his vision of imperial 34

35

Pedro Cardim, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruiz Ibañez, and Gaetano Sabatini (eds.), Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). For a general discussion of this issue, see Tavárez, “Colonial Economic Improvement.”

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governance. Indeed, Campomanes turned the Economic Society of Madrid into an important incubator of his project for a nation-empire bound by economic reciprocity. Campomanes also authored two texts, the Discurso sobre el fomento de la industria popular (1774) and the Discurso sobre la educacion popular de los artesanos, y su fomento (1775), that were subsequently used to legitimate and create dozens of economic societies in the Iberian peninsula and across the empire.36 The ascent of Campomanes’s and Floridablanca’s project of economic imperial integration was aided by the explosive rebellions that Gálvez’s project of reform generated. Of particular relevance were the Comunero Rebellion in the viceroyalty of New Granada and the indigenous rebellions in the Andes between 1780 and 1782. The Comunero Rebellion was not a proto-nationalist independence movement, as they demanded a return to “good government.” In fact, this rebellion was directed against the fiscal reforms and state monopolies instituted by the visitor-general of the viceroyalty of New Granada.37 The indigenous rebellions are more difficult to categorize. Although most also called for the restoration of “good government,” the radical rebellion of Tupac Amaru called for the institution of an Inca kingdom as a replacement for Spanish rule.38 What is important to keep in mind is that these shocks in the colonies drove the Spanish crown to recognize that Gálvez’s system of government was unsustainable. This was especially the case because, just as Spain confronted these challenges in the colonies, the Iberian polity had ironically decided to support the revolution for the independence of the Thirteen Colonies.39 36

37

38

39

On Campomanes, see Jesús Astigarraga, “Campomanes y las sociedades económicas de amigos del país: Estructura política, descentralización económica y reformismo ilustrado,” in Dolores Mateo Dorado (ed.), Campomanes: Doscientos años después (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 2003), 617–668. John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978); John Fisher, Allan Kuethe, and Anthony McFarlane (eds.), Reform and Insurrection in Bourbon New Granada and Peru (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Anthony McFarlane, “Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 14/3 (1995), 313–338. Sergio Serulnikov, Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). For the most complete scholarly account of Spain’s involvement in the American Revolution, see Gabriel Paquette and Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia (eds.), Spain and the American Revolution: New Approaches and Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). For a general narrative history of Spain’s contribution to the American Revolution, see Larrie D. Ferreiro, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (New York: Knopf, 2016).

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The recognition that the empire was confronting difficult problems drove some Spanish ministers to put forward daring proposals. Between 1781 and 1783, precisely as Spain was financially and militarily helping the Thirteen Colonies create an independent republic, the count of Aranda and José de Ábalos presented the king with the idea of creating independent Bourbon kingdoms in the Spanish American viceroyalties. Both Aranda and Ábalos suggested that because the American Revolution had proved that colonies could secede from their mother countries once they achieved maturity and self-sufficiency, it behooved Spain to anticipate the process by creating three independent Bourbon kingdoms in the New World.40 Both officials had come to the conclusion that the independence of Spanish America was close to inevitable. Spain, then, had to make sure the process happened in an orderly way, preserving for the former metropole the utility of commerce with new Bourbon kingdoms in the Americas. These independence projects, of course, fell on deaf ears. This does not mean, however, that the Spanish crown did nothing to rethink its relationship with its American territories during this critical moment. On the contrary, although not every historian would agree, this was a period of great importance, especially for new economic reforms aimed at binding the empire in a new imperial and national project. To be fair, Gálvez was still busy implementing his centralizing and more domineering project of reforms during the mid-1780s, when he moved to establish the intendancy system in Peru, Mexico, Chile, and Río de la Plata.41 However, as the most powerful minister of the Spanish monarchy, the count of Floridablanca, then minister of state, was moving toward a different kind of government, one that closely resembled the “single national body” ideal he had designed with Campomanes in 1768. When Gálvez died in 1787, Floridablanca moved swiftly to implement his project of imperial economic integration. Initially, he focused on reforming the empire’s ministries, so that no individual minister like Gálvez could again govern Spain’s American territories in such an authoritarian and unrestrained 40

41

Manuel Lucena Giraldo (ed.), Premoniciones de la independencia de Iberoamérica (Madrid: Doce Calles; MAPFRE, 2003). Luis Navarro García, Intendencias en Indias (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos de Sevilla, 1959); Luis Navarro García, Servidores del rey: Los intendentes de Nueva España (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2009); Horst Pietschmann, Las reformas borbónicas y el sistema de intendencias en Nueva España: Un estudio político administrativo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996); John Lynch, Spanish Colonial Administration, 1782–1810: The Intendant System in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1958); John R. Fisher, Government and Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784–1814 (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1970); Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile.

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manner. Instead, he hoped that both hemispheres would be governed with “union and equality.”42 It was not too long before Floridablanca turned to the issue that most preoccupied him, namely the economic integration of the empire, which he thought would bind the empire by reciprocal commercial bonds, creating a commercially unified, though not politically centralized, nation-empire. To this end, he and his collaborators finally included New Spain and Venezuela into the empire’s system of free internal trade in 1789. Then, the Spanish court approved and charted multiple consulados (merchant chambers) across the major cities of the empire under the assumption that, as one minister put it in 1785, the consulados would allow American and peninsular merchants and landowners “to identify the interest of all in one corporation, which brings about the reciprocal promotion of agriculture and trade.”43 The trajectory in the Portuguese Empire was somewhat different, not least because the centralizing impulse set in motion by Pombal slowed down after 1777, when he was removed from office. Still, the main cause for a rethinking of the Portuguese Empire in the 1790s came from the conviction that Brazilian territories could indeed launch an independence movement if the relationship with the metropole was no longer beneficial. In fact, a conspiracy in Minas Gerais in 1789 proved precisely this point. A group of intellectuals from the Brazilian elite, most of whom were familiar with the political literature of the Enlightenment, drew inspiration from the American Revolution to launch a project for independence.44 The attempt was unsuccessful, but shortly thereafter it became obvious to contemporary ministers in Lisbon that something had to change. It was in this context that Rodrigo de Sousa Countinho, along with what Kenneth Maxwell has called the generation of the 1790s, came to lead the way in governing the Portuguese Empire in a new, less extractive manner.45 To be fair, attempts to integrate Brazil into the Portuguese Empire more tightly were attempted during the leadership of Pombal, including by way of educating the Brazilian elite at the University of Coimbra.46 However, with Coutinho, as with Campomanes and Floridablanca in the Spanish case, the emphasis was less on political than on economic integration. 42

43 44

45

46

Jacques A. Barbier, “The Culmination of the Bourbon Reforms, 1787–1792,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 57/1 (1977), 51–68. Cited in Tavárez, “Colonial Economic Improvement,” 626. Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808 (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1973]). Kenneth Maxwell, “The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea of Luso-Brazilian Empire,” in Dauril Alden (ed.), Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 107–144. Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, ch. 1.

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The viability of Coutinho’s project of economic integration came into sharp relief after 1798, when a group of free Afro-descendants from Salvador, Bahia launched a rebellion against the Portuguese crown, proclaiming the necessity of abolishing slavery and creating an independent Brazilian Republic.47 This rebellion in 1798, in conjunction with the example of the rebellion of slaves in Saint-Domingue that later developed into the Haitian Revolution, provided the Brazilian elite with a powerful reminder that radical and republican political ideas could end up backfiring and destroying the fragile hegemony of the Brazilian white elite. As Kenneth Maxwell has argued, “for the white minority in Portuguese America, the failure of the oligarchic movement in Minas Gerais during 1789, and the threat from below revealed by the Bahian artisans in 1798, provided two powerful incentives for compromise with the metropolis.”48 As a result, the Brazilian elite adopted a more conciliatory tone with the Portuguese crown, especially as plantation owners slowly realized that the collapse of the plantation complex in Saint-Domingue was a moment of opportunity for Brazil’s sugar economy. Just as the Brazilian elite adopted a conciliatory stance, the Portuguese crown, now under the influence of Countinho, softened its approach to colonial governance by focusing on issues of commercial integration. While Coutinho initially worked as a diplomat stationed in Sardinia and Turin, he was appointed minister of the navy and overseas territories in 1796, a position he held until 1801, at which point he was transferred to the Ministry of Finance. Unlike Pombal, Coutinho preferred to avoid monopolies. Additionally, rather than focusing on colonial extraction, he preferred development and improvement across the empire. He understood that only by pursuing this kind of policy, not one of imperial centralization, could the Luso-Brazilian Empire survive the ubiquitous conflicts of the 1790s. This was the perspective that Coutinho brought to bear during his tenure as minister of the navy and the overseas territories. Many of his proposals were never implemented, but the idea of a Luso-Brazilian Empire comprising coequal kingdoms bound by common economic interests was beginning to take shape.49 In fact, Coutinho had even begun to tinker with the idea that the

47

48

49

Donald Marcos, “Social Revolution Frustrated: The Conspiracy of the Tailors in Bahia, 1798,” Luso-Brazilian Review, 13/1 (1976), 74–90. Kenneth Maxwell, “The Idea of the Luso-Brazilian Empire,” in Naked Tropics: Essays on Empires and Other Rogues (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109–144, at 130. José Luís Cardoso and Alexandre Mendes Cunha, “Enlightened Reforms and Economic Discourse in the Portuguese-Brazilian Empire (1750–1808),” History of Political Economy, 44/4 (2012), 619–641; also Maxwell, “The Idea of the Luso-Brazilian Empire.”

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seat of the crown could be moved to Brazil, which he deemed the more powerful portion of the Luso-Brazilian Empire.50 Because Portugal managed to maintain itself somewhat removed from the cycle of war that had taken hold in the Atlantic since at least 1793, its project of nation-empire proved to be more productive than Spain’s. The latter Iberian empire, unlike the former, was dragged into a continuous state of warfare, first against revolutionary France and then as a partner with France against Britain from 1796 until 1808, when Napoleon, under the pretext of invading Portugal, Britain’s ally, took the unprecedented step of attempting to invade Spain as well. As a result, the Spanish imperial economy began to suffer from the middle of the 1790s, while the Portuguese imperial economy enjoyed a renaissance of sorts during the same period.51 After the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, however, Portugal, like Spain, was also thrown into a cycle of political and economic instability. Even so, the Iberian nation-empires proved to be resilient as innovative political experiments allowed them to muddle through, though certainly not very strongly, until the 1820s, when Brazil and Spanish American territories definitively secured their independence from the Iberian mother countries.52

Conclusion On 22 January 1809, a few months after the unprecedented crisis generated by the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1808, the temporary government of Spain, the Junta Suprema Central y Gubernativa del Reino, proclaimed that American territories were “not properly colonies or factories, such as those of other nations, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish monarchy.”53 We may be tempted to conclude that the statement 50 51

52

53

Maxwell, “The Idea of the Luso-Brazilian Empire,” 139. For Spain, see John R. Fisher, “Commerce and Imperial Decline: Spanish Trade with Spanish America, 1797–1820,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 30/3 (1998), 459–479. For Portugal, see J. M. Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse: Portugal, Brazil, and the Breakdown of the Old Colonial System (1760–1830),” Hispanic American Historical Review, 80/4 (2000), 839–864. For a detailed description of this process, see Brian R. Hamnett, “Process and Pattern: A Re-examination of the Ibero-American Independence Movements, 1808–1826,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 29/2 (1997), 279–328; Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830. See the full declaration: “Considering that the vast and precious dominions which Spain possesses in the Indies are not properly colonies or factories, such as those of other nations, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy . . . H. M. has chosen to declare . . . that the kingdoms, provinces, and isles which constitute the said dominions should have immediate national representation before his royal person and form

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represented mere political expediency, not a genuine commitment to incorporate Spanish American territories on an equal footing into Spain’s new parliamentary and constitutional experiment. This conclusion is, in some senses, true. However, the ideas expressed in the 1809 statement were not new. In fact, as we have seen, they harkened back to at least 1768, when Campomanes and Floridablanca suggested that it was necessary to govern Spain’s American territories with “gentleness,” for these vast dominions were not colonies but “powerful provinces of the Spanish Empire.” They were surely hoping to gain the support of Spanish Americans, but they were also attempting to bring to fruition the creation of an economically integrated nation-empire. This commitment led to an unprecedented experiment in the Spanish Atlantic. Just as the Bonaparte brothers were busy taking over the Spanish monarchy and invading Spain’s peninsular territories, a set of Spanish political leaders, from the city of Cádiz, decided to call for elections in the New World so that Spanish Americans could also be a part of Spain’s temporary government, the aforementioned Junta Suprema Central y Gubernativa del Reino. As a result, cities and municipalities across Spanish America did hold elections throughout 1809, though not always in an orderly and timely fashion, with the purpose of sending representatives to the Junta. In 1810, the Junta took a more radical step. It decided to dissolve itself and call for the meeting of the Cortes, the Spanish parliament. This decision resulted in new elections but now for deputies in the Cortes, an institution that was charged with writing and promulgating Spain’s first imperial and national constitution. Between 1810 and 1812, fierce debates ensued in the Cortes about how to allocate deputies for Spanish American territories and about whether castas (especially people of African descent) should be counted as Spanish citizens.54 Nonetheless, it is clear that, even though there were many disagreements, most deputies were convinced that Spain needed to become a new kind of nation-empire bound by a constitution and mutual economic interests.55 In Portugal, the declaration of equality formally emerged in 1815, many years after the Portuguese court had moved to Rio de Janeiro (1807). The delay, of course, should not be read as a sign that Portugal remained more imperialist, so to speak, than Spain. On the contrary, because the court had

54

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part of the Junta Central . . . through their respective deputies.” Cited in Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America, 60. For a detailed description of this process, see Rodríguez O., “‘Equality! The Sacred Right of Equality.’” Feros, Speaking of Spain, ch. 7.

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Building Nation-Empires in the Iberian Atlantic

literally moved to Brazil, the declaration of equality in 1815 was more of a formality. What is important is that, as in the Spanish case, the declaration of equality between the Portuguese and Brazilian kingdoms signaled an interest in creating a Portuguese nation-empire bound by economic interests. However, in the Portuguese case, it was metropolitan elites who complained that Portugal proper had been reduced to a peripheral province. As Rio became the true imperial capital and the center of government for the LusoBrazilian Empire and as the court got comfortably settled in its new capital city, elites in Portugal feared that the court would never return to Lisbon. It was only with the Porto Revolution of 1820 and the demands that liberals in Portugal placed on the monarch that the king, Dom João, began to consider seriously the return of the court to Lisbon. He succumbed to pressure in 1821, when he returned to Lisbon and left his son, Dom Pedro, as Prince of Brazil. In the midst of this crisis, Dom Pedro decided to proclaim the independence of the Brazilian Empire.56 While both empires did eventually collapse, the path toward imperial dissolutions was not ineluctable, even after the Napoleonic invasion. Nor was it inevitable that a majority of colonial subjects would opt for independence. By and large, elite Spanish Americans and Brazilians desired autonomy, not independence, within their respective empires.57 The account presented in this chapter suggests that the reasons for which colonial elites remained committed to Spain and Portugal have much to do with the project of imperial nation-building that took place during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Unlike the centralizing and extractive systems developed earlier by Pombal and Gálvez, the ministers who governed the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the 1780s and 1790s chose to create an imperial nation bound by economic reciprocity. It had become clear that European metropoles could not rule the colonies by mere force, especially in the case of Spain and Portugal, whose colonial dominions were significantly larger and wealthier than the metropoles. In this context, leading Iberian ministers turned to softer, commercial means of integration. And while their reforms were mostly geared toward economic matters, they also understood that an imperial parliament was the only way to keep the empire bound politically. 56 57

Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, ch. 2. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic; Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America; Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “We are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Hamnett, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent.

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The 1808 crisis surely brought to the fore political concepts that were absent from the late eighteenth-century projects of imperial nation-building discussed here, including the notion of national sovereignty. However, the idea of a nation-empire comprising territories across the Atlantic, which were bound by commercial ties and by an imperial parliament, had deeper origins in the late eighteenth century. Thus, the projects for Spanish and Portuguese “nation-empires” described in this chapter differ from the “imperial nation” recently described in Josep M. Fradera’s magnum opus. Studying the British, French, Spanish, and American empires in tandem, Fradera argues that from about 1750s onwards the British, French, and Spanish empires underwent a similar process of reconfiguration. While early modern empires were composite states comprising multiple territories with particularistic rights and privileges, over the course of the nineteenth century the aforementioned empires had become liberal polities that enshrined national sovereignty at home but also became increasingly extractive in their colonies. According to Fradera, the clearest example of this process was the rise of “special laws” for the colonies, a legal instrument that effectively allowed the mother countries to maintain liberalism at home while also expanding slavery and colonial extraction from their overseas territories. Fradera’s account is certainly correct in the long term, as Spain and Portugal, like their competitors, did attempt to adopt special laws for their then-small colonies in the 1830s. However, before the triumph of the imperial nation described by Fradera, Spain and Portugal sought to bind their empires by abolishing – politically, legally, and economically – the distinction between colony and metropole.58 Finally, it is important to keep in mind that while the Iberian projects of nation-empires may have been a triumph for the Latin American elites, who were granted more political power and voice from the 1780s onwards, the same cannot be said for people of African descent, especially in Brazil and Cuba, which became two of the most profitable, if also lugubrious, slave economies of the nineteenth century. Even the Constitution of Cádiz, perhaps the most inclusive imperial constitution of the period, was not an unequivocal victory for Afro-descendants in Spanish America. Indigenous peoples and mestizos were counted as Spanish citizens, but after much debate between 1810 and 1812, the deputies in Cádiz decided that free people of African descent were to be counted as Spaniards but not as Spanish citizens, 58

Josep M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

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unless they could prove to have served the nation in some important capacity or distinguished themselves with some talent, in which case they would presumably receive a letter of citizenship from the Cortes.59 Nevertheless, as the wars of independence gained momentum, people of African descent were able to carve a space for themselves in the new Spanish American republics, both by joining the revolutionary armed forces and by demanding political inclusion.60 With the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, which continued to be slave societies until much later in the century, significant numbers of Spanish American people of African descent – though not all, for the abolition of slavery was a gradual process in Spanish America during the first half of the nineteenth century – gained some political rights. In contrast, the Iberian projects of imperial nation-building of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had left much to be desired for Afro-descendants, who remained either enslaved or excluded from political participation.

Further Reading Adelman, Jeremy, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Feros, Antonio, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). Fradera, Josep M., The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Hamnett, Brian, The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Kuethe, Allan, and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Maxwell, Kenneth, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808 (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1973]). Paquette, Gabriel, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Portillo Valdés, José M., Crisis atlántica: Autonomía e independencia en la crisis de la monarquía hispana (Madrid: Fundación Carolina; Centro de Estudios Hispánicos e Iberoamericanos; Marcial Pons Historia, 2006). Schultz, Kristen, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001). 59 60

Feros, Speaking of Spain, 271. Marixa Lasso, “Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810– 1832,” American Historical Review, 111/2 (2006), 336–361; Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).

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Nations and Nationalisms in the Late Ottoman Empire ebru boyar

In his popular novel, Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), which was first published in Istanbul in 1943, Sabahattin Ali wrote that “for some reason or other people prefer to investigate what they feel sure they will find. It is without doubt easier to find a brave man to descend to the bottom of a well where it is known that a dragon lives than to find a man who will show the courage to descend into a well about the bottom of which nothing is known.”1 This view applies nicely to research into nations and nationalisms, for the bottom of the well is already known: the Ottoman Empire collapsed and was replaced by new nation-states. This collapse has often been taken as the “inevitable” triumph of nation-state over empire, the victory of national identities over other identity constructions. For Hans Kohn, writing in 1934, for example, “the Ottoman Empire was destined to go to pieces in any event on the internal conflicts evoked by the nationalism of the young Turks and the corresponding but opposed nationalism of the Christian and Arabic population.”2 This “inevitable” collapse is then explained by a selective representation of the past and the use of well-circulated tropes which tends to result in a simplification of the processes of the development of ideas of nationalism and nations in Ottoman territories, and a historical analysis that lacks depth. Certain views and individuals are thus given prominence, such as Father Paisi for Bulgarian nationalism or Yusuf Akçura and Ziya Gökalp for Turkish, and other views relegated to second place, thus presenting the idea of “nation” or the concept of “national identity” as far more fixed than in reality they were, with the differences in understanding, disagreements about any “national” belonging, or conflicts over ideological or intellectual concepts smoothed over and discarded from the historical discussion. It is this which allows Eric 1 2

Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Istanbul: YKY, 2016), 11. Hans Kohn, Orient and Occident (New York: John Day Company, 1934), 4.

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Zürcher to talk of “reactive Muslim nationalism” (a term which he uses interchangeably with “Ottoman Muslim nationalism”), the product of the trauma suffered by the Muslims in the Balkans and the Caucasus which propelled the Young Turks, many of them themselves from the Balkans, to order and carry out “the wholesale killing of Armenians,” convinced, Zürcher argues, that “what had happened in the Caucasus and the Balkans was about to repeat itself in Anatolia.”3 One of the major tropes that dominate academic literature on nations and nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire is that of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). These wars, which resulted in the loss of a vast swath of the empire’s European territories, led, it is argued, to the imposition by the Young Turks of Turkism as the state ideology.4 According to Karpat, this process was so sudden that “Centuries-old traditions of power and authority were pushed aside overnight as the state took charge to create a Turkish nation out of the Ottoman-Islamic mold.”5 Thus Ottomanism (Osmanlıcılık), a supranational ideology designed to unite all in the empire, at least in theory, was swept away6 as “Ottoman nationalism,” as Hourani terms it, “turned into Turkish nationalism” with the seizing of power during the Balkan Wars by a group of Turkish officers whose “ideas were nationalist rather than liberal.” In reaction to this “new Turkish nationalism,” Hourani argues, Armenian nationalism was strengthened, and that of the Arabs, Albanians, and Kurds came into being.7 The disastrous defeats in the Balkan Wars doomed the empire, with Keyder noting that its disintegration “had become inevitable after 1913.”8 These developments, scholars have argued, pushed the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) into abandoning any idea of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire by the beginning of the First World War. Instead, following this argument, the ruling elite focused on the creation of a homogenized Turkish and Muslim Anatolia. “The nationalist project of Turkification was launched in a deliberate 3

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Erik-Jan Zürcher, “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics 1908–1938,” in Kemal H. Karpat (ed.), Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 160. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 281. Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 349. Markus Dressler, “Fuad Köprülü’nün Tarih Yazısına Milliyetçiliğ in Etkisi,” in Yahya Kemal Tas¸tan (ed.), Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (Ankara: T. C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığ ı, 2002), 210. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939, 281–282. Çağ lar Keyder, “The Ottoman Empire,” in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds.), After the Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 41.

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manner,”9 and, in the wake of defeat and territorial loss in the Balkans, “the Committee of Union and Progress . . . decided to follow a strategy of aggressive Turkish nationalism targeting the non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire.”10 This policy was pursued through ethnic and religious homogenization,11 or even mass violence.12 In fact, however, although the Balkan Wars resulted in a great deal of soulsearching and questioning among the Ottoman elite, defeat did not bring about the construction of Turkism as the dominant ideology but rather unleashed a multitude of different intellectual responses, representing different solutions to the problems that the empire faced.13 The desire for the unity of the state and a common “Ottoman” bond did not vanish. The Ottoman elite of the period, regardless of their political choices, believed in the necessity of some form of psychological and moral “glue” to cement the Ottomans together and to prevent the disintegration of the state. Hafız I·smail Hakkı Pas¸a, referring to Gustave Le Bon, wrote in October 1913 of the existence of “a common soul” (müs¸terek bir ruh)14 which resulted in “a belief in a common and sacred ideal” (müs¸terek, mukaddes bir mefkureye iman).15 It was this “soul” that Ziya Gökalp alluded to when he wrote to his daughter in 1921 from Malta where he was being kept as a political prisoner by the British: “The Turkish peasant begged God with sincere belief: I do not have a soul [ruh], give me strength that I may save my fatherland [vatan]. Did God not grant him what he wanted?” But by then that soul was no more: the Ottoman

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Erol Ülker, “Contextualising ‘Turkification’: Nation-Building in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1908–18,” Nations and Nationalism, 11/4 (2005), 622. Nedim S¸ eker, “Demographic Engineering in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Armenians,” Middle Eastern Studies, 43/3 (2007), 462. Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 52; Mehmet Arısan, “The Loss of the Lost: The Effects of the Balkan Wars on the Construction of Modern Turkish Nationalism,” in M. Hakan Yavuz and Isa Blumi (eds.), War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, and Their Sociopolitical Implications (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013), 719–720. See, for example, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Seyhan Bayraktar, and Thomas Schmutz (eds.), The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019). Ebru Boyar, “The Impact of the Balkan Wars on Ottoman History Writing: Searching for a Soul,” Middle East Critique, 23/2 (2014), 154–155. For a recent detailed discussion, see Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, “Point of No Return? Prospects of Empire after the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912–13),” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 50/1 (2018), 65–84. Erkan-ı Harbiye Binbas¸ısı Hafız Hakkı, Bozgun (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Hayriye ve S¸ ürekası, 1330/1914), 20. Ibid., 49.

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Empire was gone, to be replaced by a nationalist struggle in Anatolia.16 Ideologies in this period were not as sharply defined or precisely constructed as they often appear through the modern lens of history writing, and Turkism did not become the dominant ideology until after the emergence of a Turkish nation-state and the creation of the new Turkish Republic. Another popular trope is that of the French Revolution, which is often taken as the starting point for the development of the idea of nation and nationalism in the Ottoman Empire,17 although for some scholars it was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that created the intellectual background for the development of nationalist ideas within the empire.18 Zürcher has argued, for example, that “The European idea of political nationalism spread in the wake of the French revolution primarily to those communities, which had the strongest overseas or overland trading networks with Europe: the Greeks and the Serbs.”19 Hence, nationalism began in the Ottoman European territories and here the role of the bourgeois classes representing “Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian nationalisms” was pivotal as these nationalisms were the result of “a mercantile-bourgeoisie impulse” and “a reaction to the slow pace of economic and political change.”20 Following the terminology used to explain the French Revolution, such as the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, its search for political participation, and the shifting of loyalties from a monarch to a state, there is an a priori acceptance of the validity of these terms and explanations as valid tools for an analysis of the Ottoman historical experience. Despite such analyses by modern scholars, the effects of the French Revolution and consequent spread of nationalist ideas to the empire were not so definite or clear-cut, and the conceptual tools employed do not automatically fit Ottoman realities. The relevance of the revolution to the empire was not immediately perceived by Ottoman contemporaries, who regarded it merely as a French affair and not one of interest to the Ottoman state. When the head dragoman of the Austrian embassy in Istanbul requested that the Reisülküttab (foreign minister) Ras¸id Efendi forbid 16

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Ziya Gökalp, Ziya Gökalp Külliyatı II: Limni ve Malta Mektupları, ed. Fevziye Abdullah Tansel (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1989), 604. Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks and the Ottoman Nationalities: Armenians, Greeks, Albanians, Jews and Arabs, 1908–1918 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014), 1–3. See Paschalis M. Kitrimolides, Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Modern Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Erik J. Zürcher, “The Ottoman Empire, 1850–1922: Unavoidable Failure?,” in Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 67. Keyder, “The Ottoman Empire,” 33.

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French republicans from wearing cockades in the revolutionary colours on their hats, Ras¸id Efendi, exasperated, replied that Oh, my friend, we have explained clearly to you that the Ottoman Empire is an Islamic state. We pay no attention to such signs and symbols. We regard the merchants of friendly nations as our guests. They can wear whatever they want on their heads and they can pin whatever symbols they want on themselves. If they wear grape baskets on their heads, it is not the business of the Ottoman Empire to inquire why. You are tiring yourselves unnecessarily.21

When the Directorate requested an Ottoman ambassador in 1797, Selim III responded by sending Moralı Seyid Ali Efendi to Paris in order to win French support against the Russian threat. This mission, however, was interrupted by the French invasion of Egypt in 1798.22 It was at this point, when revolutionary France acted against Ottoman interests, that Ottoman reactions changed. The French invasion of Egypt and French propaganda among the Orthodox population of the Ionian islands, acts which threatened the Ottoman order, prompted all ranks of the Ottoman elite to condemn the revolution and the dangerous propagandizing of its ideas. In 1798, the Greek Patriarch called on his Orthodox flock not to be carried away by the “infecting” ideas of the French Revolution and not to revolt against Ottoman rule, which was “the result of God’s will, rather than human power” and which saved the Orthodox believers from the heresy of Catholicism.23 Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a continuous engagement with the French Revolution and with concepts such as “nation,” “fatherland,” and “nationalism” that it invoked, but this engagement was shaped by the Ottoman elite’s own understanding of the world around it. The threat of the revolution lay not so much in its ideas as in its overthrowing of the existing political order. What led Abdülhamid I I (r. 1876–1909) to ban the entry into the empire of books on the French Revolution was not simply fear of awakening nationalist feelings but fear of encouraging ideas of regime change and the toppling of authoritarian rule.24 Ahmed Cevdet Pas¸a, the official state 21

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Ahmed Cevdet Pas¸a, Tarih-i Cevdet, vol. V I, 2nd edition (Istanbul: [Süleyman Efendi’nin Matbaası], 1294/1877), 119; see also Bernard Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution on Turkey: Some Notes on Transmission of the Ideas,” Journal of World History, 1/1 (1953), 119. Faik Res¸at Unat, Osmanlı Sefirleri ve Sefaretnameleri (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2008), 179–181. Sia Anagnostopolou, “‘Tyranny’ and ‘Despotism’ as National and Historical Terms in Greek Historiography,” in Anagnostopolou, The Passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Nation-States: A Long and Difficult Process: The Greek Case (Istanbul: The İSİS Press, 2004), 13–14. Ebru Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 13, 151 n. 24.

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historian, commented on the sharp contrast between the ideals and the reality of the French Revolution when he wrote in 1869 that it is so strange that while the aim of the French in having the revolution [ihtilal] was to obtain independence [istiklal], liberty [hürriyet], equality [müsavat] and freedom [serbestiyet], instead the absolute rule of the base element [erazil] over the people of the country and the carrying out of crimes such as the murdering of innocent people became the custom.25

For Ahmed Cevdet Pas¸a, the revolution toppled the existing legitimate monarchy and replaced it with disorder and the rule of the lower classes. In the period after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the influence of the French Revolution and the concepts of nationalism became more prominent, at least among some Ottoman intellectuals. But, again, engagement with the French Revolution was more about present needs than past realities. Writing in 1913, Mehmed Fuad (Köprülü), who was an eminent intellectual and historian of the period and known as the defender of Turkism, responded to those who accused him and his fellow Turkists of creating Turkism out of thin air by appealing to the example of the French Revolution. The “idea of nation [millet] spread by the French Revolution” was inevitable “in this twentieth century of the nation” and Turkism was but one among many, for “wherever there exists a group with a common language, a shared history, possessing common desires and lives, there exists a nation [millet].”26 The impact of the ideas of the French Revolution, as reassessed and “reused” by some thinkers of this late Ottoman period for the development of their own concepts of nationalism, was, however, neither universally accepted nor related directly to the French Revolution itself, but represented rather a reworking of nineteenth-century ideas for the intellectual requirements of this particular period in the early twentieth century. These two tropes, which have tended to dominate discussions of nations and nationalism in the Ottoman state, while presenting an attractive paradigm and reducing chaos to clarity, oversimplify the realities of the empire. The fluidity of concepts and the cacophony of intellectual ideas is replaced with conceptual certainty and linear progression which did not exist in the period itself. The approach that suggests that, with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, the empire moved seamlessly out of Ottomanism and into a clearly 25 26

Cevdet, Tarih-i Cevdet, 115. · Köprülüzade Mehmed Fuad, “Türklük, Islamlık, Osmanlılık,” Türk Yurdu, 25 Temmuz 1329 (5 August 1913), 696.

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defined, and accepted, Turkism must be discarded, as must the acceptance of the French Revolution trope to explain the Ottoman passage to nationalism.

Nationalism and the Ottoman Imperial Mind-Set The Ottoman elite’s engagement with ideas of nation and nationalism was shaped within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman imperial mind-set. By the nineteenth century, the elite, the product of a multireligious, multiethnic and multilinguistic empire which had existed for many centuries, found itself constantly challenged physically, intellectually, and even psychologically by the West. The future of the empire became the “Eastern Question,” a phrase that objectified the Ottoman Empire as the prey of the great powers, an increasingly powerful Russia, Britain, and France, and, by the end of the century, the German Empire. International debt, bankruptcy, and foreign economic concessions created an economic stranglehold over the empire, which was reduced to a “semi-colony.”27 By 1911 some Ottomans had come to see the Eastern Question, that is the fate of their own world, as being a question only for the West, discussed, decided, and imposed by the Western powers. It was now an established truth that in our time the politics of the world have become the politics of the East, the issues of the world have almost become Eastern issues. It is a fact that while such politics are thought up in Europe and planned in Europe, they are, in every case, thought up for the East, it is in the East that they are realised and implemented.28

The elite, grappling with the implications of the Eastern Question, was also faced with the “sick man of Europe” epithet and cast in the role of the “barbarous Turks” whose presence was entirely alien to the civilized, that is Christian European, world. Ottoman existence in the Balkans was epitomized by the saying “where the sultan’s (or Ottoman) horse-hoof treads, grass never grows again,”29 a saying of which the truth was “sufficiently confirmed,” for Leopold Ranke, by Ottoman devastation of “the most beautiful 27

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Kate Fleet, “Geç Osmanlı Erken Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Döneminde Yabancılara Verilen · · Ekonomik Imtiyazlar,” Kebikeç, 39 (2015), 343; Korkut Boratav, Türkiye Iktisat Tarihi, 1908–2007 (Ankara: I·mge Kitabevi, 2003), 21. Hasan Ferhad, “Bir I·ki Söz,” in Paul Imbert, Avrupa Siyasetinin En Gizli Safahatı: Osmanlı · Imparatorluğ u’nun Teceddüdü, trans. Hasan Ferhad and Muallim Anjel (Istanbul: Sırat-ı Müstakim Matbaası, 1329/1911), 3–4. This is the Turkish translation of Paul Imbert’s La rénovation de l’empire Ottoman: Affaires de Turquie (Paris: Perrin, 1909). Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, 93–94.

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countries of the world, which they have conquered.”30 Although the Turks were doomed as “a dying race,”31 the Balkans remained under their “iron heel.”32 Such discourse legitimized the support given by European powers to separatist activities within the empire. Thus the Greek Revolt of 1821, which led to the establishment of the Greek state and was supported by outside powers, was “the war of the Cross against the Crescent.”33 The engagement of Ottoman intellectuals with Europe in the nineteenth century was thus largely dominated by the “civilization” debate which centered around the Western perception of the Ottoman Empire as an inferior entity and claims of the intrinsic superiority of Christianity and Western civilization which were constantly directed at the empire and at Islam from the West.34 The aim that lay behind such claims and the ignorance upon which they were based was noted by the well-known ideologue of Ottomanism, Namık Kemal, who developed the concept of vatan (fatherland) within the Ottoman context, when he wrote in 1872 that: A few ambitious men gave the Muslims the epithet of bigots in order to deprive them of the affection of the civilized world. Whenever the name of Turk is mentioned, a savage tribe, similar to bloodthirsty crusaders, who desires to turn the world upside-down, is portrayed. Learning a few French words, a few frivolous men attempted ignorantly and impudently to ridicule Islam, which is the quintessence of the perfection of justice and wisdom. This shows the desire to make the religious commands into a laughing stock.35

Intellectuals such as Namık Kemal were not challenging or engaging here with ideas of nation, but were rejecting European claims to superiority over the empire and Islam. As Ernest Dawn has stated, this rejection applied to Ottomanists and Arabists alike, regardless of “national” sentiment, for all were “unwilling to admit the East was inferior to Europe; instead, all 30

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M. Leopold Ranke, Histoire des Osmanlis et de la monarchie espagnole pendant les XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Debécourt, Libraire-Éditeur, 1839), 105. Charles Johnston, “Macedonia’s Struggle for Liberty,” North American Review, 176/555 (February 1903), 224. Ibid., 235. Paul Stock, The Shelley–Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 125. Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, 83–104. Namık Kemal, “8. Avrupa S¸ arkı Bilmez,” in Mustafa Nihat Özön (ed.), Namık Kemal ve · · Ibret Gazetesi (Istanbul: YKY, 1997), 69. First published in Ibret, no. 7, on 22 June 1872. Ahmed Cevdet Pas¸a also pointed out the European lack of knowledge about the Ottoman Empire. See Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, 85–86.

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maintained that Islam and the culture of the East were intrinsically superior to Christianity and Western civilization.”36 These attacks on the empire coming from the West, the Eastern Question, the “sick man of Europe,” and “the barbarous Turk,” together with the military losses and economic colonization, combined to produce a crushing sense of urgency which triggered the survival instinct and propelled the elite into a struggle for self-preservation shaped not by theoretical concerns but by practical ones. Conceptually, a further complication is added to the nationalist discourse in the Ottoman context, owing to the “double” nature of Ottoman vocabulary. Ottoman terms, such as kavm, millet/milliyet, and cinsiyet were used to define various religious, ethnic, or ethnoreligious groupings within the empire. Millet, according to the definition given by ¸Semseddin Sami, meant “a community sharing the same religion or sect,”37 but by the period immediately following the 1908 Revolution, it had come to mean, at least for Ziya Gökalp, a political rather than a religious community,38 a definition Ziya Gökalp was to reject a decade later, arguing that millet actually meant a society of members bound by a shared moral education and sentiment.39 Kavm/kavmiyet meant race or tribe, something distinct from millet. While Ahmet Cevdet used kavmiyet to translate the French word nationalité,40 for ¸Semseddin Sami it meant a people, as distinct from a nation. For ¸Semseddin Sami, cinsiyet was synonymous with kavm.41 These Ottoman terms came to be used to translate concepts associated with nationalism.42 This opened the way for a fuzziness of meaning and a lack of clarity, for such terms could be interpreted either in the traditional Ottoman sense or with the new European meaning. In the same way, European terms could be used both as translations of Ottoman terms, thus departing from their original meaning, or with their European meaning. This is clearly the case in a letter written in 1862 in French by the Ottoman foreign minister, Ali Pas¸a, to Mehmed Cemil Pas¸a, the Ottoman ambassador in Paris, with the intention that it be shown to the French foreign minister, Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys. The letter, which covers various issues, ends by underlining the importance of the survival of the Ottoman Empire for the 36

37 38

39 40 42

C. Ernest Dawn, “From Ottomanism to Arabism: The Origin of an Ideology,” in Albert Hourani, Philip S. Khoury, and Mary C. Wilson (eds.), The Modern Middle East: A Reader (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 386. · S¸ . Sami, Kamus-ı Türki (Istanbul: Ikdam Matbaası, 1317/1899), 1400. Ziya Gökalp, “Beynelmileliyyet, Milliyet, Kavmiyet,” Genç Kalemler, 2/2 (1327/1911), repr. in I·smail Parlatır and Nurullah Çetin, Genç Kalemler Dergisi (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1999), 108. Ziya Gökalp, “Millet Nedir?,” Küçük Mecmua, 1/28 (25 Kanun-u evvel 1338/1922), 3. Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, 50. 41 S¸ . Sami, Kamus-ı Türki, 484. For further discussion, see Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, 49–56.

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European balance of power. In the letter Ali Pas¸a uses the term “nationalité” meaning two different things. In the first place, he uses it to translate millet, with its traditional Ottoman meaning, when he refers to the “different nationalities [nationalités] who make up the populations of Turkey.” When he turns to a warning of the dangers of an Ottoman collapse, he uses the term in its French meaning, i.e. nation, in what might be taken as a veiled criticism of European intervention in internal Ottoman politics. “Just imagine,” he writes, “what would happen in Turkey if one were to give free rein to all the different national aspirations which the revolutionaries and along with them certain governments seek to develop there.”43 The Ottoman elite’s engagement with ideas of nation and nationalism should thus be seen against this backdrop. Regardless of whether members of the elite wanted a united empire or sought irredentism, they all acted in relation to the dominant discourses in the empire, each developing within this context their own understanding of what kind of governance and state they wished for. For many, the fundamental issue was to keep the empire together and thus to construct an ideology which would ensure this. Products of the Tanzimat reforms aimed at strong centralized control,44 the Young Ottomans, who called for wider political participation with the establishment of a parliament and a constitution, attempted to create a new kind of ideology, Osmanlıcılık (Ottomanism), that would engender empire-wide loyalty in an empire of enormous diversity. The enormity of the task was not underestimated, for “upon undertaking a study of the composition of the Ottoman Empire, it will instantly be seen that we are a society produced from the coming together of very many groupings, equal before the law and common in interest, yet different from one another in language, in race [cinsiyet] and especially in thought, each one in opposition to the other.”45 The Young Ottomans were not alone in their quest to create a common identity for all Ottomans. Butrus al-Bustani, who is taken as “the first of the Syrian nationalists in the modern age,”46 also advocated Ottomanism. For al-Bustani, Ottomanism represented a guarantee of protection for different groups within the empire against the danger of foreign aggression. That was why he argued that “it is the duty of each easterner to say that I like to preserve the present [political] situation and avoid all causes of split (inshiqa¯q) in 43

44

45 46

· M. Cavid Baysun, “Âli Pas¸a’nın Fransızca Bir Mektubu,” Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi, 5/8 (1953), 144; Bernard Lewis, “Ali Pasha on Nationalism,” Middle Eastern Studies, 10/1 (1974), 78–79. See M. S¸ ükrü Hanioğ lu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 72–108. · · Namık Kemal, “12. Imtizac-i Akvam,” in Özön, Namık Kemal ve Ibret Gazetesi, 91. Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Routledge, 2006), 8.

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order to remain [a member] of a great nation called the Ottoman nation (´umma), which even though composed of many racial groups (ajna¯s) is one in [common] interests.”47 According to Abu-Manneh, “Bustani’s vision was of Ottomanism as the progenitor of Syrian patriotism, and he apparently saw no contradiction between these two ideals.”48 The loss of vast swaths of Balkan, and thus Orthodox, territory after 1878 and the influx of large numbers of mostly Muslim refugees changed the demographic nature of the empire. This in turn played into a shift away from Ottomanism as the unifying ideology aimed at keeping the empire together, to an emphasis on the unifying power of Islam. Although the Ottoman elite, while opposed to any form of ethnic nationalism, never denied the importance of Islam in the make-up of the Ottoman Empire,49 those who argued for Islam as the sole unifying power among the Muslim people regarded the “I·ttihad-ı ·Islam” (the union of Islam) as the major uniting force among Ottoman Muslims.50 For these intellectuals, the concept of nation had been surpassed by the universal bond of religion. According to Afghani, the quintessential nineteenth-century Islamist thinker, nationalism was “a phase of tribalism that the Muslims have overcome. Muslims, having passed this tribal stage, are bound by more universal ties, and have no more concern about racial and ethnic questions.”51 Benefiting from such views,52 Abdülhamid II used his title as caliph to propagandize an idea of Islamic unity within and outside the empire which emphasized the centrality of the sultan/caliph.53 Even after the 1908 Revolution, some still strongly believed in the unifying power of Islam and condemned ethnic divisions of any sort. In 1913, the poet Mehmed Akif (Ersoy), who was very much associated with Islamism in this period and was an Albanian in origin, condemned Albanian Muslims’ desire to set up their own national state: Your nationality [milliyet] was Islam . . . what is ethnic nationality [kavmiyet]? If you had only embraced tightly and hung on to this nationality [milliyet]

47

48 49

50 51

52

53

Quoted in Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Christians between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism: The Ideas of Butrus Al-Bustani,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 11/3 (1980), 298. Abu-Manneh, “The Christians between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism,” 296. · · · See, for example, Namık Kemal, “10. Ittihad-ı Islam,” in Özön, Namık Kemal ve Ibret Gazetesi, 85–89. Niyazi Berkes, Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: Hurst, 1998), 267–270. Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jama¯l ad-Dı¯n “al-Afgha¯nı¯”: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 159. Nikki R. Keddie, “The Pan-Islamic Appeal: Afghani and Abdülhamid II,” Middle Eastern Studies, 3/1 (1966), 46–67. See, for example, Karpat, The Politicization of Islam.

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What does “Albania” mean? Does it have a place in the Sharia? ... What is the superiority of Arab over Turk, Laz over Çerkez or Kurd, Persian over Chinese? Where is it! Are there these elements [anasır] in Islam? What nonsense! The Prophet anathematizes the idea of ethnic nationality [kavmiyet].54

The search for an ideological anchor to keep the Ottoman Empire together was not limited to “supranational” concepts. Türkçülük (Turkism), which emerged predominantly in the early twentieth century and is associated with modern Turkish nationalism, sought a strong centralized state within the existing Ottoman borders but called for the recognition of the centrality of the Turkish element in the state. Here again the aim remained that of securing the survival of the empire, but this was to be achieved by combining nationalism and an imperial political space. Ziya Gökalp, the best-known ideologue of Turkism, saw nationalism as a necessary condition for the survival of the Ottoman state. “A state,” he wrote, “that is not based on a united spirit can only be a common source of substance and nothing more. A land that is not the home of a nation is like a public kitchen where everyone merely feeds himself. The institutions of state and fatherland achieve permanent life only when based on a national ideal.”55 For Yusuf Akçura, another prominent figure of Turkism, the adoption of nationalism was a conscious and practical decision driven by the need to survive. Writing in 1914, he explained that: the reason that leads the Muslims consciously to accept the idea of nationality [milliyet] is the same as the reasons which cause them to accept other Western principles and precepts: just as the Muslims strive to assimilate German [military] tactics, French criminal law, and British seamanship for the protection of the individual and social being and for autonomy, they strive with the same aim and in the same way to absorb the idea of nationality [milliyet].56

Others adopted a different approach to the problem of keeping the empire together and advocated the idea of adem-i merkeziyet (decentralization). The best-known proponent of this idea, Prens Sabahaddin, who was a nephew of 54

55

56

Mehmed Akif [Ersoy], Safahat. Üçüncü Kitab: Hakkın Sesleri, 3rd edition (Istanbul: Gündoğ du Matbaası, 1347/1928), 18. Ziya Gökalp, “The Ideal of Nationalism,” in Niyazi Berkes (ed. and trans.), Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 81. Yusuf Akçura, “¸Sarkta Milliyet Fikri,” in François Georgeon, Türk Milliyetçiliğ inin Kökenleri Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), trans. Alev Er (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1999), 172.

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Abdülhamid II and spent many years in exile, believed that the only way to ensure not only the survival of the empire but also its development was decentralization.57 Writing in 1906, he argued that, owing to the underdevelopment of the state, rifts had appeared within Ottoman society: Because we were completely bereft of trade and industry, we became alienated from all the elements [anasır] living within our fatherland [vatan]. On the day when the general conditions of the world changed with the great improvement in the means of transportation, immediately almost all the peoples [akvam] we thought of as Ottoman, Muslim and Christian came out against us with a feeling of enmity.58

While concerns over divisions within Ottoman society might be clear, what exactly was meant by decentralization was not. For some, it was a kind of administrative flexibility for local governments, based on the 108th clause of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876.59 This was how it was seen by the journalist-then-politician Ali Kemal, a staunch supporter of Ottomanism, fiercely opposed to Turkism, and part of the opposition to the CUP. According to Ali Kemal, writing in 1908, “the system of centralization is deeply ingrained in our type of administration. For us, it is a great obstacle to progress. If a governor in Baghdad cannot build a school or undertake the smallest action without asking permission from Istanbul, he can in effect do nothing.”60 For others, however, decentralization meant autonomy, which would allow “national” aspirations to be achieved under an Ottoman umbrella. It was for this reason that decentralization as autonomy appealed to those advocating different versions of nationalism and even Islamism. In 1913, “Syrian Arabists” called for “a policy of ‘several nations, one state,’”61 where Arab national identity was recognized and Arabs were given a certain level of administrative autonomy within the Ottoman Empire.62 Similarly, immediately after the 1908 Revolution the prominent Arab scholar Rashid Rida defended the idea of “I·ttihad-ı I·slam,” claiming that while Islam 57

58 60

61

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Prens Sabahaddin, Gönüllü Sürgünden Zorunlu Sürgüne, Bütün Eserleri, ed. Mehmet Ö. Alkan (Istanbul: YKY, 2007), 194. Ibid., 190. 59 Kanun-u Esasi (Istanbul: Matba-i Amire, 1293/1876), 12. · · “31. Iklimde Hükmü Yok mu Farkın?,” Ikdam, 27 August 1908, in Ali Kemal, Toplu Yazıları, 1908–1909, Bölüm I (Temmuz-Tes¸rîn-i sânî 1908), ed. Safiye Kıranlar (Istanbul: I·SI·S, 2010), 193. Mahmoud Haddad, “The Rise of Arab Nationalism Reconsidered,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 26/2 (1994), 217. Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 116–143.

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united Arab and Turk, they were still two separate entities with Arabic being the language of religion.63 Even after the collapse of the empire, there was a belief that Islamic unity would ensure that the Ottomans remained relevant on the international scene because of Muslims’ acceptance of the Ottoman sultan as caliph. Said Halim Pas¸a, who was the grandson of Mehmed (Muhammed) Ali of Egypt and the Ottoman grand vezir between 1913 and 1916, claimed that there is no alternative. The day will come when the truths of Islam will be victorious once again over the corruptions which have arisen against Islam; this country, where is to be found the caliph, sovereign of all the Muslims on the face of the earth, will become once more the head of the nations [akvam] of Islam and it will propel them to the time of felicity.64

Said Halim Pas¸a accepted the “current of nationality” (milliyet cereyanı) as a contemporary reality which could not be reversed,65 but he supported an · idea of “Islamic internationalism” (Islam beynelmilelciliğ i) which he compared with socialist internationalism and regarded as the “most perfect, final form” of internationalism.66 For him, the aim of internationalism was “to modify existing relations” between nations by developing moral rules similar to those which governed social relations between members of the same society.67 In this Islamic internationalism, Islam would strengthen the friendship between nations by not encouraging in people’s minds “the errors and corruption of the theory of nationality [milliyet] and the feelings of and tendency toward arrogance inherent in [the concept of] race.”68 But for some, neither a centralized nor a decentralized Ottoman state was a satisfactory response to their demands for their own survival. For these elites, nationalist ideals became both a cause and a pretext for demanding either a separate homeland or to be annexed by another nation-state. Some gradually moved to the abandonment of the idea of an autonomous existence within the Ottoman Empire, such as Rashid Rida, who, after 1910, adopted a stance in favor of Arab independence.69 Similarly, I·smail Kemal Bey, who acted closely together with Prens Sabahaddin during Abdülhamid II’s reign and did not support the idea of an independent Albania, then became one of 63

64

65 69

· · Res¸id Rıza [Rashid Rida], Ittihad-ı Osmanî’den Arap Isyanına, ed. and trans. Özgür Kavak (Istanbul: Klasik, 2007), 156–158. Prens Mehmed Said Halim Pas¸a, I·slamlas¸mak. Sebi-ül Res¸ad’da Nes¸r Olunduktan Sonra Ayrıca Kitap Halinde Tab Olunmus¸tur (Darülhilafa (Istanbul): Hukuk Matbaası, 1337/1918– 1919), 20. Ibid., 24. 66 Ibid., 25. 67 Ibid., 24. 68 Ibid., 30. Eliezer Tauber, “Rashı¯d Rida¯’s Political Attitudes during World War I,” The Muslim World, 85/1–2 (1995), 107–121.

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the leaders of Albanian irredentism.70 The adoption of nationalism and calls for a separate state were the result of either the belief that the end of the Ottoman Empire was imminent or the perception that centuries of dominance by an alien Ottoman/Turkish/Muslim presence was now to be thrown off. Young Albanian Muslims in 1912 regarded nationalism as the only way of retaining their homeland, for “the European states will drive the Turks from Europe. But we are ‘autochthons.’ If we unite with you [the Turks], they will drive us out as well. We want to stay in our homeland.”71 For the Bulgarianborn, naturalized American journalist Svetozar Tonjoroff, writing in 1912 during the Balkan Wars, the birth of the Bulgarian nation-state was simply the culmination of a “life and death struggle” against alien rule: The battles of Kirk-Kilisseh, of Uskub, of Scutari, of Lule Burgas, in 1912, are only the logical resumption of the life-and-death struggle that reached a crisis at Kossovo Polie, in 1389, when the joint armies of Servia [sic] and Bulgaria were crushed by Sultan Amurath and the light of liberty went out on the Balkan Peninsula. During the long intermission of five centuries, the conquered peoples have waited with clenched teeth for the coming of the morning. The glimmerings of dawn began to appear at the opening of the nineteenth century, the century of reviving nationalities. In 1912 the dawn has worn into daylight and the daylight has disclosed a new nation in Europe.72

This perception of the “nation-in-waiting,” the overthrow of the Ottoman oppressor, and the birth of the new nation became a backbone of many nationalisms developed in the ex-Ottoman lands.

The Sense of Belonging among the Ottomans It is very hard to analyze or assess the actual impact on the ground of all the different intellectual responses and reactions to concepts of nationalism. But what is evident is that these were not as clear-cut and linear as represented in many post-Ottoman memoirs, literary works, and academic research, which often present a world of stark contrast and clear division. Writing in 1978 in Lebanon, Anbara Salam Khalidi, who was born in 1897, gave an account of a sharp dichotomy between Arab elite and Ottoman rulers, referring to “the determination by leaders of the Ottoman state to Turkify all non-Turkish 70

71 72

Sommerville Story (ed.), The Memoirs of Ismail Kemal Bey (London: Constable, 1920), 368–374. Mehmed Ali Ayni, Milliyetçilik (Istanbul: Marifet Basımevi, 1943), 292. Svetozar Tonjoroff, “The War in the Balkans,” North American Review, 196/6 (1912), 729.

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elements and to humiliate and degrade all that was Arab.” This policy then “led young Arab men to attempt to protect their Arab identity in any way they could, for they had had enough of the insulting disregard shown for their national sentiments.”73 Such a “we” and “them” attitude is also evident, for example, in the celebrated literary works of the Albanian Ismael Kadare or the Bosnian Ivo Andric.́ The eminent Arab historian Albert Hourani also argued that, despite improvements introduced by Young Turk rule, any such improvements were “more than outweighed” for the “subject peoples” by “the threat to their languages and political rights implicit in the tightening of central control, the policy of ‘Ottomanization,’ and the idea of Turkish nationalism.”74 In fact, however, such clarity of national self-belonging did not exist even for the Ottoman elite. Figures who were later seen as the pioneers of various proto-nationalisms, such as ¸Semseddin Sami Frasheri for Albanian nationalism or Namık Kemal for Turkish, were the products of an Ottoman “imperial” identity, a concept which can perhaps best be described as an amalgam of belongings, rather than a coexistence of separate identities. For much of the population outside the elite world, in particular in rural locations, the often contrasting concepts of nation, nationality, belonging, and identity could be of little relevance, a reality which frustrated the Greek author Io¯akeim Valavane¯s, who wrote in 1891 about the Christian failure to grasp race and belonging: if today you ask a Christian, even one speaking a corrupted Greek: ‘What are you?’ ‘A Christian (Christianos),’ he will unhesitatingly reply. ‘All right but other people are Christians, the Armenians, the Franks, the Russians . . .’ ‘I don’t know,’ he will answer, ‘yes, these people believe in Christ but I am a Christian.’ ‘Perhaps you are a Greek?’ ‘No, I’m not anything. I’ve told you that I’m a Christian, and once again I say to you that I am a Christian!’ he will reply to you impatiently.75

Belonging here was clearly not attached to any ethnic identity, or even to the empire. This also highlights the essential vagueness of what people belonged to. Fatherland (vatan), despite its symbolic significance in the shift of popular loyalty from religion and the Ottoman dynasty to territory as the basis for a redefined 73

74 75

Tarif Khalidi (trans.), Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist: The Life and Activism of Anbara Salam Khalidi, foreword by Marina Warner (New York: Pluto Press, 2013), 46. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 282. Quoted in Richard Clogg, “A Millet within a Millet: The Karamanlides,” in Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (eds.), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999), 117.

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legitimacy of the Ottoman state, remained an amorphous and fluid concept, used by all, regardless of where they were on the ideological spectrum. Even Dervis¸ Vahdeti, for example, who opposed the reestablishment of the constitu· tion on religious grounds and became the leader of the 1909 31 Mart Isyanı, a revolt against the 1908 Revolution, in the newspaper Volkan called on Ottoman soldiers not to get involved in politics for the sake of “religion, nation and fatherland” (din, millet ve vatan). For him millet was made up of Muslims, while the Ottoman millet (millet-i Osmaniye) had a wider meaning.76 The fact that the concept vatan has shifting boundaries is indicated by the apparent willingness of Enver Pas¸a, one of the leaders of the CUP, to negotiate over granting Kırkkilise (modern Kırklareli) to Bulgaria in return for Bulgarian entry into the First World War on the Ottoman–German side.77 In the same vein, Mahmud ¸Sevket Pas¸a, who was the grand vezir in 1913, did not hesitate to abandon Ottoman claims to Kuwait and Bahrain in order not to antagonize the British.78 While, on the one hand, the boundaries of the territory of the vatan were negotiable and could shrink, the imagined vatan could stretch well beyond any physical reality, as shown by the persistence of the images of Rumeli (the Ottoman lands in Europe lost by 1913) after these territories had been separated from the Ottoman Empire.79 What, then, did this conceptual geography of the vatan mean to the mass, non-elite, population of the empire? Ahmed Cevdet Pas¸a, writing in the late nineteenth century, commented that for the Muslim soldier vatan meant no more than his village square, and he expressed skepticism about the motivational value of the concept. If we now take the word “vatan,” even if with the passage of time it gains in (our) people’s minds the power it has in Europe, it cannot be as strong as the zeal of religion. And it cannot replace it. This needs much time. Until that time our army remains without a soul. In a moment of crisis, will Private Hasan obey Hristo [his superior] who is sending him to his death?80

For many, vatan, far from being a wide-sweeping, all-embracing imperial space, was, if not the village square, then no more than the village or town from which 76

77

78

79 80

[Dervis¸] Vahdeti, “Asker Kardas¸larımızdan Selamet-i Vatan Namına Rica,” Volkan, 23 Rebiyülevvel 1327, 5 Nisan 1325 (18 April 1909). Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivi (BOA), Istanbul, Ali Fuad Türkgeldi Evrakı, 9–73, 9 August 1915. Adem Sarıgöl (ed.), Harbiye Nazırı Sadrazam Mahmut S¸ evket Pas¸a’nın Günlüğ ü (Istanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat, 2001), 61. See, for example, Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans. Ahmed Cevdet Pas¸a, Ma ‘rûzat, ed. Yusuf Halaçoğ lu (Istanbul: Çağ rı Yayınları, 1980), 114.

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they came and in which they lived. For the elderly couple driven into central Anatolia from Erzurum by the imperial Russian and Armenian invasion in 1916, nothing could compare with their own small hometown. “How can one talk of Istanbul compared with Erzurum,” the old man asked his interlocutor from the capital, regardless of any lack of natural beauty or historical monuments from which Erzurum might suffer.81 This was not a view shared by the eighteenthcentury S¸ eyhülislam Feyzullah Efendi, who preferred death to exile to Erzurum.82 This lack of understanding of and feeling for the fatherland as understood by the elite chagrined Ottoman POW officers who set to to inculcate POW privates with a sense of belonging as they perceived it.83 Despite its amorphous nature, vatan kept its central position for most of the Ottoman elite, who perceived it as an emotional and moral glue for the empire. For Namık Kemal, later known as the poet of the fatherland (vatan ¸sairi), the soil becomes the vatan because of the blood of those who have sacrificed themselves for it: “We gave one precious soul for every stone of the land in which we live. For us every handful of its soil is a reminder of the body of a hero who was sacrificed for it. For us our land is beyond comparison with the vatan of China or Siberia.”84 In his 1912 book written for Ottoman soldiers, Osmanlı Tarihine Dair Nefer Ne Bilmelidir? (What a Soldier Should Know about Ottoman History), the popular historian of the late Ottoman Empire Ahmed Refik called on his audience to “know well that the fatherland [vatan] which has raised and reared you expects this service from you,” and explained what he expected from those who read about the heroism and sacrifices narrated in the book. You too will be a heroic soldier. Using against the enemy what you have learnt on the parade ground, what you have had drummed into you on maneuvers, keeping in front of your eyes the heroes you have read about in this book, you will serve the fatherland [vatan] as they did, you will strive to remove the bitterness of old defeats, and so you will then prove that you are a true son of the fatherland [vatan].85

Vatan was expected to stir feelings of loyalty not only among military personnel but also among civilians. A series of Ottoman Red Crescent 81 82

83

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S¸ evket Süreyya Aydemir, Suyu Arayan Adam (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2017), 73. Abdülkadir Özcan (ed.), Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi (1099–1116/1688–1704) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2000), 233. Yücel Yanıkdağ , Healing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 89–109. Quoted in Boyar, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, 125. For a detailed discussion of the “vatan,” see 124–129. Ahmed Refik, Osmanlı Tarihine Dair Nefer Ne Bilmelidir? (Istanbul: Kitabhane-i Askeri, · Tüccarzade Ibrahim Hilmi, 1328/1910 or 1912), 6–7.

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propaganda postcards from the First World War, depicting wounded Ottoman soldiers being taken care of by both male and female Red Crescent personnel, carried the slogan “Love for the fatherland, help for the wounded” (Vatana muhabbet, yaralılara muavenet).86

Conclusion In order to understand nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, it is important not to reduce the subject to a selection of handy tropes, to avoid seeing it through the lens of nation-state constructions of history, and, above all, to envision it within its own environment, in the historical context of the empire. The development of nationalism and the idea of nation in the Ottoman Empire was not a wholesale adoption of European notions and concepts of nationalism, but was a dynamic historical process through which the ideas of nation, nationalism, and nation-state were defined and redefined. In this context, paradigms and theoretical frameworks need to be treated with caution, for, as Ziya Gökalp noted in 1914, “we can fit our ideas to reality. We cannot fit reality to our ideas.”87

Further Reading Aymes, Marc, A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Adrian Morfee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014). Boyar, Ebru, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). Kayalı, Hasan, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Khalidi, Rashid, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon (eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Methodieva, Milena B., Between Empire and Nation: Muslim Reform in the Balkans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). Provence, Michael, The Last Ottomans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 86

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Krt. 022231, Krt. 022235, Krt. 022274, Krt. 022306, Krt. 022347, Krt. 022369, Krt. 022432, Hüseyin Safiye Elbi Koleksiyonu, I·BB. Atatürk Kitaplığ ı, Istanbul. Ziya Gökalp, Türkles¸mek, I·slamlas¸mak, Muasırlas¸mak (Istanbul: Yeni Mecmua, 1918), 52.

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The Dutch Empire michael wintle

The Dutch Empire lasted from 1600 to 1975 and beyond; even now there are some Caribbean island dependencies left. The size, shape, and nature of the empire has evolved and altered, but over those centuries the Dutch colonies have been an important, if fluctuating, component of the national consciousness. Economic advantages were very considerable, but arguably the Dutch gained just as much in terms of self-confidence and status for their small nation: in the nineteenth century the empire was seen as absolutely essential in terms of both economics and prestige. Even in the twenty-first century, a centrist prime minister could call for a return to “the mentality of the VOC” (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United East Indies Company), a remark that was not universally well received.1 Before the French Revolution, the empire was essentially a commercial enterprise (including slaving), but in limited areas also incorporated long-term political and military occupation. After 1815 many territories were ceded to the British, but in what remained, Dutch control intensified, developing into an arguably classic imperial role in the East Indies, and a full-blown mission civilisatrice operation by the turn of the twentieth century. Such things were significant components of Dutch national identity, which was in turn radically affected by the painful experiences of decolonization wars and ejection after the Second World War. The colonial past still surfaces as a serious disruption in national politics today, for example with heated debates about those decolonization wars, and the wider issue of slavery in the West but also the East Indies. Few issues have been of more recurrent importance over the centuries to the national psyche. (See Figure 3.1.) 1

“Dutch PM J. P. Balkenende in a debate in the Second Chamber, Handelingen Tweede Kamer (2006/2007), 6, 280.

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Figure 3.1 The Dutch golden state coach, 1898, showing side-panels with depictions of the colonies. This golden coach was made for the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina in 1898, in the heyday of Dutch imperialism in the West and especially the East Indies, and was presented by her grateful subjects of the city of Amsterdam. On the side-panels the artist Nicolaas van der Waay painted scenes of colonial subservience, in the form of scantily clad representatives of the Dutch colonies bringing trade goods to a white female personification of the Dutch nation. The coach was used each year in the royal rituals around the announcement of the government’s legislative program (similar to the king’s speech at the opening of the UK parliament), but in 2015 was removed from the scene for years of expensive “restoration.” In 2021 it was displayed in an Amsterdam museum, while a lively row about imperialist heritage and slavery rumbled on. Source: “Gouden koets op het Binnenhof,” image cropped from original photograph of 16 September 2014 on Flikr, available at www.flickr.com/photos/51135196@N05/15236325 606, last accessed 6 October 2020, under the CC BY 2.0 licence (https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by/2.0/).

The Scale of the Operation For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch possessed a seaborne empire on an enormous scale, having taken over many parts of the Portuguese and Spanish networks; only later would the British supersede them as the leading colonial power. Most of the territories were under the control of the East and West Indies Companies, founded in Amsterdam in 1602 and 1621, respectively. Their reach extended to ports in West Africa, the Cape Colony, East Africa and the Arabian peninsula, around the Indian coast, Ceylon, much of Southeast Asia, including all of present-day Indonesia, Taiwan (Formosa), Canton and other ports in China, and Nagasaki in Japan. There was a Dutch mercantile and cultural presence in the Golden Age in Persia and in parts of the interior of the

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Indian subcontinent.2 In the Americas the Dutch were at various times colonially active in the New York region, the Caribbean islands, Guyana, and Brazil. By the end of the eighteenth century all this was overextended. The VOC and WIC (Westindische Compagnie, West Indies Company) were both effectively bankrupt, and their debts and territories were taken over by the Dutch state in 1798 and 1792, respectively. In the peace settlement after the Napoleonic Wars, the Dutch received what had been the Austrian Netherlands as part of an expanded kingdom in Europe, and surrendered to Britain most of the overseas possessions which had been captured during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The result of the Vienna settlement (and an Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824) was an empire consisting of the islands of Java and Madura in the East Indies, with some claim to the rest of the archipelago; in the Caribbean they regained the islands of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire near the Venezuelan coast, and Sint Maarten, Sint Eustatius, and Saba east of Puerto Rico. They also held the sugar colony of Suriname. Beyond that, there were a number of “factories” or trading posts, notably on the island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbour, in Canton, and on the West African coast in what is now Ghana, centered on the old slaving port of St. George del Mina. The West African ports were exchanged with the British for the latter’s claim to parts of Sumatra in 1872.3 In the twentieth century, the Dutch held on to those remaining possessions to their considerable economic gain, albeit with the familiar problems of nationalist resistance and economic depression, especially in the 1930s. The Dutch East Indies were overrun by the Japanese in 1942, and, after the liberation in 1945, Indonesian nationalists declared independence. Following two particularly vicious decolonization wars in 1947 and 1948–1949 (euphemistically named “Police Actions” by the Dutch, and referred to jointly as the “War of Independence” in Indonesia), and under increasing international pressure, in December 1949 the Netherlands formally recognized Indonesian sovereignty, only holding on to the vast province of West New Guinea, which was also finally ceded in 1962. In the Caribbean area, Suriname on the mainland has been independent since 1975. In 2010 the three islands of Saba, 2

3

On the Dutch and India, see Jos Gommans, The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550 (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum/Vantilt, 2018); on China, John E. Wills, Pepper, Guns and Parleys: The Dutch East India Company and China, 1622–1681 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). See Michael J. Wintle, An Economic and Social History of the Netherlands, 1800–1920: Demographic, Economic and Social Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 7.2.

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Sint Eustatius, and Bonaire gained the status of special municipalities (gemeenten) in the Dutch kingdom. Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten are still constituent parts of the kingdom of the Netherlands. Those, then, are the bare bones of the extent and scale over more than four centuries of the Dutch Empire: what, then, was its – inevitably changing and evolving – role in the shaping of Dutch and other nationalisms? Nationalist movements of the twentieth century in the Dutch colonies were undoubtedly driven in the first place by local factors. But at the risk of a degree of Eurocentrism, it is almost by definition the case that imperial powers also played a significant role in stimulating nationalist feelings and movements in their colonies; the Dutch Empire was no exception. The Indonesian nationalist movement was at least partly directed against Dutch attempts to reestablish their imperial control after liberation from the Japanese. In the Caribbean area, nationalism in Suriname was fragmented by local issues, especially ethnicity, but an important stimulant to nationalism was always the strength of opposition to the Dutch colonial regime, with its exploitation and oppression, in particular during the Second World War.4 A final example, from much earlier, would be the Belgian secession from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden), which was ruled by the Dutch King Willem I from 1815 to 1830: Belgian nationalism has perhaps never been very strong, but there is little doubt that opposition to domination by the Dutch provinces to the north in finance, religion, and politics was a principal motor for the liberal Belgian Revolution in 1830, with final recognition extracted from the Dutch state in 1839. This Dutch Empire, then, has from time to time exerted a major effect on other nationalisms in those colonized territories over the years. But the principal emphasis falls here on the Dutch self-image over the long term, and how the changing nature of formal and informal empire affected Dutch nationhood.

The Dutch Self-Image Dutch national feelings, as one would expect, changed over the centuries, according to evolving circumstances. The conflict with Spain in the Eighty Years War engendered a degree of Dutch self-awareness, while the economic and political success of the “Golden Age” in the seventeenth century gave rise to a certain pride in mercantile matters, bolstered by Calvinist sentiments of 4

See Peter Meel, “Towards a Typology of Suriname Nationalism”, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 72/3–4 (1998), 257–81; Edwin K. Marshall, Ontstaan en ontwikkeling van het Surinaams nationalisme: Natievorming als opgave (Delft: Eburon, 2003).

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being a “chosen” people. In the eighteenth century there were signs of an imagined community, certainly amongst intellectuals: an awareness of relative economic decline in the Republic went together with an assertion of the need of renewal, and even a cult of the fatherland.5 Away from the large towns and ports, however, most were probably more concerned with their regional environment, their religion, their kin, and the like than with the nation. But in the 1780s the anti-Orangist Patriot Movement contained elements of aggressive political nationalism, which was compromised but perhaps inflamed by French domination from 1795 to 1813, and then by the emergent confrontation with Belgian anti-Dutch feeling. In parallel with the increasing centralization of the state in the nineteenth century, there was evidence of a sense of a shared national undertaking, especially with regard to foreign affairs. Toward the end of the century, assisted by the prosperity brought at least in part by the colonies, the Netherlands engaged fully in modern nationalism, as did much of the rest of Europe in the decades preceding the First World War. In the classic period of romantic nationalism, there was in fact a variety of Dutch national sentiments. This was by no means unique, for nationalism is often distinguished by its ability to produce a level of unity amongst a dizzying variety of political, economic, and ideological groups. But in the Dutch case, the famous “pillarization” of society, which grew up in the later nineteenth century and shaped the country until the 1960s, emphasized the parallel existence of a range of nationalisms, from the orthodox Calvinists to the Catholics, and from socialists to liberals: these “pillars” of Dutch society could nonetheless come together when it came to supporting the idea of the nation, if not with identical content from pillar to pillar. It is no exaggeration to say that verzuiling (pillarization) and national consciousness in the Netherlands were two sides of the same coin. For example, there was a particular mission for the orthodox Calvinists in the Netherlands, especially under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), who had set up the Calvinist AntiRevolutionary Party, ran two national newspapers, founded a Calvinist university, and developed a neo-Calvinist theology. His “vision of the Dutch nation,” and its place in the world, was a particular one which centered on the Calvinist values and virtues, and was quite unlike the 5

N. C. F. van Sas, “Varieties of Dutchness,” in Annemieke Galema, Barbara Henkes, and Henk te Velde (eds.), Images of the Nation: Different Meanings of Dutchness, 1870–1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 5–16, especially 10.

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patriotic nationalism of, for example, the liberals, which was rather more commercial.6 The crescendo of such nationalist sentiments toward the end of the century confirms in the Dutch case the association which Gellner and others have identified among modern capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism.7 In the twentieth century, Dutch nationalism was perhaps less intense than that of some other European countries, but certainly continued to interact with the House of Orange, war, occupation, migration, and economic change. What role, then, did the colonies, or the “empire,” play in that general evolution of Dutch national sentiment? The overseas territories and activities were probably always of some importance to the Dutch self-image as an imagined community, or indeed nation. Particularly for the leading provinces of the Republic, Holland and Zeeland, the global connections and the interaction between the Dutch and other people in the world, especially in Asia, were meaningful, not only for those actively involved, but for some of the wider population too, including intellectuals and artists. There was an “economic and cultural exchange between the Republic and its overseas territories”: “the Dutch identity grew in particular out of a continuous exchange with the world overseas.”8 From the early seventeenth century onwards, there was always a global context to the self-awareness of the Dutch nation, which went beyond its involvement in European conflicts and commerce. A good example is the Dutch connection with southern Africa, centered on what had been the Cape Colony, but later directed to the Afrikaner republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. It was of particular interest because it involved a nationalist affinity with a territory long abandoned to the British. The Afrikaners were Calvinists, spoke a language related to Dutch, and shared some Dutch ancestry. In 1877 Britain annexed the Republic of the Transvaal, and Dutch public feeling erupted. Enormous sympathy went out to the people of the Veld in their struggle against the mighty British Empire, and the Dutch loudly applauded their underdog cousins. This was an example of “Dutch cultural imperialism which enlarged the Netherlands’ selfesteem and importance.”9 The feeling of kinship continued, up to and 6

7 8

9

R. Kuiper, Zelfbeeld en wereldbeeld: Antirevolutionairen en het buitenland, 1848–1905 (Kampen: Kok, 1992), 243–246; Wintle, An Economic and Social History, ch. 11. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Piet Emmer and Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de rand van de wereld: De geschiedenis van Nederland overzee, 1600–1800 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2012), 14–15. G. J. Schutte, Nederland en de Afrikaners: Adhesie en adversie (Franeker: Wever, 1986), 205; Wintle, Economic and Social History, 293.

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including the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, and “the South Africa question played a significant role in the development of Dutch political culture and nationalism.”10 Thus to a considerable extent the collective memory which the Dutch had of earlier colonies played into the nationalism of the later nineteenth century.

A Dutch Role in the World The possession of colonies was one of the ways in which “a small country could be great,” as the Queen-Regent Emma put it in 1898,11 and there are examples of modern constructions of Dutch national identity, underpinned by ideas of empire. By the 1790s the Dutch East and West Indies Companies (VOC and WIC) had been part of the idea of the nation for centuries. The ethnicity of the nation seems to have played little part in the Dutch case (with the exception of that popular emotional support for the Afrikaners). The VOC was refounded in 1824 as the Dutch Trading Company (Nederlandsche Handel Maatschappij, NHM), and the WIC also saw a (less successful) nineteenth-century reincarnation as the West-Indische Maatschappij (West Indies Company) in 1828: these were popular investment vehicles, especially the NHM, and might be said to represent a refashioning of an earlier colonial aspect of nationhood to fit the new global economics and indeed new politicized romantic nationalism of the modern period. We can move forward to examine how empire helped condition Dutch national consciousness with specific attention to four illustrative episodes: the status of the Netherlands in global affairs; the perception of Dutch economic dependence on the empire; the Dutch imperial conscience or “White Man’s Burden”; and the trauma of decolonization.

The Status of the Netherlands Despite being a small country with few mineral resources (except gas), the Dutch provinces and later the kingdom have been amongst the wealthiest states in the world for several centuries.12 The Dutch 10

11

12

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, “Songs of an Imperial Underdog: Imperialism and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1870–1960,” in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 105. Henk te Velde, “The Debate on Dutch National Identity,” Dutch Crossing, 20/2 (1996), 87–100, at 93–94. Wintle, Economic and Social History, 74–75.

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amounted to a world power in the seventeenth century, and maintained their weight in global affairs thanks to their economic prosperity, and their empire, with concomitant feelings of national ambition and pride. In the context of the long-lasting war with Spain, the United Provinces carved out an Atlantic empire in the Americas,13 and perhaps there is a certain irony in the fact that the Dutch celebrated their emancipation from Habsburg imperial domination in the Eighty Years War by establishing their own global empire and domination over others. In the Americas it was a warring and trading empire, which successfully preyed on Iberian activities, chalking up 73 million guilders worth of damage in the first fifteen years after the foundation of the WIC in 1621, including Piet Hein’s celebrated capture of the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, an event which immediately entered the nation’s canon of glory, where it still comfortably resides.14 Such national assertion included the invasion of large parts of Portuguese Brazil between 1630 and 1654 by Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604– 1679), a scion of the Orange-Nassau family. Brazil brought the Dutch into the slave trade as a major player, with long-lasting consequences. There was a vision of Dutch imperial power, realized between 1620 and 1660, with memories and ideas of heritage long afterwards. The land action in Brazil in particular was bound up with a nationally driven imperialist Atlantic vision of expelling the Spanish and the Portuguese, which went beyond commercial and even colonization plans. The Brazil adventure did not end well for the Dutch (Brazil reverted to the Portuguese in 1654), but generated a “nostalgic longing” for “the once-flourishing empire,” which became part of the national self-image. The Caribbean colonies lived on (New Amsterdam was lost to the British in 1664). The plantations were not an unqualified success, and the WIC had to be refounded in 1674, with a much smaller capital. But by virtue of the Dutch carrying trade among the other empires in the area, and running a thriving slave trade linked to their remaining colonies in Guyana and the islands, the Atlantic empire continued as a part of the national heritage.15 The overseas possessions were immensely important to the status of the Netherlands in the world as

13

14 15

Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016). H. T. Colenbrander, Koloniale geschiedenis, 3 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1926), vol. I I, 6–7. Klooster, Dutch Moment, 8.

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a colonial power; in the Dutch view of their nation, without their colonies, especially in the East, they would be nothing.

Economic Dependence on the Empire The economic aspects of empire were also very much a part of the self-image of the Dutch. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide a good example, for which we have copious economic data as well as plenty of material about how the Dutch viewed that economic relationship. It was seen as one of dependence, and to a meaningful extent it was: the Netherlands benefited greatly from its colonies, and without them the home economy would probably have struggled. The new East Indies Company, the NHM, had a difficult start, but by 1840 it was generating large financial profits for the Dutch state and considerable economic benefits to Dutch commerce and home industry. Between 1830 and 1870 the economic core of the colony was the Cultivation System (Cultuurstelsel), an ingenious way of taxing the population in kind when they had no money. In the areas where it was applied, approximately onefifth of the cultivated land and one-fifth of agricultural labor were commandeered for Company crops, which were cash crops for export, like coffee and sugar. These were transported to the Netherlands in Company ships, and sold on for Company profits. After deductions of cost – not for land or for Indonesian labor, which was free – the bottom line (batig slot, or favorable balance) was handed over from the Company to the Dutch treasury, where it was used to help service the national debt, and to finance infrastructure and other projects. In the 1850s the “credits from the Indies” (Indische baten) amounted to some 31.5 percent of government revenues, and in the 1860s an even higher share.16 Not a few private fortunes were also made. After 1870 the system was privatized according to the prevailing liberal economic ideology of the day, and the colony continued to contribute in a major way to the Dutch economy, for example estimated at 13.8 percent of national income in 1938; it had probably been even higher in the 1920s. Add to that the political leverage at the international conference table which the Dutch gained from possessing an empire, and the assertion by the Governor General and later Minister for the Colonies J. C. Baud (1789–1859) that the Indies were “the cork upon which the Netherlands floats” had more than 16

Janny de Jong, Van batig slot naar ereschuld: De discussie over de financiële verhouding tussen Nederland en Indië en de hervorming van de Nederlandse koloniale politiek, 1860–1900 (Amsterdam: SDU, 1989), 39–40.

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a glimmer of truth to it.17 The system was not without its critics, most famously the novelist and publicist Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–1887), a biting satirist who had served as a colonial administrator in the East Indies in the 1840s. He wrote under the nom de plume of Multatuli (“I have suffered much”) and caused a considerable stir with the publication in 1860 of his seminal novel, Max Havelaar, on the corruption and vicious oppressive violence at the heart of the Dutch colonial system in its heyday. But it was a highly profitable system: between 1830 and 1877, 840 million guilders were transferred to the Dutch treasury under the “favorable balance” system. Increasingly in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the epoch of modern nationalism, the Dutch benefited heavily from their empire, and what is more important in terms of national feeling and self-image, they were acutely aware of it. A major assertion of Dutch power in military and economic terms took place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, starting with the Achin War, or Atjeh Oorlog, in northern Sumatra, which began in 1874 and only ended in 1904 (or arguably 1914). By the 1890s Dutch control was being extended over more and more of the archipelago, under what has been called the Forward Movement. It involved the extension of military, political, civil, and economic control over many of the “outer provinces,” like Sumatra, Celebes, Bali, and Borneo. Three hundred previously selfgoverning political units were brought under Dutch political control between 1898 and 1911.18 Military conquest was followed by the administrators, and when the coast was clear of serious resistance, the economic investors and entrepreneurs moved in, with their mines, plantations, and infrastructure: the export of capitalism to the colony. As for the West Indies and their economic importance in the national selfimage in the age of modern nationalism, the refounded West Indies Company, in existence from 1828 to 1863, was not an asset on anything like the scale of its counterpart in the East Indies. Some individual fortunes were made, and around 1850 some 5 percent of the value of Dutch imports came from the Antilles and Suriname. The emancipation of the slaves in 1863 meant that the Dutch government had to compensate the owners to the tune of 17

18

Henri Baudet, “The Economic Interest of the Netherlands in the Netherlands East Indies,” in Papers of the Dutch–Indonesian Historical Conference Held at Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands 19 to 22 May 1976 (Leiden: Bureau of Indonesian Studies, 1978), 234–249, especially 235–239. Daniel G. E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, 4th edition (London: Macmillan, 1981), 499.

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some 12 million guilders.19 But the West Indies and other overseas activities in the empire also contributed to the feeling that the Netherlands was economically dependent on its colonies.

The “White Man’s Burden” If the Dutch benefited in strategic and material terms from their empire, especially the East Indies, the colonies also went a long way toward satisfying the powerful instincts of the Dutch to export their culture too.20 The Dutch version of the White Man’s Burden was the Ethical Policy (Ethische Politiek). (See Figure 3.2.) After hunger and distress caused by rainfall problems in the East Indies, in 1901 the liberal politician C. T. van Deventer (1857–1915) announced that the Dutch owed the Indies a “debt of honor”; the Dutch economy had profited from the colony, and the Netherlands should begin to repay some of that debt.21 The sentiment was broadly supported by liberals, Calvinists, and Catholics, and the Ethical Policy was formulated by a Christian Democrat coalition under Abraham Kuyper. It had been announced by Queen Wilhelmina in 1901: the government accepted an ethical responsibility to improve the situation of the colonized. Right up to the Second World War, efforts and resources were directed at introducing modest measures of Dutchstyle local politics, economic advice, education, a money economy, and healthcare.22 It failed almost completely (largely thanks to massive population increases which rendered the investment inadequate overnight), but there has seldom been a clearer example of implementing the White Man’s Burden as an expression of colonial guilt, or of cultural imperialism as a result of a deep psychological and perhaps human need to assert one’s own successful culture. The projection of those feelings of a need to civilize and succour, to shoulder “the burden,” was contemporaneous with and linked to Dutch nationalist imperialism, in the sense of military conquest and expansion within the Indonesian archipelago: as in other empires, the White Man’s Burden was part and parcel of Dutch imperialism.23 19 20

21

22

23

Wintle, Economic and Social History, 216. Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900– 1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). C. T. van Deventer, Rechtvaardige koloniale politiek: Redevoering (Amsterdam: VrijzinnigDemocratische Vereeniging, 1901), cited in Baudet, “The Economic Interest of the Netherlands,” 246. Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–19, 23, 45; Wintle, Economic and Social History, 297. Ewald Vanvugt, Roofstaat: Wat iedere Nederlander moet weten (Amsterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2016), 524.

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Figure 3.2 Albert Hahn, “Indië in de Tweede Kamer,” Het Volk (27 November 1904). While they launch the Ethical Policy, the specter of colonial guilt hangs over confessional cabinet ministers in 1904. Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper is seated on the left, A. W. F. Idenburg, minister for the colonies, is standing, with J. C. de Marez Oyens (infrastructure, trade, and industry) on the right, in the cartoonist Albert Hahn’s evocation of the Dutch “White Man’s Burden.”

Decolonization The Eurocentric assumption that the nation and nationalism were developed in Europe is certainly questionable, but there is a sense in which nationalism turned on the continent which may have spawned 54

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it.24 That leads us to the subject of decolonization, and its interaction with Dutch nationalism. Much of the Dutch political elite was proud of its colonial regime: they chose largely to ignore Indonesian nationalism, and felt that the Netherlands had led the world in enlightened treatment of its imperial charges. The Japanese takeover of the Indies in 1942 had been experienced by these Dutch elites as a disaster, striking at the heart of “an integral aspect of the nation’s pride, prestige, power and economic potential.”25 There was what has been called a consensus during and after the war that the colony should be regained and retained, returned to stability and the status quo ante, before any moves toward independence should be considered. For Queen Wilhelmina had talked in a broadcast of 1942 of devolution into a kind of commonwealth structure, but it was intended to be by a route entirely subject to Dutch control, and in no way a secession. There had been comparisons between the occupation of the East Indies by the Japanese and that of the Netherlands by the Nazis, a comparison which cut more ways than one: both had suffered, but a conclusion could be drawn that any form of foreign occupation was not be countenanced.26 The Dutch were not in control of the archipelago after the Japanese withdrawal: the British provided a semblance of law and order while Dutch authority attempted to reestablish itself. The unilateral declaration of independence by the Indonesian nationalists in August 1945 had been encouraged by the Japanese, and the British did not countermand it. Dutch public opinion saw it as revolution and subversion, and drew parallels between the nationalists and wartime collaborators with the Germans. There were tense negotiations between the Dutch and the nationalist leaders, in particular the Linggadjati Agreement in November 1946. The Netherlands, now bearing the brunt of world disapproval of imperialism, especially from the Americans, was obliged to recognize a republic on Java and Sumatra, but insisted on a federal state for the other territories, all in the context of an Indonesian–Dutch Union under the Dutch queen, for purposes of economic and cultural affairs. It was not a conclusive agreement; while the Dutch refused to surrender West New Guinea, and extreme violence 24

25

26

These intricate matters of nationalism in the colony and the metropole are well discussed in Prasenjit Duara (ed.), Decolonization: Perspectives from Then and Now (London: Routledge, 2004). Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 89. On these subtleties, see Jennifer L. Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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characterized their attempt to “pacify” the Celebes (now Sulawesi), the nationalists continued to consolidate a unitary state and ignored the Union (which they abandoned in 1957). Finally, the Dutch set about two major campaigns of “pacification,” accompanied by widespread atrocities on both sides, known as the “Police Actions” of 1947 and 1948–1949; the United Nations (UN) forced them to desist from both campaigns. By 1949 some 5,000 Dutch troops and more than 100,000 Indonesians had lost their lives,27 and in December 1949, under UN auspices, sovereignty was finally transferred, to the chagrin of broad swaths of Dutch opinion at home. Dutch Socialists were not at all happy with government policy, and many of the Dutch remaining in the archipelago thought their home government and military had mishandled matters, but in general the Dutch felt humiliated on the world stage, and deprived of the jewel in their imperial crown. This was all happening against the background of a burgeoning Cold War, which severely affected the policy of the United States with regard to colonial empires in general.28 That collective feeling of being wronged and robbed is what explains the West New Guinea episode, which in reality only made things worse for the injured Dutch national pride. The vast, remote territory was of symbolic rather than tangible value to the Dutch, and their insistence that West New Guinea should remain outside the Republic of Indonesia was based less on possibilities for development, investment, trade, and settlement than on a stubborn determination to salvage at least something from the debacle of decolonization. A decade after independence, by around 1960 the continuing deterioration of relations with Indonesia, even to the point of a potential renewal of armed conflict, finally led the Dutch to succumb to widespread international pressure and submit to an agreement to cede the territory in late 1962 to the United Nations, which promptly passed it on to the Republic of Indonesia in 1963. It was perhaps the final nail in the coffin of presumed Dutch imperial greatness: thereafter only problems seemed to emanate from the colonies. By 1963, the Dutch had lost even the last vestiges of “symbolic means of maintaining at least some degree of national grandeur,” and the whole episode was an example of “castles in the air in the realm of Dutch fantasy” about a great empire, now lost. It was the last humiliating straw in what had been a thoroughly bitter decolonization in the East. As for the West Indies colonies, not a great deal of interest was shown by the Dutch, until the 27 28

Buettner, Europe after Empire, 94. Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and Lawrence J. Butler, Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial States, 1918–1975 (London: Hodder, 2008), 417–418, 424.

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independence of Suriname in 1975; and even there, rather than the colonial possessions themselves, it would be the postcolonial migration issues which impinged upon the identity of the Dutch at home, and their sense of nationhood.29 In much of the literature on decolonization, there is reference to the “trauma” which accompanied it, also in the Dutch case. The ignominiously failed Police Actions and the West New Guinea fiasco, proving that the Netherlands was no longer a power in the world, were treated as best forgotten, and the colonies were little mentioned in the politics of the 1960s.30 But imperialism had been of central importance to national identities in several other European nations as well, and the decolonization process did not entirely erase that centrality.31 In the Netherlands, the wrenching away of their colonies in the East, on top of military defeat and Nazi occupation, felt for many like the loss of all claims to international status and power. By the time some of the truth about the atrocities in the Police Actions began to leak out in the late 1960s, the Netherlands had become what a respected commentator has referred to as “one of the least nationalist countries in Europe.”32 There were significant postcolonial migration streams to the Netherlands in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Between 1949 and 1958 some 250,000 migrants arrived from Indonesia, many of them of mixed Indonesian– Dutch ancestry, and the government made efforts to integrate them into Dutch society. Those from Ambon and other islands in the South Moluccan group were differently treated: they had supplied large numbers of the Dutch colonial army (the KNIL), were Christian rather than Muslim, and some of them wanted a Republic of the South Moluccas, independent of Indonesia. The Dutch government did not think they would stay long, and put them in isolated districts and camps – eventually for decades – which gave rise to social tensions and even terrorist actions, most notably the capture of a train full of hostages in December 1975. Many Surinamese took advantage of their right to take up residence in the Netherlands at the time of independence in 29

30

31 32

Buettner, Europe after Empire, 97–99, 100–105, quotation at 98; on New Guinea, see also the classic Arend Lijphart, The Trauma of Decolonization: The Dutch and West New Guinea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); James C. Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig (Amsterdam: Boom, 1995), 51–53. Matthijs Kuipers, “De strijd om het koloniale verleden: Trauma, herinnering, en de ‘imperial history wars’ in Nederland,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 131/4 (2018), 657–676, at 668; Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw, 69–71. Martin et al., Crises of Empire, 424. Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw, 62–64, 66, 77.

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1975; significant numbers of Dutch Antilleans also transferred to the “mother country.” The Dutch were generally pleased with their attempts to integrate the Indonesian migrants (with the exception of the Moluccans), although it was a strongly assimilationist policy, keen to reduce or even eradicate the differences in culture between immigrants and the Dutch; many experienced the policies as alienating and racist. Migrants from the West Indies also felt they faced racial discrimination, and were treated as second-class citizens. This was perhaps part and parcel of Dutch indigenous readjustment of their identities in a time of cultural turmoil (the 1970s and 1980s), much of which had been caused by decolonization itself, but equally by secularization, emancipation, youth culture, drugs policy, and other factors. It was also the time of the demise of the longstanding political and social system of pillarization (verzuiling), into which the postcolonial immigrants did not really fit; the vertical divisions in Dutch society had not played a similarly characteristic role in the colonies. In this readjustment of values at the core of the nation, there were new directions to follow, like the path toward European integration, and even a self-appointed role as a moral guide to the world in international matters. But the Dutch tended to see postcolonial immigrants as “the Other,” concentrating on their differences from Dutch culture. Thus Dutch nationalism was and is always in flux, but seems continually affected by imperial and postcolonial issues.33

The “Empire” Today As for what survives from the Dutch imperial connections to affect Dutch nationalism today, first there is an argument that neocolonialism has replaced colonialism. There is no longer any formal colonial relationship, but by means of financial, trade, and debt structures, the hegemony of the West continues unabated.34 Through less formal neocolonial structures, the feelings of self-importance and superiority which Europeans held were not in the long run irrevocably altered by decolonization, because Europe’s and the West’s ability to exploit the rest of the world continued. Imperialism may be gone, but empire lives on as a global system of rule through hybrid identities and exchanges.35 There may well be a kernel of truth in such assertions when 33 34

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Buettner, Europe after Empire, 219–22, 276–83, 379. Tony Smith (ed.), The End of European Empire: Decolonization after World War II (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1975), xiii. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xi–xii and passim.

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applied to the Dutch: they remain key members of the privileged West. Second, there is the assertion that decolonization led directly to, or at the very least cleared the way toward, European integration, with the benefits that it has bestowed on the nations of Europe, and perhaps especially on the Dutch.36 Third, several scholars agree that colonial “categories of mind” are still present, and that full decolonization of the mind has not yet taken place. The “colonial archive” is still open and consulted to some degree. The sentiments of tempo doeloe (time past, or “the good old days,” in the East Indies) still sell picture-books in large numbers, but the colonial past is also fast becoming a major moral issue in the life of the Dutch nation today.37 Two examples will suffice. The first is the issue of the extreme violence which characterized the Indonesian War of Independence (the two Police Actions). The violence (on all sides, but especially by Dutch troops) was hardly discussed, and long kept as a guilty secret by those who knew of it first-hand. Twenty years later some serious academic work on the subject38 launched a periodically recurring discussion about the degree, intensity, and systematic nature of the violence, until in 2016 Rémy Limpach published The Burning Kampongs of General Spoor.39 It gave detailed accounts of the wide range of atrocities including summary executions, torture, village-burning, and massacres; the controversy flared up again, and finally in December 2016 the government agreed to a major academic research program to investigate violence in the East Indies in the period between 1945 and 1950.40 It had become necessary to seek an academic solution to a disgraceful episode in the past concerning the reputation of the nation. The last time that happened, with an academic report of 2002 on the role of the Dutch UN troops in failing to prevent the massacre of 7,000 Muslims by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995, the moral climate became so intense that the entire cabinet felt obliged to resign. 36

37 38

39

40

Peo Hansen, “European Integration, European Identity and the Colonial Connection,” European Journal of Social Theory, 5/4 (2002), 483–498. Kuipers, “De strijd om het koloniale verleden.” For example J. A. A. van Doorn and W. J. Hendrix, Ontsporing van geweld: Over het Nederlands/Indisch/Indonesisch conflict (Rotterdam: Rotterdam University Press, 1970). Rémy Limpach, De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor (Amsterdam: Boom, 2016); see also Bart A. Luttikkuis and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2014). The project, entitled “Dekolonisatie, geweld en oorlog in Indonesië, 1945–1950,” is run jointly by three research institutes: the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), the Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie (NIMH), and the NIOD Instituut voor Oorlogs-, Holocaust en Genocidestudies. The results were presented on 17 February 2022 in Amsterdam: Gert Oostindie, et al., Beyond the Pale: Dutch Extreme Violence in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945–1949 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022).

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Then there is the issue of slavery. As in other countries, for example Great Britain, the longstanding controversy concerning the history of the slave trade, especially in the eighteenth century, and the deployment of slaves on plantations well into the nineteenth, has intensified in recent decades, with multiple research projects, television documentaries, museums, exhibitions, monuments, and demonstrations. Much of the attention has focused on the West Indies and the Americas; recent research in the Netherlands has drawn attention to the large-scale existence of slavery in the East Indies as well. There were plantations in the East as well as the West Indies. But there were also very large numbers of enslaved people used in domestic and other forms of labor in the East: some 66,350 of them in 1687–1688. The VOC traded slaves on a substantial scale.41 A recent detailed study of slavery under the VOC by Matthias van Rossum estimates numbers of slaves in the East Indies in 1750 at 75,500, considerably more than in the Dutch West Indies possessions in the same year.42 So, contrary to previous understandings, the East Indies was a slave society well into the nineteenth century, involving both enslaved persons and those born in slavery. This new, or at least much more detailed, research has started to dispense with the idea that slave bondage in the East was of a much milder form than on the West Indies plantations, much of it domestic, and on a much smaller scale. All that has now been seriously questioned by scholars, and there remains little doubt that the Dutch were involved with slavery as much as other Asian societies in the early modern period.43 The slaves came from Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and “slavery was a defining component of Dutch colonial settlements throughout the Indian Ocean” by the end of the seventeenth century, by which time it is estimated that something like 50 percent of the inhabitants of Dutch settlements from Java to the Cape were slaves.44 And then there was the slave trade on top of the ownership and use of slaves; the Dutch were prominent in the Atlantic triangle between northern Europe, the West African coast, and the Caribbean, along with the 41

42

43 44

Catia Antunes and Jos Gommans (eds.), Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks and Institutions, 1600–2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 273. A polemical but welldocumented study provides details on Dutch-perpetrated slaving and slavery from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: Vanvugt, Roofstaat, e.g. 179, 245, 292–293, 390, 451, 714–715, 733. Matthias van Rossum, Kleurrijke tragiek: De geschiedenis van slavernij in Azië onder de VOC (Hilversum: Verloren, 2015), 7, 23. See, e.g., ibid., 8–16. Mark Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of World History, 14/2 (2003), 149.

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French, British, and Portuguese. The trade was effectively stamped out at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but slaves were still recruited for the Dutch East Indies army (the KNIL) in the 1830s from the Ashanti: 1,000 of them in 1837 at 100 guilders a head.45 Slavery was abolished in the Dutch West Indies in 1863, when the labor was replaced by Chinese and Indian indentured workers. All this attention to the slavery which was central to the Dutch Empire far into the nineteenth century has taken its toll on the Dutch national heritage, and constitutes a troubled aspect of Dutch nationalism even today. The clearest example is the current annual outburst about the public celebration of the St. Nicholas feast for children on 5 December: his arrival is accompanied by his servants, zwarte pieten (Black Peters), who are dressed in outfits of doublet and hose, wearing black make-up and black curly wigs. Protesters demonstrate against the racism and references to Dutch slaving and slavery, while some nationalists vigorously (and sometimes violently) defend their right to celebrate the traditional folk event. The annual battle over this part of the nation’s soul is far from being resolved.

“Imperialism”? There has been a debate in the Netherlands about whether the terms Dutch “Empire” or “imperialism” are appropriate in the first place: the country took no part in the “Scramble for Africa,” for example; the word “imperialism” was not often used to describe its colonies.46 On the other hand, the Dutch at that particular time were actively expanding their territorial control within the East Indies, using considerable military force to do so, if that is one of the definitions of “imperialism.” Taking a longer view of Dutch global commercial and colonial activity, the scholarly consensus seems to be that there was indeed a “Dutch Empire,” which had support at home and was often bent on expansion, just as with other European empires, especially the maritime ones. Some recent attention to home opinion over the whole period from the foundation of the VOC onwards would seem to confirm this. There have been challenges to a traditional historiography maintaining that the Dutch did not share the Iberian empires’ thirst for conquest, preferring to 45

46

Douglas Coombs, The Gold Coast, Britain and the Netherlands, 1850–1874 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 3. Antislavery campaigns put a stop to the practice shortly afterwards. Remco Raben, “A New Dutch Imperial History? Perambulations in a Prospective Field,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, 128/1 (2013), 9–10.

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concentrate on purely commercial aspects. Current work suggests the VOC and the WIC were both “agents of empire-building,” and were themselves essential to building up the power and status of the central state of the Republic at the expense of the federal provinces, which may have contributed to the consolidation of feelings of collective Dutch nationhood.47 In the later period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there seems little doubt that the Dutch were full members of the European maritime imperial club, complete with military, economic, and cultural imperialism, concentrated in the East Indies.48 So any doubts about the Dutch participation in imperial ideology “are definitively over.”49 As for the interaction of “empire” with nationalism, there is evidence as we have seen that the colonies were seldom far removed from the national psyche. Especially in the period of romantic nationalism, either side of the year 1900, the colonies played an important part in Dutch ideas of nationhood. Caution has been urged in referring to Dutch “imperial identities,” and in the time of the Republic the “raison d’être of the Netherlands was not founded in any imperial motivation,” as might be argued in the case of Britain. But later on, many more Dutch people were involved in the empire, and the colonies were seen as part of Dutch greatness. From the midnineteenth century, more and more information was available to feed the empire into the national consciousness, through journals, missionary organizations, churches, scientific bodies, and learned societies, and this was of course the classic period of modern nationalism.50 Imperial nationalism was no doubt more subdued than in Britain, France, or Germany, but colonies certainly played an increasing role in the “Dutch mindset,” with images of empire permeating Dutch culture through all regions and all classes. The Colonial Museum (founded in 1864, later called the Colonial Institute) and other organizations promoted awareness of the colonies, especially in schools, with an emphasis on the civilizing mission, and the colonies “served both as a mirror and as a source for national pride.”51 Cultural nationalism experienced its peak in the decades between 1870 and the First World War, 47

48 49

50 51

Catia Antunes, “From Binary Narratives to Diversified Tales: Changing the Paradigm in the Study of Dutch Colonial Participation,” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 131/3 (2108), 396. Kuitenbrouwer, “Songs of an Imperial Underdog,” 90–93. René Koekkoek et al., “Visions of Dutch Empire,” forum discussion, BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, 132/2 (2017), 78. Raben, “A New Dutch Imperial History?,” 9. Kuitenbrouwer, “Songs of an Imperial Underdog,” quotations at 94, 103. See also Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas.

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and that was precisely the period in which “the Indies and South Africa helped to increase national self-awareness in the Netherlands, and enhanced its national culture,” for example with vociferous support for military actions in the East, and for the cultural “brethren” in southern Africa.52 All in all, the 350 years and more of Dutch colonial activity can indeed be called imperial, and although perhaps less central to the national psyche than in other maritime empires, the overseas possessions were almost always present there. Certainly from the later nineteenth century they were an essential component in Dutch nationalism, even to the point of severely affecting the self-image of the nation when most of the colonies were stripped away after 1945, leaving little behind but six tiny islands in the Caribbean, the results of some significant migration streams, and a certain restlessness about the composition of Dutch nationhood.

Further Reading Antunes, Catia, and Jos Gommans (eds.), Exploring the Dutch Empire: Agents, Networks and Institutions, 1600–2000 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Buettner, Elizabeth, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Emmer, Piet, and Jos Gommans, The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Gouda, Frances, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995). Klooster, Wim, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016). Koekkoek, René, et al., “Visions of Dutch Empire,” forum discussion, BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, 132/2 (2017), 77–120. Kuitenbrouwer, Vincent, “Songs of an Imperial Underdog: Imperialism and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1870–1960,” in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 90–123. Luttikkuis, Bart A., and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2014). Multatuli [E. Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company (London: Penguin, 1987; published in Dutch 1860). Raben, Remco, “A New Dutch Imperial History? Perambulations in a Prospective Field,” BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, 128/1 (2013), 5–30. 52

Martin Bossenbroek, Holland op zijn breedst: Indië en Zuid-Afrika in de Nederlandse cultuur omstreeks 1900 (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1996), 10; see also 343–357.

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4

The Habsburg Monarchy b a´ l i n t v a r g a

Habsburg Lands and Identities In the century of nationalism, the House of Habsburg ruled over a vast territory in East Central Europe. Second only to Russia in size on the European continent, the Habsburg lands stretched from the Alps to the foothills of the eastern Carpathians and from the shores of the Adriatic to the Sudetes mountain range on the border with Saxony. The core of this territory in the Alps, corresponding roughly to what is today Austria and Slovenia, had been ruled by the Habsburgs from the High Middle Ages. In 1526, the Habsburgs made a decisive step to become East Central Europe’s leading power by acquiring the Bohemian and the Hungarian crowns. After one and a half centuries of warfare against the Ottoman Empire, the long eighteenth century witnessed the Habsburgs’ decisive eastern expansion. First, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they reconquered central Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans. The loss of Silesia to Prussia (1740) was compensated in 1772, as the decaying Poland had to renounce its southeastern parts, to be turned into the Habsburg-controlled kingdom of Galicia, soon to be followed by the acquisition of the tiny northern pocket of the Ottoman vassal Moldovia called Bukovina. The long nineteenth century was more balanced. The Habsburgs finished the Napoleonic Wars with newly acquired Lombardy and the Venetian Republic, but lost Belgium and minor territories in south Germany. In 1846, Cracow and its vicinity were attached to Galicia, and in 1878 the Habsburgs de facto conquered Bosnia and Herzegovina (a de iure incorporation followed much later, in 1908); yet this was preceded by the losses of Lombardy and Veneto to the newly formed Italy and the expulsion from the German lands to the benefit of Prussia. The core lands of the Habsburg Monarchy were predominantly German-speaking and Catholic, with smaller Italian-speaking pockets in their southwest (Tyrol) and Slavic-speaking populations in their south

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(present-day Slovenia). The eastward expansion ultimately turned the Habsburg Monarchy into a linguistic and religious mosaic. Bohemians and Moravians spoke German and Czech; in the sixteenth century, the Reformation turned these provinces largely Protestant, but the consolidation of Habsburg rule in the seventeenth century reconverted them to Catholicism. Hungary was populated by Magyar-, Slavic-, German-, and Romanian-speaking populations; here, too, the Reformation gained a strong foothold, but the devoted Catholic Habsburgs partly reversed this, which left the country with a Catholic majority and strong Calvinist and Lutheran minorities nationwide as well as Orthodoxy in the east and the south. Galicia was Latin-rite Catholic and Polish-speaking in the west, Eastern Catholic and largely Ruthenian-speaking in the east, with Roman Catholic and Polish-speaking pockets. In Dalmatia, Italian and Slavic vernaculars coexisted, just as Catholicism did with Orthodoxy. Ashkenazi Jews lived all around the Monarchy, though the highest number claimed the provincial towns of Galicia, the shtetls, as their home. The final addition to the religious mosaic was Sunni Islam and Sephardic Judaism in Bosnia. The intersection of language, religion, and social status could play out in various ways. In some provinces, language functioned as a social marker: the urban population of Dalmatia spoke Italian and left Slavic to the peasants of the hinterlands; in east Galicia and south Transylvania, Polish and Magyar were the dominant languages of the nobility, while peasants tended to speak Ruthenian and Romanian, respectively. Since the purges of Protestant nobility of Bohemia and Moravia in the seventeenth century, German became spoken by their nobility, most town dwellers, and many peasants alike, while Czech was employed by some peasants and members of the lower strata of the urban population only. In contrast to that, in northern Hungary Slavic vernaculars and Magyar were used by the nobility and peasants alike; in towns, these languages coexisted with German. However, there were some general patterns. Slavic and Romanian vernaculars were generally spoken by peasants and the lower urban classes, and only occasionally by noblemen and in local administration. Magyar, Croatian, and Polish were employed more by the landed gentry in Hungary, Croatia, and Galicia, respectively; yet in the mideighteenth century, these languages were held even by their elite speakers as unrefined and not “mature” enough for advanced communication. It was only German that was spoken by noble and urban elites all across the Habsburg Monarchy and had a fully elaborated written form. (Italian enjoyed similar prestige, but its usage was limited to the Adriatic shore and South Tyrol.) 65

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In the eighteenth century, elites employed languages in flexible ways, choosing the “proper” language depending on the context: Latin and German in administration, sciences, and belletristic works; vernaculars in local and domestic affairs. Given the multilinguality of educated elites, linguistic affiliation did not turn into an ethnic identity; instead, religion, provincial patriotism, and feudal privileges built the core of identification. Religious texts, including translations of the Bible, catechisms, and hymnbooks, and manuals used in elementary schools, were printed in not yet standardized vernaculars to reach as wide an audience as possible. This did not necessarily determine the identities of peasants. In 1759, a peasant in the vicinity of Buda (today Budapest) claimed in a testimony recorded in German that six years earlier, at the time of his settlement in the village, he “had been French” but learned the local German vernacular and thus became recognized as German and an “ordinary” member of the local society. Evidence from Hungarian villages shows also that the terms “Slav,” “Slovak,” “Pole,” and “Russian” were regularly confused because no social significance was attached to them.1 Language or ethnicity did not play a role in political action and “there is no reason to believe that peasant attitudes . . . were determined by ethnic differences.”2 The lack of clear-cut ethnic identification, however, did not mean that nations did not exist in Habsburg Europe. On the contrary: feudal nationes did exist as the body of the privileged; their main duty was the governance of the provinces. The natio hungarica, for instance, corresponded to the Hungarian nobility, regardless of religion and language; it, therefore, included Roman and Eastern Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox, and Magyar, Slavic, German, and Romanian speakers, but excluded peasants claiming membership in the same churches and speaking the same vernaculars. In Transylvania, a remote eastern corner of the Habsburg Monarchy, as many as three nationes emerged: in the south, the natio saxonica, the body of the German-speaking, Lutheran Saxons with an unusually inclusive membership including even free peasants; in the east, the Magyar-speaking Szekler natio, comprising peasant frontiersmen; and in the rest of the province, the mostly Magyar-speaking “ordinary” nobility, limited to landholders only.

1

2

Tamás Faragó, “‘Még akkor Franczia lévén . . .’: Történeti adatok az asszimiláció és az etnikai identitások alakulásához a 18–20. században,” in Bódy Zsombor, Horváth Sándor, and Valuch Tibor (eds.), Megtalálható-e a múlt? Tanulmányok Gyáni Gábor 60. születésnapjára (Budapest: Argumentum, 2010), 334–349. Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2013), 23.

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Governing this highly complex composite state, the Habsburg authorities developed a flexible approach which included cooperation with local noble elites (though the autonomy of provincial gentry varied greatly) and communication with the subjects in local languages. Queen Maria Theresa (1740–1780) ordered compulsory elementary schooling in the local vernaculars; in middle schools and universities, Latin was the dominant language of instruction, which prepared students for state service, conducted mostly in Latin and in German.

Exploring the National Language and Defining the Borders of the Nation Inspired by the Enlightenment, scholars started to develop an interest in local history and languages. They published historical documents dug out of local archives and grammars of local languages, and in the framework of provincial patriotism also penned apologetic treatises in which they took pride in the provincial past and language. These works had a twofold aim: they legitimized the provincial estate system and also pointed toward its reforms. “Defending” local vernaculars became an important tenet in these works; yet, at this point, vernacular language was seen as a means to promote the education of people and not an end in itself. At the same time, an ethnolinguistic understanding of community started to infiltrate into provincial patriotism. Notably, many of these works were still written in Latin, later in German. For instance, the Hungarian Jesuit monk Samuel Timon took pride in his Slavic ancestry, advocated the dignity of the “Slavic” language, and praised the early medieval polity of Moravia in Latin (1733). The Czech language was glorified by an aristocrat, Count František Josef Kinský, in a treatise written in German (1773). The reason for their choice was actually the lack of choice: intellectuals were confronted with the fact that despite all their enthusiasm for provincial languages, such languages were not “sophisticated” enough to express the intriguing ideas of the Enlightenment. Hence, polishing the language – meaning setting a standardized grammar, orthography, and vocabulary cleansed of foreign vestiges – became one of the most important imperatives in a cultural and yet apolitical program. During the smooth transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism, and more concretely, under the influence of German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, language was increasingly dubbed the most important marker of nationhood. From the 1830s at the latest, intellectuals gradually conceptualized communities on the basis of a shared language, and the earlier, provincial patriotism increasingly lost its appeal. 67

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Magyar and Romanian, languages obviously different from all their neighbors, were spoken by a relatively small number of people on a relatively compact territory and the dialects within the language continuum did not differ significantly; hence, imagining a nation comprising speakers of these languages was a relatively easy task. German dialects were far more diverse, but a German literary language, employed by the educated strata all over Germany, the Habsburg lands, and beyond, provided a skeleton of an imagined cultural community. In contrast to that, Slavic vernaculars, spoken between Saxony and Siberia, took a plethora of shapes and several literary traditions emerged (though some early ones, most importantly Czech, had practically vanished). Protagonists of Slavic cultural “revival” realized early on that delineating a cultural community on a linguistic basis could take several forms. The Hungarian-born Lutheran priest Ján Kollár (1793–1852) believed in pan-Slavism, i.e. the existence of a single Slavic nation whose members spoke various dialects, such as Russian, Polish, Czech, or Illyrian (South Slavic), each of them further divided into sub-dialects (Russian, for instance, included in this scheme Belorussian and Ukrainian). Kollár propagated Slavic literary reciprocity – Slavic patriots should read literature written in dialects other than their own – and he also proposed a united Slavic orthography.3 While Kollár’s influence on the birth of the romantic Slavic nationalisms was enormous, political impossibility and unbridgeable differences among orthographies, grammar, and vocabulary made the concept of pan-Slavism lose importance. Czech national protagonists in the 1830s and 1840s imagined a Czech nation which apparently included the Slavic speakers of north Hungary (the to-be-Slovaks). This idea fell initially on fertile soil in north Hungary, but in the 1840s a separate Slovak national movement gained momentum under the leadership of the charismatic journalist and linguist Ľudovít Štúr (1815–1856), which imagined a distinct Slovak nation and distanced itself from the Czech national movement. In the south, Illyranism, i.e. the unity of South Slavs in a Kollárian fashion, became the buzzword of the 1830s and 1840s (Illyria had been a Roman province on the eastern shore of the Adriatic). Protagonists of an Illyrian nation under the leadership of journalist and language reformer Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) advocated an Illyrian language which included what are known today as Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Slovene. The concept of the Illyrian language was challenged by the multiplicity of South Slav written traditions, and in particular 3

Alexander Maxwell, “Effacing Panslavism: Linguistic Classification and Historiographic Misrepresentation,” Nationalities Papers, 46 (2018), 633–653.

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by the fact that Catholics and Orthodox employed different alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, respectively. While the unity of Croats and Serbs was a widely accepted idea, Orthodox intellectuals framed the concept of the South Slav nation in their own terms. A number of Slavophone intellectuals living in present-day Slovenia did evince enthusiasm for South Slav (Yugo-slav) unity, but this proved controversial, in particular after a dialect in the very south of the language continuum (furthest away from Slovenia) was defined as the basis of the South Slav literary language; instead, local erudite scholars, among them imperial librarian Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844), developed the concept of the Slovene language and nation based on the Ljubljana dialect.

The Making of a National Public Sphere Once a language standard was set, and by that the borders of the “national container” were imagined, this container had to be filled and communicated to the members of the nation. Using the now eloquent national language, poets and writers compiled a wide range of belletristic works in which the heroic past of the nation occupied a central place. Historians did the same, but their fantasies were limited by more rigid academic standards; nonetheless, their creativity in interpreting the sources (and sometimes even in forging false but spectacular evidence) was remarkable. Collecting and publishing folklore also became a common activity of romantic intellectuals. The common trait in these works was their subject: replacing baroque odes to aristocrats and monarchs and treatises feeding provincial patriotism, romantic authors put the nation and the “people,” however it was defined, in the center of their literary activity and used the medium of the recently developed national language. The most illustrative case here is Czech historian František Palacký (1798– 1876), dubbed the “Father of the Nation.” Palacký is remembered for his magnificent interpretation of Czech history, putting the Hussites, a fifteenthcentury proto-Protestant religious group advocating the usage of Czech in religious practice, in the center of the narrative, and juxtaposing them with baroque, Catholic, and heavily Germanized Bohemia. The language and title of his magnum opus are illuminating: published in 1836, the first volume of Palacký’s work appeared in German under the title History of Bohemia (Geschichte von Böhmen). In 1848, he restarted the project, now in Czech and with the tellingly modified title History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia (Deˇjiny národu ˇceského v Cˇechách a v Moraveˇ, published 1848–1867 in

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five volumes). The subject and the interpretation changed accordingly: Bohemia, the bilingual province, was no longer at the forefront of the investigation, and the Czech nation, dispersed in several crownlands, took its place instead.4 The sudden rise in academic and belletristic works discussing and thereby inventing the nation would not have been possible without an adequate institutional background. The Vormärz years, the era preceding the March 1848 revolutions, witnessed the mushrooming of new institutions engaging in the “awakening” of the “sleeping” nation. The Bohemian National Museum (established in 1818) and the Hungarian Learned Society (later Academy of Sciences, established in 1827) were founded with the purpose of cultivating the sciences in Czech and Magyar, respectively. An instructive type of institution was the matica (literally, “queen bee”), a Slavic cultural-academic society with a strong popular educational profile. The first matica was the Serbian one, established in 1826 in Pest (the eastern part of today’s Budapest; moved to Novi Sad in 1864), to be followed by the Czech (1831) and the Illyrian (1842; renamed Croatian in 1874). Maticas promoted high literature and academic disciplines in their standardized vernaculars, and they also created the medium of national communication by publishing journals, dictionaries, academic books, poetry, and fiction. Theaters, founded in several major cities in these years, also took a role in spreading languages other than German. Some of these institutions, such as the maticas, were private; some others were either directly founded by provincial authorities (such as the Bohemian National Museum) or were taken care of by them (the Hungarian National Museum was established as a private initiative but was later nationalized). Last but not least, an educated and engaged audience was needed that was interested in and willing to pay for these cultural products. This public came into being also in the Vormärz: in the framework of Biedermeier sociability, daily papers and journals mediated the ideas of the “national awakeners” to a wider public. The making of a full-fledged national culture became associated with social and economic reform, most importantly the emancipation of the peasantry and the creation of more modern institutions. As a result of these factors, the 1840s profoundly differed from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hungary illustrates this change well. Around 1800, the political leadership of the country, the aristocracy, 4

Monika Baár, Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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tended to speak German and French and shared its time between its Viennese palaces and mansions in Hungary. The administrative language of the country was Latin. The Hungarian language was scarcely seen in print: only a few books in languages other than Latin or German were published, and only a handful of Magyar newspapers existed, the publishers of which usually went bankrupt after a few issues owing to the narrow market. Until a national museum was established at the initiative of Count Ferenc Széchényi, there were practically no academic institutions in the country. Yet a Hungarian-language literary semi-public did exist, mostly in the correspondence of authors, most of whom wrote as a hobby and lived on the income of their estate or had a church or public office. These exchanges of letters were ostensibly private, yet often ended up being published. The central figure of this semi-public forum was literary critic and author Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831), a petty nobleman and an ardent promoter of language reform. It is a telling fact that Kazinczy lived in the remote northeast corner of the country; since the medium for this form of quasi-public discourse was the private letter, his place of residence had little significance. In contrast to that, in the 1840s aristocrats employed Magyar publicly (though in private German still prevailed) and let the new generation be raised in Hungarian schools. Magyar became the official language of the country in 1844 (to be discussed in more detail below). Various daily newspapers and journals reporting on national and international news, economics, literature, and fashion discussed the ideas of nation and social reform; their circulation totaled several thousand, reaching a relatively wide readership. A national museum, an academy of sciences, theaters, and other institutions meant a rather solid framework of cultural production. Journalists, authors, and scholars could now make a modest living as professional intellectuals and earned considerable social prestige. They were concentrated in Pest, the most populous and central city of Hungary. Throughout the Habsburg lands, similar national public spaces centered on cities emerged, albeit of varying social depth. Besides the Germanspeaking public space, still covering the entire Habsburg Monarchy and beyond, the most elaborate national public spaces were the Magyar and the Czech; others followed with a similar structure but smaller size in terms of actors, institutions, and publics. While these national public spaces with an outspoken agenda of language-based nationalism emerged, multilingualism did not disappear. German still functioned as the lingua franca of the Habsburg Monarchy, 71

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and Viennese newspapers were still read by educated people regardless of their preference for any other emerging national cultural community. This was not least due to the fact that several “national awakeners” worked on behalf of language communities different from their mother tongue. Gaj, Czech philologist and historian Josef Dobrovský, and the Magyar literary critic Ferenc Toldy were raised in a German-speaking environment and learned Illyrian (Croatian), Czech, and Magyar in school (Toldy, in fact, was born as Franz Schedel and Magyarized his name in 1847); Kollár spoke in German only with his wife, whom he met during his studies in Jena.

From Culture to Politics The programs of “national revivals” had only indirect political leanings. Kollár’s pan-Slavism, for instance, was limited to the making of a permeable cultural space but did not strive toward the political unification of Slavs living at the time in three different empires (Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov) and in some other German polities (Prussia, Saxony). Yet the cultural program turned into politics soon enough. A proto-national controversy emerged during the reign of the radical reformer Emperor Joseph II (1780–1790). Joseph saw diversity of governance practices as outdated and urged the uniformization of the Habsburg Monarchy under the umbrella of rationality. One of his rationality-driven measures was the introduction of German as the official language in all provinces of the Monarchy (previously, Hungary and Croatia employed Latin and Lombardy Italian, respectively). Joseph was anything but a German nationalist; his only reason for German was practical, German being the only living language sufficiently developed and spoken by enough educated people to conduct state affairs in. This measure, however, caused a storm in Hungary and Croatia: the language-reform movement had already started and gained support from the gentry; and Joseph’s initiative was seen as an intolerable aggression against the local customs, notably, administrative Latinity. Furthermore, it would have discriminated against many petty noblemen who were employed by the state and had a training in Latin only. Facing wide-ranging rejection, the dying Joseph II withdrew almost all his reforms, including the one concerning language. Joseph was followed by his brother, Leopold II (1790–1792), who aimed at introducing reforms with the support of the political classes (and not against them, as Joseph did). In this context, south Hungary’s Orthodox convened in 72

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Timis¸oara in 1790 to ensure the church’s privileges. During the negotiations, the term “Orthodox” was gradually replaced by “Serbian” as the notion describing the privileged community. Romanians in Transylvania could not claim a similar, preexisting privileged status; in a plea submitted to Leopold, the Greek Catholic bishop of Blaj, Inocenț iu Micu-Klein, alluded to the ancient liberties of the “Wallachian nation” and, based upon them, demanded the installation of a Romanian natio, but to no avail. In the following decades, national activists gradually promoted loyalty to language-based national communities in lieu of provincial identities. A telling example is how the province-based patriotism of Slavophone intellectuals in Carniola, Styria, and Carinthia was replaced by identification with the Slovene nation. When the Carniolan Diet convened in 1790, its members (the provincial nobility) dubbed themselves representatives of the Carniolan nation. They demanded that all the provincial clerks be locals and took pride in the Carniolan language (what we would today call Slovene), which, according to a local, patriotic clergy, was as dignified as any other language. However, this provincial and estate-based patriotism faded away, and thanks to the handful of Slovene “national awakeners,” in a few decades the concept of a language-based Slovene nationalism gained momentum. This Slovene nationalism included anyone speaking a vernacular identified by national protagonists as Slovene. While the geographical core of the Slovene nation was in Carniola, the language-based definition meant that the German speakers of Carniola were excluded, while Carinthians, Styrians, and inhabitants of the Austrian littoral speaking a vernacular similar to Carniolan Slovene were included.5 The most tangible sign of the politicization of cultural nationalism took place in the linguistically most heterogeneous Habsburg country, Hungary, where several national movements developed simultaneously. While Magyar speakers had only a relative majority among the population, their share among the country gentry, i.e. the natio traditionally engaged in politics, and the most important promoters of social reforms, was far higher. In the Vormärz years, Magyar became fashionable among aristocrats also. Magyarizing the country’s administration became one of the imperatives of the liberal reform movement. It was also one of the few initiatives that was approved by the Diet and the monarch: in 1844, Magyar replaced Latin as the official language of the administration, grammar 5

Rok Stergar and Tamara Scheer, “Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification,” Nationalities Papers, 46 (2018), 577.

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schools, and colleges. This provoked bitter reactions on the part of protagonists of other languages, most importantly in Croatia, where the local gentry found themselves severely discriminated against and did not comprehend why they should replace a language spoken by literally no one by another language spoken by virtually no one. Indeed, a modern Croatian literary language (called Illyrian by many) was already available. In 1847, the Croatian Diet passed a resolution making Croatian the official language of Croatia. Throughout the Habsburg lands, national protagonists in the mid1840s could feel content: within a few decades, they had managed to imagine national communities with various layers of culture and communicate this to the members of their imagined national communities. All the more bitter was the reality of indifference on the part of the very peasantry who allegedly constituted each nation’s core population. The northeastern Habsburg province of Galicia had been, a few decades earlier, part of the decaying Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and its mostly Polish-speaking nobility kept on dreaming about the resurrection of Poland. In 1846, noblemen rose up with this high hope. But the peasants with whom they shared their Roman Catholic faith and Polish language sided with the Habsburg authorities and started to massacre the gentry. To the dismay of the noblemen, either the concept of Poland meant nothing to the peasants or, even worse, they associated serfdom and poverty with the late Polish state and contrasted that with Joseph II and his social reforms.

Nation(alist)s against the Empire, 1848–1849 In March 1848, revolutions broke out in Vienna, Pest, Prague, Milan, and several smaller places. The revolutionaries had overlapping, yet quite different agendas. Nationalism, though, was almost omnipresent: the springtime of the peoples was actually the springtime of nations, or even more precisely, the springtime of nationalists. The first wave of revolts shocked the empire to its very foundations and, in the spring of 1848, its dissolution along nationalist lines seemed quite likely. Hungary became a polity practically independent from the rest of the Habsburg Monarchy, sharing with it only its monarch, and was governed by the Magyar national liberals. Lombardy and Veneto were about to secede from the Habsburgs to join an Italian nation-state under Piedmontese leadership. German liberal nationalists laid hopes in the making of a united Germany under 74

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Austrian leadership at the parliament of the German Confederation which convened in Frankfurt in May 1848. This possibility deeply worried Slavic national protagonists living in the to-be-Germany. Slavic leaders vehemently protested: Palacký, despite being invited to Frankfurt, rejected a seat in a famous letter claiming that Czechs had nothing to do with the matters of Germany, and instead installed a Slavic congress in Prague with a rather unclear agenda (and, ironically, employing German as working language). After an unsuccessful revolt in Prague, the imperial army dissolved the Slavic congress; Palacký and his peers could do nothing to hinder the making of a united Germany. The project was wrecked by a far more complicated circumstance which concerned Hungary, the Italian provinces, and Galicia, i.e. the Habsburg territories which were not members of the German Confederation (and, with the exception of medieval Lombardy, had not even been parts of the Holy Roman Empire). These polities did not intend to join Germany in any form, and nor would protagonists of a German nation-state have welcomed them: a vote in Frankfurt in October 1848 confirmed that princes of the to-be-Germany could rule over other countries only through a personal union. Hence, it became obvious that either the Habsburg Monarchy in its entirety would remain outside the to-be-Germany or only its core lands would join and the peripheries would seek their own way. For Francis Joseph, the new, young, dynamic emperor, the unity of the Habsburg lands was the primary political goal. In March 1849, a “decreed constitution” was issued which stated the indivisibility of the Habsburg lands; this signaled that the Habsburg lands opted out of a united Germany. Hungary, in turn, rejected the House of Habsburg and declared complete independence. Yet this did not last long: the imperial army was able to win wars in both Italy and Hungary (albeit in the latter case only with the help of Russia) and kept the Habsburg Monarchy’s territorial integrity intact. Meanwhile, Hungary, now led by Magyar nationalists, also experienced the backlash of nationalist agitation on its peripheries, where Croatia rebelled against its rule and waged a largely unsuccessful war. Much more devastating were the civil wars in south Hungary and Transylvania, where the mostly Serbian frontiersmen and Romanian peasants, suspicious of Magyar elites, clashed with the Hungarian military. While Hungary and Italy were embroiled in bloody wars with wide popular participation, Bohemia, Galicia, and rural Alpine lands remained relatively quiet, showing the limits of nationalism even in this hot historical moment. 75

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Imperialization, 1849–1867 At the end of the day, nationalism was defeated: neither Germany nor the nation-states of Italy and Hungary were realized, and for a decade the absolutist and now centralized Austria engaged in an attempt to create an imperial identity. Before 1849, the imperial authorities tolerated the rise of cultural nationalisms but did not care to offer a modern, imperial, non-ethnic, Austrian identity. In contrast to that, in the 1850s the state bureaucracy started to develop a Greater Austrian patriotism; history books were written to promote a sense of Austrianness and various symbolic means were employed to nurture an Austrian imperial identity. Within this, national cultures were still tolerated and to a certain degree even promoted, but only within an Austrian framework. Multilingualism was seen as a distinctive marker of Greater Austria. A symptomatic piece of scholarship of the period is statistician Karl Czoernig’s Ethnography of the Austrian Monarchy (Ethnographie der österreichischen Monarchie, 3 vols., 1855–1857), in which, for the first time, ethnic (linguistic) groups were visualized, downplaying traditional provincial boundaries; yet in this narrative all the various “peoples” were united and together formed the Austrian Empire. Owing to practical reasons familiar from Joseph II’s times, German became the language of state bureaucracy in every corner and at every level; grammar schools and universities also taught mostly in German. Other vernaculars were still used in elementary education and in communication with the authorities. The laws were printed in nine recently standardized vernaculars of the empire. Effective as it seemed, the from-above modernizing, neo-absolutist regime collapsed at the hands of external nationalisms. In the context of the Piedmont-led Risorgimento, Lombardy was annexed by Italy (1859). Concessions had to be made to liberals, and some ill-fated, semi-liberal reform experiments in 1860 and 1861 meant that a limited public space was rejuvenated. Three more maticas – a Dalmatian one with a Croatian nationalist agenda (1862), a Slovak one (1863), and a Slovenian (1864) – were established. In Hungary, Magyar was restored as the official language but not in its exclusive form as it had been before 1848. In the north of the country, three grammar schools teaching in Slovak were established, which had a decisive impact on the training of a Slovak intelligentsia. In Transylvania, for the first time, all three major languages, Magyar, German and Romanian, became equally employed by the provincial administration and in the Diet.

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Semi-liberalism came to an abrupt end in a few years. A devastating defeat in the short war against Prussia led to the making of Prussian-led Germany and to the secession of Veneto to Italy (1866). It was also the final nail in the coffin of the united Austria, which ultimately lost financial and political viability. In the following year, the Compromise (Ausgleich) put the Habsburg Monarchy on a new basis: a dual state, called the AustroHungarian Monarchy, was produced, with two polities practically independent in all domestic matters but sharing a common monarch, Francis Joseph, as well as maintaining a joint foreign policy, army, currency, and debts, and forming a customs union. While both Austria and Hungary (re-)inaugurated constitutional monarchies, they developed strikingly different policies concerning nationalism.

An Empire of Nations: Austria, 1867–1914 Uniquely in Europe, Austria’s 1867 Constitution declared the complete equality of all nationalities (referred to in the original as Volksstamm, literally “tribe”) and the imperial authorities insisted on a neutral position in national matters. Somewhat paradoxically, this approach helped to shape national communities in various ways and at the end of the day, nations practically became legal entities. The most basic way Austrian authorities engaged in the making of nations was in the exercise of their essentially arbitrary power to acknowledge certain tongues as languages sanctioned by the state while defining others as dialects not worthy of official recognition and support. Hence, the concept of a panSlavic language was dismantled; Ruthenian, Slovene, and Slovak were recognized as independent languages and not dialects of Polish, Croatian, and Czech, respectively. On the other hand, Yiddish was regarded as a German dialect, and thus Jews were defined as a religious group and not a nation (this definition, in fact, corresponded to the mainstream Jewish opinion until the advent of Zionism in the early twentieth century).6 The sanctioned languages found their way to various state policies. Decennial censuses measured the usage of languages from 1880 on; despite the fact that the Austrian census asked for the language most used in everyday interactions (and not for the mother tongue), nationalist agitators and the wider public equated that with the numerical strength of nations which, in turn, fed further arguments in lobbying for state resources. The 6

Stergar and Scheer, “Ethnic Boxes,” 575–591.

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army, widely regarded in contemporary Europe as the school of patriotism and in several cases as a school literally teaching the state language, employed a double policy concerning language. In the units of the common army of Austria-Hungary, the language of command was German, but if more than 20 percent of the soldiers declared another vernacular as their mother tongue (which was quite often the case), the officers were required to learn that language. The most likely field where citizens were confronted with the language policy was public education. An 1884 court verdict stated that communes had to provide elementary education in each vernacular that was declared as mother tongue by more than forty pupils’ parents within two hours’ walking distance from the commune. For grammar schools and universities, no similar principle was developed; hence, national advocates fought hard to persuade local, provincial, and imperial authorities to develop education in their preferred vernacular. Grammar school education in each recognized vernacular was indeed provided, though national advocates found the number of schools insufficient. Whether in Celje, a bilingual town in Lower Styria surrounded by a monolingual, Slovene-speaking vicinity, the grammar school was supposed to have parallel classes teaching in Slovene or to remain solely a German institution developed into an infamous controversy which even led to the failure of the imperial government in 1895. Advocates of national cultures witnessed the least success at the college level, where German remained the dominant language. Some other recognized languages did find their way to higher education in certain places: Polish was employed in Cracow and L’viv, Czech in Prague at the Charles University and at a technical college, the University of L’viv developed some chairs in Ruthenian, and the School of Divinity of the University of Chernivtsi instructed in Romanian and Ruthenian. Demands to establish a second Czech university, a university instructing in Slovene, and a faculty of law for Italians came to naught, as the imperial government pointed to the insufficient number of potential students and the high costs; anyhow, providing a college for one national group would have offended the others, so it was deemed better to retain the status quo. German dominated not only higher education but several bilingual crownlands, such as Carinthia, which employed it as the language of inner administration; Carinthian authorities also tried their best to restrict Slovene education. This frustrated non-German national advocates, and people lacking fluency in German looking for public jobs felt discriminated against. Over time, German domination in public affairs decreased; this, in turn, frustrated German national protagonists and public servants, who interpreted this 78

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process as a gradual de-Germanization and feared the ultimate decay of German society, in particular in contexts where German speakers were a small but powerful minority. These existential fears can be explained by a social Darwinist interpretation of society which became prevalent in the late nineteenth century; accordingly, the clash of nations was seen as a zero-sum game. This explains how it was that, while the imperial bureaucracy proclaimed national neutrality and strove to strike a balance among the demands of nationalist groups, the imperial political scene became the battlefield of gradually radicalizing nationalist politicians. Between 1867 and the First World War, there was an electoral reform in every decade in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy, culminating in 1907 with the introduction of universal and equal male suffrage. These reforms turned politics from the business of the educated middle classes and the nobility to a mass enterprise. In the 1860s and 1870s, Austrian politics was ruled by the architects of the Dualist system, the German liberals. Their agenda concentrated on the introduction of modern reforms facilitating commerce, industry, and secular institutions, but they were less interested in national issues. For this reason, several advocates of non-German nationalisms, for instance, Poles, cooperated with them. Liberals lost power in 1879, to be followed by a coalition of conservative federalists and certain Slavic groups (1879–1897). From 1897, the Austrian parliament became so fragmented that it practically lost its ability to legislate. Instead, the bureaucracy governed Austria. This can be explained by the radical change in the political landscape by the end of the nineteenth century. Aristocracy-supported conservatism was replaced by the Christian social movement which sought support among the lower middle classes and peasants. German liberalism faded as well and gave way to radically nationalist pan-Germans who hoped for the merger of Germany and Austria (and thus faced the problem of the non-German lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, already discussed in the context of 1848). A similar process took place everywhere in Austria. In Czech politics, for instance, the old-school liberal-nationalist Old Czech Party, led by Palacký’s son-in-law, František Ladislav Rieger, lost its dominance by the 1890s to the benefit of the more nationalistic, yet still rather liberal Young Czechs; from the 1900s, however, both parties were outnumbered by Agrarians and the radical National Socialists, who represented peasant and lower middle-class interests. Aggressive nationalism was, however, not the only product of the wide electorate. At the 1907 elections, Christian socials and social democrats gained 79

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the most seats; remarkably, instead of speaking on behalf of nations, they claimed to represent Catholics and workers, respectively. At the same time, in German-speaking regions, the Christian social movement had a German character and its marked anti-Semitism connected it to German nationalism. The once united Austrian social democratic party also engaged in nationalism and disintegrated along national lines. Karl Renner and Otto Bauer, the leaders of Austrian social democracy, developed the concept of AustroMarxism. In their nuanced theoretical works, they did not share Marx and Engel’s famous anti-national statement (“The working men have no country”). Instead, they proposed the principle of personal autonomy (which included the right of choosing a national identity) and advocated the cultural autonomy and equality of Austria’s nations.7 Another theater of nationalist clashes was that of provincial politics, of which the most toxic case was Bohemia. The conflict in the 1860s and 1870s, under the hegemony of German liberals in imperial politics, was of a legal nature: German liberals proposed a curtailed provincial autonomy in order to strengthen the power of the imperial center and the integrity of Austrian society in toto; in contrast to that, Czech liberals, referring to the historic state rights of the Czech crown and emulating Hungary, aimed at turning Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia into a more integrated polity with extended home rule and securing the position of the Czech language. In 1871, a short-lived conservative government made an unsuccessful attempt to meet Czech demands; the Czech national liberals remained frustrated during Austria’s liberal period. The conservative–Slavic coalition, in power from 1879, helped to realize several Czech nationalist goals, though Bohemian home rule never materialized. In 1880, the two languages, Czech and German, were given formal equality in the outer public services in both Bohemia and Moravia. Two years later, the Charles University of Prague was divided into a Czech and a German university. This signaled the gradual division between a Czech and a German society, each having its own schools, associations, press, banks, and even breweries. In 1897, the government stated that every official in Bohemia should know both provincial languages, even if they served in a monolingual area; in practice, this meant that Germans, often monolingual, could barely compete to obtain appointments to public posts with Czechs who knew German as the lingua franca of the Habsburg Monarchy. This initiative, known as the Badeni ordinances, had to be 7

J. S. Beneš, Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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withdrawn because of empire-wide German protests. Meanwhile, in the course of the democratization and massification of politics, the focal point of the conflict between Czech and German politics turned from Bohemia’s rather abstract historic state rights to tangible, more meaningful everyday practices, such as buying at stores owned by co-nationals, donating to national goals, and sending children to the “right” school. While Bohemian politics were disrupted by the burgeoning Czech– German conflict, a possible solution to the national problem came from its neighbours. In 1905, Moravia’s electorate was divided into German and Czech curias, compelling all voters (with the exception of large landowners, mostly aristocrats) to define themselves as either German or Czech. These national curias became responsible for education and culture, the most significant matters for nation-building. This practice, based on the concept called nonterritorial autonomy, had its pros and cons: on the one hand, it required people to define themselves according to nationalist principles, hence a provincial, religious, or nationally indifferent identification was no longer possible; on the other, education and language use became intra-national issues and did not feed German–Czech antagonism any more. In Galicia, aristocrats were able to secure themselves a privileged position to expand home rule immediately after the Compromise. Polish replaced German as the administrative language and the language of instruction in higher education. Democratization meant that Ruthenian (from around 1900 more frequently called Ukrainian) national activists entered Galician and Austrian politics and the public sphere. Once a language spoken mostly by peasants, during the second half of the nineteenth century Ruthenian became the language of a full-fledged public space, including several grammar schools in Galicia and Bukovina and even some departments of the University of L’viv. Ukrainian national advocates, including Greek Catholic clergy and lay middle classes, dreamt of splitting Galicia into a western, Polish, and an eastern, largely Ukrainian, part. This idea met with fierce refusal from the Polish elites; nonetheless, on the eve of the First World War, a compromise similar to that of Moravia was drafted. Dividing the voters into national curias was also the method Bukovinian politics opted for. In the southwest, Slovene nationalists fought local German- and Italianspeaking elites and demanded the making of a Slovene crownland within the Habsburg Monarchy. As parties with different agendas (Catholic, social democratic) gained momentum, the idea of a Slovene crownland lost its appeal and more practical issues came to the fore. During the First World 81

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War, a growing number of Slovene leaders opted for Yugoslavism, which set the scene for the postwar settlement of the region. A new phenomenon of fin-de-siècle Austria was Jewish nationalism. Its main ideologist was Theodor Herzl, who, in 1896, argued for the making of a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism took several forms in Austria’s various Jewish contexts. In 1907, four Galician representatives of the Jewish National Party were elected to the Austrian parliament (before that, Jewish representatives had routinely joined the Polish Club).

A Nationalizing State: Hungary, 1867–1914 In 1867, Hungary’s liberal gentry triumphed and achieved most of the goals of the Vormärz and 1848: Hungary became a constitutional monarchy and Transylvania was (re-)integrated into this polity. In the years following the Compromise, remnants of feudal autonomies were abolished and the inner administrative division of the country was modernized; in short, a unitary Hungarian state administration evolved. One of the first matters the new Hungarian government encountered was the “nationality question.” Hungarian liberals equated the concept of “nation” with territorybased self-governance, and since the indivisibility of Hungary was seen as a given, this meant that in their vocabulary there was only a single Hungarian (political) nation and this term was denied to Slovaks, Germans, Romanians, etc., who were considered mere “nationalities” instead. The founding fathers of Dualist Hungary, Ferenc Deák and József Eötvös, however, did not deny the linguistic rights of these “nationalities” on an individual basis. The 1868 Nationality Act defined Magyar as the state language and ruled how citizens, communes, and, to a certain extent, county-level administration could use other languages. Churches were given practically complete autonomy in choosing the language of their operation. The Elementary Education Act (also 1868) reinforced the former practice of elementary education organization: the vast majority of local schools were run either by communes or by church congregations and instructed in the language of the pupils. Hungary’s non-Magyar nationalist leaders, however, were not content with these developments. On a theoretical level, they insisted on the term “nation” as self-designation. On an administrative level, they rejected the notion of the Hungarian unitary nation-state; Transylvanian Romanian elites still hoped for the detachment of Transylvania from Hungary and the reinstallation of the Transylvanian polity, while the Serbian leaders still 82

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preferred some kind of autonomy for the southern region of Vojvodina, a practice briefly tried in the 1850s. Soon after having laid the foundations of Dualist Hungary, Deák and Eötvös died and their place was taken by less tolerant leaders who perceived the linguistic diversity of the country as an ultimate peril. While Deák and Eötvös harmonized liberalism with a mild state-nationalism, the ideologists of the later era were to sacrifice liberal principles if they collided with Magyar national interest. In this spirit, from the 1870s, Hungary increasingly engaged in homogenizing measures. In 1874 and 1875, the government closed down all three grammar schools instructing in Slovak as well as the Matica Slovenská, even though the former were run by the Lutheran and the Catholic Church, respectively, and the latter was a private association. After that, only a single grammar school operated using Serbian, in Novi Sad, and a handful using Romanian and German in Transylvania. Also, the share of elementary schools instructing either in Magyar or bilingually (Magyar and another language) increased between the 1860s and the First World War. In elementary schools instructing in a language other than Magyar, Magyar became a compulsory subject from 1879, but in regions where the population spoke another language, this meant little in practice. In fact, only grammar schools, frequented by but a tiny share of the male population, guaranteed that pupils learned the state language. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, non-Magyar nationalist leaders, with the exception of the pragmatic Transylvanian Saxons, boycotted the elections to the parliament and withdrew to civil society activities. In the context of the emergence of mass society, they developed associations and press. Three churches, the Serbian Orthodox, the Romanian Orthodox, and the Romanian Greek Catholic, operated as national institutions, though their significance slightly decreased at the expense of the emerging secular middle classes. Slovak national leaders envied these autonomous institutions: until the mid-nineteenth century, Slovak nationalism found some shelter among the leadership of both the Catholic and the Lutheran churches (to which the vast majority of Slovak speakers belonged), but during the last third of the century, the upper clergy adjusted to the state ideology and the “Slovak cause” found supporters among the lower clergy only. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the expansion of nationalizing measures and renewed struggles in the parliament. In 1892, 237 Romanian politicians submitted a memorandum to Francis Joseph in Vienna in which they demanded the equal rights of Magyars and 83

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Romanians. Alluding to his constitutional position, the monarch immediately forwarded the document to the Hungarian government, which ignored the demands. As the memorandum was printed, its authors were charged with incitement committed through the press and were sentenced to prison. In the following years, several non-Magyar journalists and politicians faced similar charges and were sentenced usually to short imprisonment. In 1896, grandiose festivities celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the so-called Conquest, the entry of the Magyar-speaking tribes to the Hungary-to-be. Non-Magyar political and church leaders protested because they narrated this celebration as the symbolic representation of their second-class status. Social Darwinist reasoning became the fashion of the day and behind the façades of equality of citizens, the government designed plans more and more favoring Magyar speakers and other groups deemed “loyal.” In the early years of the twentieth century, non-Magyar nationalist politicians reentered politics and successfully ran for seats in parliament. Hungary’s limited franchise and the gerrymandering carried out by the bureaucracy, however, kept their number rather low. The zenith of nationalizing policy was marked by a law enacted in 1907 which significantly increased state control over teaching practice in communal and church-run schools. Croatia was the only territory within Hungary that was not under the direct control of the Budapest government; its special status was reaffirmed in 1868. The Croatian provincial government had a relatively wide leverage in domestic, social, cultural, and jurisdiction matters, in short, several necessary tools to promote nationalism; however, its head was appointed by the king on the nomination of the Hungarian prime minister, which gave Budapest a considerable say in Croatian matters. Croatian nationalist politics aimed at establishing a Croatian polity independent from Hungary but still within the Habsburg Monarchy that would have encompassed Croatia, the Austrian crownlands Dalmatia and Istria, and possibly the quasi-colony BosniaHerzegovina. This obviously went against Hungarian interests; the Croatian public thus gradually became anti-Hungarian and perceived any initiative of the Budapest government as an instrument of Magyarization. As in Slovenia, Yugoslavism was on the rise also in Croatia on the eve of the First World War.

Nationalist Agitation and the Masses On the eve of the First World War, nationalism seemed ubiquitous: nationalist rallies were attended by large masses of people and 84

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organizations (for instance, gymnastic associations) claimed extensive networks of chapters with wide memberships. In some Bohemian cities, even the corso was divided into German and Czech sections. However, this is only one side of the coin. Dynastic patriotism remained a powerful pattern of identification, even in Hungary where it coexisted with anti-Austrian sentiments. An important school of dynastic loyalty was service in the imperial army (compulsory for all males aged over twenty-one). The Latin-rite Catholic Church, to which the majority of Habsburg subjects belonged, still operated on a nonnational basis, though its Eastern-rite faction in Galicia and Transylvania became an important supporter of Ukrainian and Romanian nationalism, respectively. Throughout the Habsburg lands, in particular in multilingual, Catholic regions, identification with any nation remained situational. People were gradually confronted with the need to declare their mother tongue or nationality (at census, military draft, in some crownlands at election), but this rarely translated into daily practice: despite all the nationalist agitation, people were reluctant to buy goods from co-nationals based on such considerations and supported their children in developing skills in other languages. In Hungary, despite all the governmental Magyarization measures, the share of people declaring Magyar as their mother tongue (seen by contemporaries as a proxy of national identification) increased from 45 percent (1880) to only 54 percent (1910). This increase was only to a lesser extent the outcome of forceful Magyarization measures and barely influenced rural regions with no or little Magyar-speaking population. Instead, language change occurred most often in cities, industrial plants, and in some rural, bilingual areas as rather a natural process; yet language change did not necessarily mean change or adoption of national identity. This is not to say that there were no groups that consciously changed their language and identified themselves with the idea of a Magyar nation-state. As a general pattern, liberal Jews, many German-speaking town dwellers (except Transylvanian Saxons), and the tiny Ruthenian-speaking elites (in particular, Greek Catholic clergy) connected the notions of modernity, Magyar national identity, and, in the Jewish case, emancipation. Many representatives of these groups Magyarized their names and became ardent supporters of Magyar nationalism. The liberal Jews’ acculturation and support for Magyar nationalism account for the failure of Zionism in Hungary, despite the fact that Herzl was born in Pest. 85

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The Fall of the Habsburgs and the New Central Europe In 1914, Austria-Hungary initiated a war which became the last chapter in the history of the Habsburgs. Had Austria-Hungary been the prison of nations (as its contemporary opponents and especially its successor states claimed), its soldiers would have surrendered to the armies of the belligerent, allegedly kin-states, Serbia, Italy, and Romania, on a mass level. This, nevertheless, rarely happened: the Austro-Hungarian army fought for years stubbornly on all fronts; if soldiers deserted, they did so mostly because of war fatigue and not on national or political grounds. Oddly enough, the home front authorities and the army did not appreciate this, and the army leadership developed a paranoia and accused Ukrainian, Serbian, and Czech soldiers, civilians, and politicians of high treason, alienating many people on ethnic grounds. This may have had the effect of a self-fulfilling paranoia. In any case, as the war became total, and as the political credibility of the state in general steadily eroded, nationalist politicians at home and in exile started to flirt with the idea of replacing the Habsburg state with their own nation-states. Finally, politicians in exile were able to persuade the Entente to dismantle AustriaHungary. In autumn 1918, Austria-Hungary collapsed; Czechoslovak, German-Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian republics were declared, a Yugoslav monarchy was formed, and Romania and Italy claimed the Habsburgs’ eastern and western territories, respectively. With few modifications and the notable exception of Ukraine, the peace treaties sanctioned these countries. They claimed to be nation-states but, in fact, most of them were as multilingual and as multiconfessional as their predecessor, the Habsburg Monarchy, had been. What makes the Habsburg Monarchy particularly intriguing is the plethora of policies within the same polity. While Hungary, especially after 1867, acted as a standard homogenizing state copying French and Prussian-German policies, the experiments of imperial Austria with solving the “nationality question” were remarkably genuine. The idea of an imperial, supranational identity, coined and promoted in the 1850s, may have failed, but the post-1867 era brought about important innovations in techniques of balancing between seemingly antagonistic pressure groups. Arguably the most significant of these innovations was the concept of non-territorial autonomy which promised the renewal of Austrian politics in the immediate prewar years. It is the irony of history that Austrian non-territorial autonomy became a source of inspiration for the Soviet Union and the now sovereign Baltic republics in the

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1920s, while the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy acted as nationalizing mini-empires, relying on the infrastructure and legislative framework they inherited from the House of Habsburg.

Further Reading Judson, P. M., Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Judson, P. M., The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Kamusella, Tomasz, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). King, Jeremy, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848– 1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Maxwell, Alexander, Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language and Accidental Nationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). Reill, D. K., Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). Shanes, Joshua, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Stauter-Halsted, Keely, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Trencsényi, Balázs, Maciej Janowski, Monika Baar, Maria Falina, and Michal Kopecek (eds.), A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vol. 1: Negotiating Modernity in the “Long Nineteenth Century” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Varga, Bálint, The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-deSiècle Hungary (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016). Wingfield, N. M., Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Zayarnyuk, Andriy, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2013).

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The British Empire krishan kumar

Establishing Empire Empire, in the Western tradition, was a unitary and universal thing. There was and could be only one empire at any one time, and it was, in principle at least, a world empire. In this case, all roads led to and from Rome. Herodotus had introduced the idea, if not the term, of translatio imperii, the transfer of empire from one ruler to another. In his account the succession was from the Assyrians to the Medes, to the Persians. Later writers saw the Macedonians, in the person of Alexander the Great, as successor to the Persians, and later still it was relatively easy to see the Romans, with their admiration for Greek culture, as heirs to the Hellenistic empire of Alexander. After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century C E, a Christian interpretation of the translatio imperii was grafted on to the classical account by the Church Fathers, drawing upon Daniel’s interpretation of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old Testament. Daniel (2:31–45) had interpreted the dream as showing a succession of empires – “gold,” “silver,” “bronze,” “iron” – which St. Jerome authoritatively declared to be the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires. The Roman Empire was to be the last empire, at least until the appearance of the “fifth monarchy,” God’s everlasting empire. The concept of translatio imperii received its definitive form in the transfer of the Roman Empire from Byzantium to the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne in 800 C E. From that time on, “empire” in the West meant the Holy Roman Empire, often referred to simply as “the Empire.” There were other claimants to the title. After the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans in 1453, Moscow was hailed as the “Third Rome” by the Russian Orthodox Church; and even the Ottomans – passing themselves off as Trojans – for a while saw themselves as the successors to Rome. But most European states continued to regard the Holy Roman Empire as “the Empire,” their rulers

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content with the title of monarch (even if some, such as Louis XIV, had pretensions to “universal monarchy”). If they applied the term empire to their own rule, they usually did so in the sense of the original Roman meaning of imperium, as expressing absolute authority or sovereignty (as in the famous usage of Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, “this realm of England is an empire . . . governed by one supreme head and king”).1 Henry also did not scruple to use “imperial crown,” as expressive of particular dignity and majesty, and that too was common among the European monarchs. It did not signify rule over an empire, in the sense of a wide realm made up of many lands and peoples. This was a meaning that, with Rome’s expansion under the republic and its consolidation under the empire, had come to be added to the original idea of imperium as absolute authority. The Imperium Romanum was such an empire, of such breadth that its reach was said to be coterminous with the ecumene, the whole known world. Europeans certainly, in the early modern period, constructed large empires in this sense. The Portuguese and the Spanish built worldencircling overseas empires, infinitely larger than Rome’s. But their rulers continued to call themselves kings. Charles V was an emperor as Holy Roman Emperor, but it was as king of Spain that he ruled his vast dominions. That did not, in the eyes of contemporaries, lessen his grandeur. The Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija observed that “though the title of Empire is in Germany, the reality of power is held by the Spanish monarchs.”2 It was not, it seems, until the eighteenth century that European powers other than the Holy Roman Empire came to style their realms “empires.” This reflected two things: the evident decline of the Holy Roman Empire in recent years, and the growing power of certain European states, such as France and Britain. In both respects, one might almost date the turning point very precisely, to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), which has often been declared the “first world war.”3 The all-out war between Britain and France, conducted on three continents, ended with the temporary victory of the British at the Treaty of Paris (1763), and the loss by France to Britain of major 1

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David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35. Quoted in Henri Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 9. By the time of Charles V (r. 1516–1556), the Holy Roman Empire had come to be referred to as the “Holy Roman Empire of the German People.” See Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Vintage, 2000); Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Pimlico, 2005).

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possessions in North America, India, and the Caribbean. But at the same time, in the same year, Austria and Prussia also agreed the less well-known Treaty of Hubertusburg, which concluded the continental aspect of the Seven Years’ War. Austria was forced to concede Silesia to Prussia. This severely weakened the power-base of the Habsburgs, and by extension that of the Holy Roman Empire. Richard Koebner has convincingly shown that it was during these years, at the time of the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, that the term “the British Empire” first established itself firmly and clearly in political and public discourse.4 One might say that there was now a space, an opportunity, for its rise, with the declining power and prestige of the Holy Roman Empire. This was shown by the frequency with which, in the later eighteenth century and beyond, the qualifying adjective “British” was omitted and the British Empire referred to simply as “the Empire,” just as the Holy Roman Empire had been.5 But even more important was the stimulus given by the challenge of the American colonies in the years immediately following the Seven Years’ War and in direct consequence of it. The pamphlet wars provoked by the struggle between the crown and the colonies, the debates in parliament and the colonial assemblies, the widespread use of the press to advance opinions, all served to give the term in its later accepted sense the greatest currency. As Koebner shows, it was the colonists, such as James Otis and Benjamin Franklin, and colonial administrators, such as Governors Thomas Pownall and Francis Bernard of Massachusetts, who gave the fullest accounts of what the “British Empire” was or should be. Up to the 1760s and 1770s, it was common to refer to “the Empire of Great Britain” – Britain itself as an empire – or “the British Empire in Europe” or “the British Empire in America.” There were also such expressions as Britain’s possession of the “empire of the deep,” or of the “empire of the seas,” to reflect the growing prominence of shipping and maritime trade in Britain’s national life and its growing impact on the world.6 What was lacking was the idea of the British Empire tout court, as the aggregate of all of Britain’s possessions, with the United Kingdom of Great Britain at the center of a far-flung series of colonies and dependencies. It was this that was 4

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Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 105–237; see also P. J. Marshall, “Introduction,” in Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. I I: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4–9, 17–18. J. T. Adams, “On the Term ‘British Empire,’” American Historical Review, 27/3 (1922), 489. Armitage, Ideology of the British Empire, 24–60, 100–124.

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first elaborated by the colonists, anxious to show that they were as British as the inhabitants of the mother country, equally part of that “fine and noble Chinese Vase, the British Empire,” as Franklin put it in urging all parties to preserve it. We should not, they argued, speak of “the British Empire in America,” so much as “America in the British Empire,” as an integral part of it. What emerged was the idea of “empire as a whole,” the British Empire as a singular entity whose constituents shared common interests and a common destiny. British commentators at home responded to this usage, adopting and refining it to suit their purpose. Edmund Burke spoke of “empire as the aggregate of many states under one common head,” and of the “imperial character” of Britain’s parliament, “in which, as from the throne of heaven, she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them, without annihilating any.”7 Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was less fulsome and less convinced of the nobility of the British Empire, which he saw as partly responsible for the crippling regime of mercantilism in British colonial policy. But he too accepted its meaning and existence in the full sense elaborated by the colonists, and even sided with them in proposing an imperial parliament, “a States-General of the British Empire,” the center of which, he impishly suggested as had Franklin earlier, might one day shift away from Westminster and the mother country entirely to base itself on the American continent.8 Such ideas were to resurface at the end of the nineteenth century in schemes of “imperial federation,” with the white colonies – now called dominions – once more leading the way. The establishment of a concept of the British Empire, in the sense proposed by the colonists, was important for allowing a whole range of comparisons, contemporary and historical. It signaled a return to the classical conception: empire was both absolute authority and a realm encompassing many lands and peoples. As with other empires, the British Empire could now be viewed and analyzed in terms of “metropole” and “colony,” “center” and “periphery,” without abandoning the sense of a unitary whole, with its guiding principles and practices. It could also seek to position itself within the tradition of empire, the translatio imperii. If Britain now increasingly saw itself in a world role, its commerce and industry, backed by naval supremacy, giving it preponderant power in the world, its empire could and should be compared with the other great world empires of the past. 7 8

Quoted in Koebner, Empire, 223. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. 120–121.

II

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Particularly important to the British, as to all the European empires, was Rome. As the British Empire grew in size and power, comparisons with Rome became natural and inevitable – especially so to an educated class that, right up to the twentieth century, remained steeped in the Greek and Roman classics. Thomas Carlyle might boast that “Romans are dead out, English are come in.”9 But if the English were, as he claimed, the new Romans, and Britain the new Rome, “in the stream of World History,” what was it that Rome had accomplished? How had it seen itself? How had it envisaged its task? If the British Empire were to see itself as Rome’s successor, as the new world empire, it needed a clear sense of what the Roman Empire had been, and what it had been able to carry out in its self-appointed role as the world’s civilizer and educator. A host of commentators in the nineteenth century devoted themselves to comparisons of the British and Roman empires, anxious to show similarities but also differences.10 Britain was not just the new Rome; it was mightier by far, its empire infinitely greater in size and scope, its character much more diverse.11 That presented new complexities. But it also presented the hope that the British Empire might escape Rome’s fate, as classically described by Edward Gibbon. Certainly there were many who echoed the view of the Liberal prime minister, Lord Rosebery, that the British Empire was “the greatest secular agency for good known to mankind.”12 Its preservation, therefore, became an item of faith for most statesmen, of all parties, well into the twentieth century. There was one further consequence of the growing sense of the character and scope of the British Empire in the later eighteenth century. That was the conviction that Britain and its empire were now deeply connected, that the fate and fortune of one were the key to those of the other. What happened in Britain, the metropolis, had direct repercussions in the colonies, and vice versa. The quarrel with the American colonies, and their eventual break with Britain, 9

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Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism,” in Alan Shelston (ed.), Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 202. Krishan Kumar, “Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Role Models,” Journal of British Studies, 51/1 (2012), 76–101. In the comparisons with Rome, a distinction was sometimes made between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, some deploring Rome’s descent into empire, and fearful that something of the same “decadence” and “despotism” would overtake Britain the more imperial it became. This fear was especially strongly expressed by liberal critics of empire, such as J. A. Hobson. See Miles Taylor, “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19/1 (1991), 1–23. Quoted in Richard Faber, The Vision and the Need: Late Victorian Imperialist Aims (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 64.

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had brought that home in the strongest possible way. Previously, the colonies might have been seen as extraneous elements, appendages to the body of Great Britain. That might have been one reason why British statesmen were, as it appeared, so surprised by American reactions to the policies framed by the British parliament in the 1760s and 1770s, so puzzled by the colonists’ outrage. The traditional attitude of what Edmund Burke called “salutary neglect” toward the colonies had its consequences as well as its proclaimed virtues. The loss of the American colonies was a profound shock to the British at home. They became aware that much more attention needed to be paid to the empire if they were not to lose more of it. That was shown immediately, and very close to home, by Irish reactions to the American example, and Irish calls for more autonomy if not independence. Eventually, and for the time being, that question was resolved by the union with Ireland of 1801. But the whole experience brought the empire to British attention as never before, and with that a concern and anxiety about its future. The change, writes Richard Koebner, was “expressive of a consciousness to which the existence of Britain and the existence of a British Empire beyond the seas were inseparable notions.”13 That inseparability might now also apply to identities: to what extent might Englishness or Britishness be linked to empire, so that national identity was an aspect of imperial identity? To what extent might there develop an “imperial nationalism,” different from ethnic nationalism but perhaps performing the same functions of collective solidarity and a sense of a common endeavor? That question became more relevant, and more complex, as the empire developed and grew in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For while the American colonies had been the most important element of the “first British Empire,” India and Asia generally were by the early nineteenth century clearly going to be the central elements of the “second British Empire.”14 How did they fit into the overall picture of empire? How did they relate to the “white” colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa? If Englishness and Britishness were increasingly tied to empire, how were they affected by the presence of millions of non-Europeans in the empire, culturally very different from the British back home? Was there an overarching English or British identity that could encompass the empire’s manifold character? Could there be “unity in diversity”? 13 14

Koebner, Empire, 240. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750– 1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989).

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Empire and Identities The fact that “the British Empire” was conceptualized – at least in the first instance – from the peripheries, from the colonies, rather than from the metropolis, was of enormous significance. It showed that questions of identity remained salient for the colonies in a way that was not true of the metropolis. Metropolitans, secure at the center of power and national life, could more or less take their identities for granted. They were, unreflectingly, English, or British, or perhaps Welsh, Scottish, or – more problematically – Irish. The English, in particular, had a long history of ignoring their national identity.15 Other, less secure, nations might need to define themselves. That might even apply to England’s “near neighbors,” the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, as subordinate members of the United Kingdom. Not so the self-confident English, makers and masters of the “Empire of Great Britain,” or the “British Empire in Europe.” With the addition of Ireland, formally incorporated in 1801, the English could even be seen to have extended that early empire, the “Empire of Great Britain,” turning it now into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Nationalism was invented in the nineteenth century mostly by small nations, or nations fighting for recognition and political expression. While the French, in the course of the French Revolution, may have theorized the nation, as the form of popular sovereignty, it was the Serbians and the Greeks in the early nineteenth century, in their struggles with the Ottoman Empire, who first gave practical expression and manifesto-like clarity to the nationalist creed.16 Later the Italians, the Germans, the Poles, the Czechs, and a host of other Central European nations elaborated the nationalist doctrine, as they sought national unity or as they fought for equality in multinational empires, such as those of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs.17 Imperial peoples do not have such a need for reassurance. Rulers of the roost, they do not have to assert their separate nationality, their particular differences. They get their sense of themselves from their rule of far-flung, diverse, multinational empires. Nationalism is for empires and imperial 15

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See Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Benedict Anderson’s well-known claim, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006), that it was the “Creole pioneers” of South America who invented nationalism has been largely discounted by scholars of the region. See, e.g., Jonathan Eastwood, The Rise of Nationalism in Venezuela (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 6–12. Krishan Kumar, “Varieties of Nationalism,” in M. Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London: Routledge, 2012), 160–174.

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peoples a threat, the assertion of a different principle from that of empire.18 Not only is the nationalism of subject peoples a danger; even more subversive is the nationalism of the ruling peoples themselves. To assert one’s own nationality, especially if it is couched in terms of superiority, is to inflame even more the sense of difference and subordination on the part of subject nations. When Germans in the Habsburg Empire, or Turks in the Ottoman Empire, or Russians in the Romanov Empire began to claim and assert their own nationality, that was the prelude to the extinction of their dynastic empires.19 If there is a nationalism of ruling peoples, it might perhaps be called an “imperial nationalism,” the pride that ruling people take in the creation and caretaking of large multinational and multicultural enterprises. The English, in particular, had every reason to pride themselves on their imperial accomplishments. They had constructed not just one but two and even perhaps three empires. The first was what we might call the “internal empire” of Great Britain and Ireland.20 This was a largely medieval affair, with English conquests of Wales and Ireland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the near conquest of Scotland in the thirteenth – an ambition finally realized with the enforced union with Scotland in 1707. This “first English Empire” was the springboard for the more familiar “outer” or overseas empire, commenced under the Elizabethans and gathering pace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By that time England had become Britain or the United Kingdom, and the empire “the British Empire.” There is no doubting the enormously important role played by Scots, Irish, and Welsh in the settlement and administration of the overseas empire.21 But the English, both in their own eyes and in those of most foreigners, were clearly the dominant people in the empire. Their language, laws, institutions, and culture were widely diffused throughout the empire, just as they had been in the earlier English Empire, the United Kingdom. The casual confusion and conflation of “English” and “British,” by both English and foreigners alike, might offend Scottish, Welsh, and Irish sensibilities. But it was a testimony to the reality of English dominance both at home, in the United Kingdom, and abroad, in the British Empire. 18

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Krishan Kumar, “Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice?,” Theory and Society, 39/2 (2010), 119–143. See Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994).

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With the loss of the American colonies, and even before that loss, in the course of the Seven Years’ War, the English were well on the way to constructing the “second British Empire,” taking in larger and larger portions of the non-Western world, culminating in their taking the lion’s share of Africa in the late nineteenth century. Even that was not enough. After the First World War the British acquired, as League of Nations “mandates,” the Middle Eastern territories of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine. At its height, in around 1920, the British Empire occupied a quarter of the world’s landmass and incorporated a quarter of the world’s population: the largest empire the world had ever seen. Truly was Sir George Macartney right in hailing, as early as 1773, “this vast empire on which the sun never sets and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained.”22 English national identity, such as it was, was an imperial identity, tied to the rule and management of empire.23 A consequence of this was a downplaying of “mere” national identity, mere national assertion, as something that was suited to less fortunate nations. David Hume got it right when he said that “the English, of any people in the universe, have the least of a national character, unless this very singularity may pass for such.”24 Hume, as a Scotsman, also knew that a further corollary of England’s dominance, in both the United Kingdom and the overseas empire, was that the other nations that made up the United Kingdom were forced, almost as a matter of self-protection and self-preservation, to play up their own nationalism.25 By the end of the nineteenth century, as the British Empire reached its zenith, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationalisms were at full throttle. Responding to this, schemes of “federal Britain,” to match and perhaps merge with those of “imperial federation,” were widely canvassed.26 In this as in many other ways, the United Kingdom – “the British Empire in Europe” – was a microcosm of the greater transoceanic British Empire. What the Welsh, Scots, and Irish faced within the United Kingdom – Who are we? What is our place in the kingdom? What is our relation to the English? – was faced by all the other peoples who became subjects of the British Empire. For 22 23

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Quoted in Marshall, “Introduction,” 8. Krishan Kumar, “Empire and English Nationalism,” in Kumar, The Idea of Englishness: English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought (London: Routledge, 2016), 31–45. See also Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137–205. David Hume, “Of National Character,” in Eugene F. Miller (ed.), Essays, Moral Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 207. J. M. MacKenzie, “Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 8 (1998), 215–231. John Kendle, Federal Britain: A History (London: Routledge, 1997), 37–78.

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those of British origin or descent, the answer was similar to that given by the non-English, “Celtic,” inhabitants of the United Kingdom. While insisting on their own national identities, Scots, Welsh, and Irish accepted and indeed embraced a capacious Britishness that, though heavily inflected with English culture, allowed for the development of local identities. One could be Scottish and British, Welsh and British, Irish and British. Sometimes this was expressed as saying that British was a political or civic identity, Scottish (or Welsh or Irish) a cultural or ethnic one. This distinction, though hallowed in the literature on nationalism, is increasingly recognized as a false one.27 There is as much “culture” in Britishness as in Scottishness, as strong attachment to the British crown, or the British army, or the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) makes it plain to see. But, nevertheless, Britishness sufficiently allowed one to assert an identity different from that of the dominant English, and to remain an active and committed member of the United Kingdom. For these groups, the British Empire gave an additional extension to the sphere of Britishness, one in which they thrived. The Scots, all agree, played a part in the rule of empire out of all proportion to their numbers at home, including posts at the highest level, as in Indian viceroys or Canadian governor-generals. But the Irish and Welsh were also heavily represented, especially in the army. So long as the British Empire existed, the non-English British were among the most committed supporters of empire. Only the Irish Catholics came to feel excluded, indeed to consider themselves colonial subjects rather than joint rulers. The departure of Ireland from the British Empire in 1922 was a serious loss, but it did not herald the breakup of the United Kingdom or the British Empire. Only with the rapid decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s did the non-English peoples of the United Kingdom begin to feel that perhaps their future lay outside Britain. Americans before the break with Britain had also regarded themselves as Britons, and claimed the rights of “free-born Englishmen” or, increasingly after 1707, “free-born Britons,” as the basis of their rebellion.28 Some 75,000 of them – the “loyalists” – carried this identity with them as they sought refuge in the British Empire after the defeat of the British in 1783.29 Indeed, even after the separation from Britain many Americans continued to regard themselves as essentially 27

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See Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). J. P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in Marshall (ed.), The Eighteenth Century, 212, 222–223, 227–229. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Vintage, 2012).

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British. In 1820 Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, bitterly described the United States as “independent colonies of England,” politically free but still heavily dependent on British trade, British manufactures, and British culture.30 Later still, Sir John Seeley, expanding on the idea of “Greater Britain,” wrote, without seemingly intending it as an insult, that “the United States are to us almost as good as a colony; our people can emigrate thither without sacrificing their language or chief institutions or habits.”31 The arc of the British Empire was of course wider still, taking in other areas of British settlement in addition to the North Atlantic. James Belich has argued that we need to think of a vast “Anglo-world” of trade, communications, people, and culture that spanned the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was a world bookended by an “American West,” with its headquarters in New York and extending all the way to California, and a “British West,” with its headquarters in London and extending to the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. America might be an independent country, but “Greater America” and “Greater Britain” formed parts of a civilizational whole, the Anglo-world, that dominated the world for nearly 200 years.32 “Greater Britain” itself has long been seen as a powerful and comprehensive idea for understanding identities in the British Empire.33 It was given especial force and currency in Sir John Seeley’s highly influential work The Expansion of England (1883). For Seeley, the British Empire was not something separate from England or Britain, as the distant colonies of a mother country, but an organic whole, an extension of England itself. He compared it to the new entity of the United States. “When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole Empire together and call it England, we shall see that here too is a United States. Here too is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.”34 Seeley’s concept of “Greater Britain” – more “Greater England” – evidently has something rather exclusive about it. It is a white man’s 30 31

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Marshall, “Introduction,” 23. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1883]), 50. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Kumar, Visions of Empire, 329–340. Seeley, Expansion of England, 126.

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club.35 It includes all those of British stock scattered across the world, whether in Britain, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or South Africa. It promotes what is indeed the highly persuasive idea of a “British world” that came into being with the formation of the white dominions, one in which most inhabitants were content to think of themselves as English or British for a long time, whatever their additional local identities.36 But then where did India, after all “the jewel in the crown,” fit in? What of the other parts of the British Empire, in the Caribbean, in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, made up predominantly of non-white, non-European peoples? How were they seen and how did they see themselves? Were they also part of “Greater Britain”? Seeley himself was firmly of the opinion that they were not, and in particular that the “Indian Empire,” unlike the white “Colonial Empire,” could not be part of the Greater Britain of the future. Indians were “of alien race and religion”; the best the British could do – and it was a noble task – was to prepare them for independence.37 But his friend Sir Charles Dilke, from whom he took the concept of “Greater Britain,” was equally persuaded that Greater Britain included India as well as the United States. Like Macaulay, he believed that the future of India lay in “Englishing” the Indians, and in making them “our fellow men,” and so an integral part of Greater Britain. “However extraordinary may be the progress, however marvellous the future, either of Australasia or of Canada, India ought always to be first in our minds when we are thinking of Greater Britain.”38 One reason why Dilke, along with the historian Edward Freeman and Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, thought that India could and should be included in any concept of Greater Britain or an inclusive British Empire was that they had in their minds the example of Rome. Rome had been a cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and multicultural empire. It had followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, whose great Eurasian empire deliberately embraced a global, cosmopolitan vision (“as in a festival goblet, mixing lives, manners, customs, wedlock, all together,” as Plutarch put it in his life of 35

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See further on this, Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, vol. I: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds.), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Robert Bicker (ed.), Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Seeley, Expansion of England, 14, 143–156. C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867 (London: Macmillan and Co, 1869), 560; C. W. Dilke, The British Empire (London: Chatto and Windus, 1899), 17.

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Alexander39). The British Empire was heir to both. While some thinkers and statesmen in Britain – such as William Gladstone – adhered to a “Greek” model of colonization, in which colonies were set up in order to free themselves from the mother country, increasingly in the late nineteenth century it was the Roman model of the centralized empire – as embraced by Gladstone’s rival, Benjamin Disraeli – that seemed best to fit the British case, and to suggest its future. A host of classically minded administrators and scholarly commentators – prominent among them the earl of Cromer, Sir Charles Lucas, and James Bryce – reflected on the British and Roman empires, seeking parallels, differences, lessons.40 As with Seeley, the main problem as they saw it was that the British Empire, unlike the Roman, was really, as Lucas put it, “two Empires,” one made up of the white dominions, the other centered on India. Or in the words of Lord Cromer: “The great Imperial problem of the future is to what extent some 350 millions of the British subjects, who are alien to us in race, religion, manners and customs, are to govern themselves, or are to be governed by us.”41 But, unlike Seeley, both he and Lucas, together with Bryce, were convinced that the British Empire had to be considered a single entity, whatever the differences and divisions within it. They agreed with Lord Curzon that India was integral to the empire, and that without it, as the linchpin of British power in the east, the British Empire would unravel. Once again Rome provided the inspiration, if not in this case the actual model. Like the Romans, said Lucas, “the English have shown in a marked degree constructive genius.”42 The Romans had adapted from being a city-state to being the creators of one of the greatest empires in the world. Under the emperor Caracalla they had granted citizenship to the millions of far-flung and diverse subjects who lived under their rule. Such a prospect should also be held out to the more than 400 million subjects – European and non-European – who lived under the British Empire. In the end, the British, in the British Nationality Act of 1948, delivered on this promise. By then, of course, it was too late to save the empire, battered by the Second World War and under strong pressure from the Americans for 39 40

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Quoted in Kumar, Visions of Empire, 46. Kumar, “Greece and Rome in the British Empire”; see also Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 18. C. P. Lucas, Greater Rome and Greater Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 170.

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it to be wound up. At the same time, the empire had schooled a whole generation of native nationalists in the culture of Western liberalism, ensuring that they would demand equal rights to the inhabitants of the metropolis. But right up to the Second World War this did not entail the quest for outright independence (only in Ireland, always a special case, did this come about). Nationalist elites strove for something like dominion status, of the kind that was granted to the white colonies in the Statute of Westminster of 1931. With few exceptions, most saw great advantages in remaining part of the British Empire, so long as they were given an equal share in the governing of their part. Even Gandhi, the most severe critic of Western civilization, accepted this position until the Second World War. In 1927 the classicist and statesman Sir Alfred Zimmern stated the principles of what he called the “third British Empire.”43 This was essentially the dominion model extended to the whole empire, India included. This promised, in the new climate created by the League of Nations and the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, to give the British Empire a new lease of life, to evolve into the “British Commonwealth of Nations,” as it was already being called. The India Act of 1935, even though it did not grant India full dominion status, seemed to show that this was not just an empty gesture; dominion status was held out for the future. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s, the empire had acquired greater prominence and popularity in the culture and consciousness of the metropolis than ever before. Its economic importance to Britain, in trade and investment, had markedly increased, compared with the nineteenth century. Its continuance and security had come to appear to British statesmen, in the increasingly unsettled international situation of the 1930s, a matter of central importance to Britain’s future.44 All this suggests that, contrary to the pronouncements of doomsters at the time and since, the British Empire was not in a state of terminal decline in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was restructuring, not preparing itself for its coming demise. Its rapid dissolution after 1945 was the result largely of the crippling economic burdens and enormous stresses, political and psychological, of the Second World War, a war between empires, the greatest and most 43

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Alfred Zimmern, The Third British Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). See also John Darwin, “A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics,” in J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. I V: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 64–87. See, on these aspects, John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Kumar, Visions of Empire, 347–365.

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destructive that has ever been fought. It was not just the British Empire that was the casualty of that war; other overseas European empires, French, Dutch, Belgian, fell under its blows – as did the Japanese Empire. (The main exception was the Portuguese Empire, perhaps because Portugal remained neutral in the war.)

The Rule of Empire Of late, it has become common to see the British Empire not as a unified entity, a system of empire, but as ramshackle and disordered, the ad hoc product of unplanned and often unwanted growth. Many territories, it is argued, were acquired in response to specific crises in the borderlands of empire, or as a seeming necessity for securing the empire against threats from its rivals. There was never any systematic plan for empire, not even a welldeveloped philosophy of empire. Highly influential in this view is the work by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher on British expansion in Africa in the late nineteenth century, seen as a reluctant venture brought about largely by the need to safeguard the Suez Canal and the Cape route to India.45 A commanding synoptic account of the whole empire in these terms was given by John Darwin in his The Empire Project, inspired by Adam Smith’s observation in The Wealth of Nations that the British Empire “has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire.”46 There is an echo in this view of Seeley’s well-known remark, that “we seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”47 But it was Seeley’s purpose precisely to remedy this indifference and absent-mindedness, to establish the British Empire, as he understood it, on firm theoretical foundations. Contemporary students of the British Empire have no such aim. They rather wish to show that the British Empire throughout its history lacked principle, that most ordinary British people were unaware and largely unaffected by it, that it staggered from crisis to crisis as it weathered the storms blown up by challenges from powerful European rivals and resentful and rebellious subjects.48 A corollary of this 45

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Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1981). John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. I I, 430. Seeley, Expansion of England, 12. See, e.g., Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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view is that the British Empire was always weaker, always more vulnerable, than it seemed to most observers. The Pax Britannica might seem imposing to foreigners, but those watching over it were always acutely aware of the “cracks and insecurities,” “the fundamental vulnerabilities and contradictions embedded in British imperial rule.”49 Much of this can be admitted. But, at the same time, it should also be recognized that this condition was not peculiar to the British Empire. It can in fact be said to be true of all empires, judging by the literature produced by both those living within them and outside commentators. Crisis and desperate attempts at renewal, decline and fall, a sense of melancholy – beginning perhaps with the writers of the Roman Empire – seem written into the very script of empire. Empires, says Charles Maier, are “epics of entropy.”50 If the British Empire seemed to many disorganized and deeply vulnerable, its administration incoherent and irrational, those complaints and charges can readily be found in the literature of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires for much of their history. None of these supposed problems prevented them, as with the British Empire, from surviving for hundreds of years. It is not so difficult in fact to find numerous statements of what were or should be the principles and philosophy guiding the British Empire.51 In 1805, seconding a motion in the House of Commons for Catholic Emancipation, the veteran Irish statesman Henry Grattan pointed to the need for such an overall statement. “In order to ascertain the principles of your Empire, survey its comprehension. Computing your Indies and your Eastern dominions England [sic] has now, with all the deference of moderation, a very great proportion of the globe. On what principles will she govern that portion?” Appealing to “the principles on which Providence governs the remainder,” Grattan argued passionately for the principle of inclusivity: “As there is no such thing as an exclusive Providence so neither, considering the extent of your Empire, should there be such a thing as an exclusive Empire.”52 The motion for Catholic Emancipation was defeated on that occasion. When it finally arrived, after a bitter struggle, in 1829, Grattan was dead. But he had sounded the note that was to be heard repeatedly in the nineteenth century, as the British Empire grew and spread over 49

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Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), 8, 11; see also Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor, 2004). Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 76. See, for a representative sample for the Victorian period, Faber, The Vision and the Need. Quoted in Koebner, Empire, 273.

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even greater portions of the earth. England and the “Empire of England” were one, he insisted, their health and strength conjoined. To deprive the Catholics, or any other group, of equal rights and opportunities was to “pronounce the doom” of both Great Britain and its empire. At different times, different principles were seen to be appropriate to the rule of empire. Some have seen a sharpening sense of racial difference in the later nineteenth century, starting with the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In Seeley and others, we have seen the view that perhaps the futures of the white and the non-white sections of the empire would necessarily be different. In the period after the First World War, this gave way to a concern with equalizing the parts of empire, so that all would share in a new “Commonwealth of Nations” in which Africans and Asians would ultimately have full membership, similar to that of the white dominions. But for much of the time what one might call a liberal vision of empire generally prevailed. It can be found even in those, such as Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham, who were profoundly critical of the empire, at least as it was being administered by those in charge. None of these demanded the end of empire; what they wanted was its reform, according to better principles.53 This was even more true of later thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, who was convinced that the empire could serve the highest principles provided that it was conceived in the right way, which meant that it should serve the interests of all its members, of whatever race or creed, and at whatever stage of development. In the bitter controversy occasioned by the brutal actions of Governor Eyre in response to the Morant Bay rising in Jamaica in 1865, Mill insisted that the black Jamaicans should be accorded all the rights at law given to the empire’s subjects at home. Like Grattan, he saw the fates and fortunes of Britain and its empire as being inseparably linked. As he put it in his Autobiography, “the question was, whether the British dependencies, and eventually, perhaps, Great Britain itself, were to be under the government of law, or of military licence.”54 The black Jamaicans were as much British subjects as the white subjects of Jamaica, or of Britain, and were entitled to the same treatment, not to be judged by different principles because of their race. 53

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See U. S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). J. S. Mill, “Autobiography,” in Max Lerner (ed.), Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (New York: Bantam, 1961), 172.

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Dane Kennedy has given a fair and comprehensive statement of the British Empire as viewed by liberals. “They saw their empire as a cosmopolitan force that promoted free trade and free labour, safeguarded security and legal rights of persons and property, and served the broader purposes of prosperity, progress, and civilization.”55 To which one can add that, whatever their criticisms and occasional acts of resistance and rebellion, it was a view shared by a remarkably large range of the empire’s subjects for most of its history. Only in the later stages, in the 1940s and 1950s, does one get a growing call for independence, and that mostly from Western-educated native elites who see a better future for themselves in their own states. Whether the people as a whole have fared better under native rule than under the rule of the British remains an open and perhaps undecidable question. For the British themselves, and especially the English, the end of empire has brought a host of questions and perplexities. For more than two centuries, in the very period in which modern British society was itself forged, the empire provided a framework for their understanding of themselves and their place in the world. It also provided a structure within which the various parts of the United Kingdom could find their niches, thus to some extent stilling potential conflicts. For much of the time, even nationalist movements within the United Kingdom could still see a place for themselves in the empire. “Scotland within the Empire” was the slogan of the Scottish National Party, formed in 1934.56 With the empire gone, Scots and others have seen less reason to remain in the United Kingdom if conditions do not suit them. The European Union beckons as an alternative arena for their aspirations and activities. Could “Scotland in Europe” substitute for “Scotland within the Empire,” wonders the historian John MacKenzie?57 With Britain’s decision, in 2016, to secede from the European Union (“Brexit”), the calls from Europe become more siren-like still, the more so as several multinational companies contemplate shifting their operations from Britain to the countries of the European Union. Somewhat bizarrely, some have seen Britain’s withdrawal from Europe as an opportunity to revive old imperial or Commonwealth ties, especially with the old white dominions. Rebuffed at the time of Britain’s entry to the 55 56

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Dane Kennedy, “The Great Arch of Empire,” in Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World, 57. Quoted in Krishan Kumar, “Empire, Nation, and National Identities,” in Andrew Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 305. J. M. Mackenzie, “On Scotland and Empire,” International History Review, 15/4 (1993), 739.

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European Community in 1974, the old dominions have shown little interest in such ideas. They have long ago made other arrangements in their own regions. Instead, England is likely to find itself lonelier even than when, in the 1950s and 1960s, it divested itself of most of the empire. If the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom decide to go their own way, the English will be thrown back even more on their own devices. For the English, it is more than just finding a new niche, as it might be for the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish (for these last, a union with their southern brethren, long mooted, might finally seem the logical solution to their post-EU problems). For the English it is a question of fundamental identity. The Scots, Welsh, and Irish seem to know who they are, mainly by declaring that they are not English. The English, virtually since the Middle Ages, have defined themselves as an imperial people, which among other things has meant denying themselves an identity as a nation. Empire has substituted itself for nationhood. Without empire, there seems to be some need for defining a national identity, for answering the question, who are we? “The English Question,” as many have noted, has been urgently raised in recent years.58 But the resources for answering that question are thin, in proportion as England’s imperial history has been so rich. Empire here shows its long arm. Even after it has gone, its ghost continues to haunt its creator.

Further Reading Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994). Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2004). Jasanoff, Maya, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 2005). Kumar, Krishan, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Louis, W. R. (general editor), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–1999). MacKenzie, J. M., Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880– 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 58

See Michael Kenny, The Politics of English Nationhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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The British Empire Thompson, Andrew (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ward, Stuart (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Wilson, Kathleen, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, Routledge, 2003).

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Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank remind us that empires constitute a far older form of rule than the nation-state. As they note, the historical “endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary and inevitable.” In settings including the French Caribbean, Spanish South America, and British North America, they stress that the fight for rights began as struggles for reform within an imperial framework, before they reached a revolutionary tipping point.1 This complicates standard ways of thinking in which nations, born of the eighteenth century, simply replaced empires. This chapter examines the entangled relationship between different kinds of nationalism, on the one hand, and a nebulous and multitiered French Empire, on the other hand. It suggests both the endurance and unexpected influences of imperial structures and ideas, as well as the significance of paths not taken, such as federalist alternatives to nationalist frameworks. The French colonial empire underwent massive transformations between the ancien régime and the modern era. By 1815, France had lost all but a few pieces of its once massive American empire, retaining only the isles of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and the more sizeable colony of French Guyana. Of course, given how scarce the French colonial settler presence had been on the ground in New France, and how deeply it had relied on alliances with indigenous peoples in what would become Canada and the United States, one can question the very notion of an imperial presence there.2 Be this as it may, after 1830, the French imperial thrust shifted to Africa and Asia. By the 1870s, the French Empire had emerged as the world’s second largest, encompassing vast swaths of territory in Africa 1

2

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3, 7, quote at 3. Catherine Desbarats, paper on indigeneity delivered at the University of Toronto, January 2019.

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and Southeast Asia, islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as the remnants of France’s empire in the Americas. Structurally, the legacy of France’s “first empire” proved complex. The colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, and Réunion, as well as the small French outposts in India and sections of Senegal, became constitutionally part of France, as did Algeria. As a result, the inhabitants of most of these regions – with the major exception of Algeria – were considered full French citizens by 1848. Algeria, France’s sole large settlement colony, featured convoluted statuses, with Europeans and later North African Jews enjoying full citizenship, but not Algerian Muslims.

The Haitian Revolution Long before the actions of Simón Bolivar, anticolonial nationalism arose in an Atlantic context in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, on the island of Hispaniola. The Haitian Revolution, which began as the world’s first successful large-scale slave insurrection, ultimately resulted in the birth of a new nation, bearing an indigenous name. Initially, however, it had involved internal repositioning and an initial revolt led within a French Atlantic framework. Like the American Revolution, the Haitian one resulted from many factors, including a complex international, local, and imperial conflict in which leading revolutionary Toussaint Louverture played a key role, navigating between French, British, and Spanish interests. By 1797, Louverture had emerged as the person in control in Saint-Domingue, having outmaneuvered several of the French republic’s representatives. He long rebuffed Paris’s attempts to reconquer the island in the name of settler interests: the island’s enslaved persons having been freed in 1793–1794 (some locally in 1793, then all by decree from Paris the year following), the planters were advocating invasion and repossession. The colony’s situation was complex. It counted some 500,000 former enslaved persons, as well as many black people who had been free long before 1793–1794 when slavery was abolished: the free people of color. Toussaint Louverture was one such individual, having obtained his freedom around 1779. Commensurately with the waning of the French Revolution and with Napoleon’s rise to prominence, Louverture bolstered his own authority. First, he negotiated the British withdrawal from parts of the island, usurping Paris’s authority to undertake such talks. He then sought British aid to rebuild the island’s infrastructure, which had been devastated by the insurrections. Second, in 1800 he conquered the vast Spanish part of Hispaniola. Then, in 1801 Louverture boldly drafted a constitution for Saint-Domingue. Although it 109

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fell short of declaring independence (the island remained “part of the French Empire” but was “governed by peculiar laws”), it did make Louverture governor for life. As of 1800, Louverture also began to “militarize plantation labor,” issuing harsh punishments to those who left their fields fallow. To many, he seemed to be turning on former enslaved persons. In the end, Louverture was deposed and imprisoned by Napoleon’s forces, which landed in Saint-Domingue in February 1802 in a bid to overthrow Louverture and to reestablish slavery. Long before 1802, Louverture strayed considerably from Paris’s line, and challenged Napoleon; he took up arms against the republic on several occasions, while fighting on its behalf on others. Yet he never crossed the nationalist Rubicon. That step was taken by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of Louverture’s former lieutenants. Whereas Louverture had fought under the banner of the French tricolor flag, in March 1803 Dessalines, leading the rebels fighting Napoleon’s forces, resolved to break with France altogether. He and his leading officers ripped the white out of the blue, white, and red flag, and stitched the red and blue back together, giving birth to a new national flag. Whether the goal was to remove the white planters from the equation, or to take aim at the royalist element of France’s compromise flag,3 the net result was the birth of a new nation. On 1 January 1804, after two years of bloody struggle, Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence, claiming to have “avenged America.” His troops, composed of veterans from Louverture’s ranks and plantation laborers, men and women alike, had at times termed themselves an “indigenous army,” at others the “army of the Incas.” Claiming inspiration from Thomas Jefferson, and wishing to rid the island of its French name, Dessalines offered a fresh start, accompanied by a nod to the precolonial past. Yet these gestures to indigeneity constituted fanciful inventions of their own. As Laurent Dubois notes: “the former slaves who made up the army, and most of the population of the new nation, were of course no more native to the island than were the French colonizers.” Nevertheless, through this symbolic charge, Haiti emerged as “the negation not only of French colonialism, but of the whole history of European empire in the Americas.”4 Thus, the Haitian Revolution looked forward, while also trying to turn back the clock. Its leaders invented a new flag out of elements of the former

3

4

The French tricolor flag involved the fusion of the Bourbon royal white with the red and blue of the city of Paris. Laurent Dubois, Avengers in the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 239–243, quotes at 298, 293, 299, 301.

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colonizer’s. Mostly, however, the events just summarized are intended to make clear that independence was not the foreordained outcome of what had begun as a struggle for abolition and reform. Louverture and Dessalines differed in this regard, and indeed Louverture’s own trajectory presented multiple about-faces. Moreover, Napoleon’s approach to Louverture shifted over time, changes inflected at least partly by transformations in European racism.

The Plurality of Anticolonial Nationalisms On the face of it, resistance to empire can appear as a continuum encompassing everything from the last-ditch battles waged by indigenous peoples against first conquest, through the Haitian Revolution, to modern, anticolonial guerrilla organizations. However, historians are careful to distinguish among types of resistance, and among the national formations they advocated. Thus, beyond the act of struggling itself, there is little in common between the earliest movements to return the monarchy to its full strength in Vietnam and modern revolutionaries such as Ho Chi Minh. I will now turn to several shifts in anticolonial currents in the modern and contemporary era, with a special focus on Algeria, Vietnam, and Madagascar. Emir Abd el Kadr was without a doubt the most significant figure of the early Algerian resistance. He managed to unite various factions in the region around Oran in the decade that followed the French invasion of 1830. He certainly did not seek to turn the clock back to Ottoman times, which he perceived as an era of occupation, and articulated a clear vision of a multiethnic Algerian space. His mysticism, ecumenism, and religious openness made him a singular, unifying character. Militarily, his guerrilla tactics led to several victories in skirmishes against the French army between 1839 and 1842. And yet, for all his notoriety and despite his ideologically malleable legacies and representations, few consider Abd el Kadr to have been a modern nationalist; most locate that turn several generations later. In Algeria, the genesis of modern nationalism can be situated between the two world wars. It was shaped by several influences, including socialism, and a reading of Islam that stressed colonialism’s oppression of the poor. Messali Hadj emerged as one of its key champions. In 1930, he became director of the tellingly titled newspaper El Ouma, or “The Nation.” Messali Hadj broke ties with the French Communist Party, one of the few mainland French political movements that had championed independence for overseas colonies. His North African Star movement envisioned a closely connected Maghreb, but 111

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not a federal model per se. In 1937, when questioned about his goals, Messali Hadj famously declared, “I am not anti-French, I am anti-imperialist. I am for the total emancipation of Algeria.” Nevertheless, he remained a gradualist and a constitutionalist, rather than a firebrand revolutionary. Indeed, he firmly believed in the need for the creation of an Algerian parliament prior to independence. After the Second World War, he was outflanked by more radical nationalists who pilloried him for allegedly fostering a cult of personality and for sectarianism, even for allegedly retaining sympathy for the colonizers. Ultimately, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), with which Messali Hadj had clashed, emerged as the main instrument of decolonization in Algeria.5 Much the same distinctions can be identified in the parts of Indochina that would later become Vietnam (French Indochina was divided into several constituent parts, including Cambodia and Laos). The Can Vuong movement (1885–1897) may well have been a “national insurrection”; it nevertheless bore few of the markers of modern nationalism. Interestingly, territorial considerations were part of the insurgents’ rallying cry – they opposed the carving up of Tonkin and Annam – along with a restoration of monarchical power. Still, the movement was deeply fractured, unfocused (some exercised reprisals on Vietnamese Catholics), and was essentially limited to rural settings. It also lacked a social agenda or a modernizing impulse.6 In Indochina, as in Madagascar and Algeria, the genesis of modern nationalism occurred in the twentieth century. Between the two world wars, the prolific Vietnamese writer Phan Boi Chau articulated the notion that Vietnamese people were “citizens of a lost country.” Phan Boi Chau represented an important turning point. He supported the Dong Du or “Going East” movement that looked to Japan for a non-Western path to national modernity. Indeed, Phan Boi Chau merged Japanese conceptions and terms with Atlantic revolutionary ideologies to create a modern nationalist blueprint. Also significant in the Vietnamese context were Bui Quang Chieu and the constitutionalists. This group of educated middle-class people used French republican rhetoric and egalitarianism not only to establish ties with backers in France, but also to promote their ideals of imperial reform, 5

6

Benjamin Stora, Les sources du nationalisme algérien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 42; Benjamin Stora, Messali Hadj: Pionnier du nationalisme algérien (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 165 (quote), 260. Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 51–59, quote at 51.

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ultimately in vain. The French unwillingness to partner with the constitutionalists on a path of reform paved the ground for more radical solutions.7 Ho Chi Minh has variously been depicted as a nationalist or communist first and foremost. Parsing the two categories may not prove that useful an exercise. Yet, it is interesting to note, first, that Ho Chi Minh’s nationalism made him stand out from party ranks in the 1930s. Second, the times and manners in which Ho Chi Minh tapped into nationalist registers seem equally revealing. For instance, in May 1941, at the eighth plenum of the Indochinese Communist Party, convened secretly near his hideout at the cave of Pac Bo, Ho Chi Minh advocated for the creation of a Vietminh front. This alliance would encompass non-communist elements. The context called for this. The Vietminh would go on to fight two battles at once, confronting both Vichy’s colonial regime and the Japanese occupying forces. The coalition’s binding agent was nationalism. Months before Joseph Stalin turned to the same nationalist elixir, Ho Chi Minh marshaled distant historical references and recent patriots alike. After Pac Bo, he renamed his command post Lam Son, after a base founded by Le Loi, a fifteenth-century Vietnamese resistor against the Chinese. The “sacred duty of liberating the fatherland” became one of his leitmotifs.8 A French colonial report from the time noted the significance of the discursive shift, which it saw as a ploy. It reads: “A decision was taken at the plenum, to camouflage communist propaganda into a national liberation movement for the eyes of the Vietnamese masses.”9 French colonial Madagascar constitutes another interesting case study. As a monolingual island-state that had been conquered and unified by upland (Merina) monarchs prior to the French invasion of 1895, there was a recent national, unitary, and independent past to which many Malagasy sought to return. Solofo Randrianja has charted the endurance of the idea of reestablishing some version of the precolonial kingdom of Madagascar among Malagasy nationalists of many stripes. He focuses on two nationalist flashpoints. One was known as the rural Menalamba revolt. This insurrection, which swept the high plateaus in the five years that followed the French conquest, used the captive queen Ranavalona III as a rallying cry. Yet, as Randrianja notes, the rebels who orchestrated the revolt did not seek to 7

8

9

Truong Bun Lam (ed.), Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 80; Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 101, 123–130. William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 217–218, 252, 261, quote at 260. ANOM (French colonial archives, Aix-en-Provence) 1 Affpol 2520, file 9, report # 12 from October 1941.

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undertake a monarchical restoration per se. Instead, these “red shawl” rebels selected monarchical strands, which they interwove to create something entirely new. For instance, they somehow discerned a decentralizing impulse in what had been in reality a quite centralized kingdom of Madagascar, the authority of which radiated out of the highland capital, Antananarivo, to control other ethnic groups beyond the Merina. The second nationalist flashpoint on the great island involved the VVS (Vy Vato Sakelika or Iron Stone Network). This student secret society came to prominence during the First World War. Like the Menalamba, it made explicit reference to the glories, legacies, and tangible sites of worship and pilgrimage tied to the kingdom of Madagascar. However, Randrianja contends, it was as influenced by the lessons of the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 as it was by this backwards-looking ethos. Moreover, it explicitly referenced only the recent past of the kingdom of Madagascar, while the Menalamba had clung to a more distant past. Mostly, the VVS was first and foremost a youth movement promoting “the moral, social, cultural, and physical rebirth of the Malagasy people.” It marked a substantial shift in many respects, including its willingness to look beyond the Indian Ocean for solutions and new social models. In Randrianja’s words, the VVS’s participants were “above all Westernized urban dwellers engaged in the (re)construction of Malagasyness” and, as such, “constituted without a doubt the first manifestation of modern nationalism in Madagascar.”10 Both the Menalamba and VVS were ferociously quelled by colonial forces, invoking emergency contexts. Yet, the VVS, in particular, would constitute a touchstone for generations of nationalists.

Paris as Anticolonial Hub Resistance also needs to be understood in global terms, as is made clear, for example, by the major role that the Algerian FLN played from within mainland France in fostering independence. That Paris should have emerged as a hotbed of both anticolonial cooperation and nationalism should not be altogether surprising. Many an anticolonial nationalist remarked that mainland France offered much greater freedom of expression and assembly than did the colonies.11 10

11

Solofo Randrianja, Société et luttes anticoloniales à Madagascar (Paris: Karthala, 2001), 97–99, 113–115, 154–160, quotes at 154, 159. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 47.

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In Paris, in 1922, Ho Chi Minh became editor-in-chief of a singular newspaper, Le Paria. It brought together anticolonial voices from Madagascar, the Caribbean, Indochina, and continental Africa. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh liaised not only with disaffected intellectuals from French colonies, but also with leaders from other colonized societies, including, for instance, Irish nationalists. Yet for all his internationalism, and for all the pan-imperial reformism professed in the pages of Le Paria, Ho Chi Minh made national liberation his top priority. The French police branch tasked with tailing him in Paris assessed his actions bluntly in 1920: “He is organizing in Paris a series of meetings during which he is proposing to develop arguments in favor of the outright independence of the Annamese [read Vietnamese] people.”12 Indeed, at this very time, Ho Chi Minh was becoming disillusioned with colonial reformism; not coincidentally he sided with French communists when, in December of that year, they split from the socialists at the congress of Tours.13 By 1927, the French Ministry of the Colonies identified the Vietnamese community in Paris as “the principal center of support” for nationalists in Indochina. Here again, we see a case of colonial strategy backfiring, for as Michael Goebel has shown, the large number of Vietnamese students in the French capital was a direct result of the French government in Hanoi’s “safety valve” policy aimed at getting rid of radicals. Not only were Vietnamese nationalists able to operate relatively freely in the French capital, they were also able to exchange ideas with reformers and activists of many stripes, from black nationalists to Latin American students and North African Star members, to name only a few.14

Nationalism or Federalism? These connections beyond the confines of the French Empire beg the question of the type of outcome sought by anticolonial resistors. Did they all necessarily advocate for national independence the way Ho Chi Minh did? In his classic Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson took federalism in colonial settings seriously. He considered Dakar’s École Normale WilliamPonty and the school’s role in training Malian, Guinean, and other elites from 12 13

14

ANOM, INF 2340. Goscha, Vietnam, 140; Daniel Hémery, “Du patriotisme au marxisme: L’immigration vietnamienne en France de 1926 à 1930,” Le Mouvement Social, 90 (January 1975), 11. Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 138.

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across French West Africa. He then turned to Indochina, and to questions of language, education, and the gravitational pull of cities such as Saigon and Paris over places like Laos and Cambodia. Finally, he sought to explain why, upon independence, Indonesia had remained a single federal structure, while French West Africa and Indochina had shattered into smaller states. His answer had more to do with interests, experience, and practice than it did with identity per se. Anderson contended that, in the end, in the Dutch East Indies – later Indonesia – “virtually all the major ethno-linguistic groups . . . were accustomed to the idea that there was an archipelagic stage on which they had parts to play.”15 Much ink has been spilled on West Africa, on the École William-Ponty, and on French Indochina since Anderson’s seminal 1983 book. The main thrust of these contributions has been to stress the importance of contingency: there was nothing teleological or even structurally predetermined about West African or Indochinese outcomes. Thus, Christopher Goscha has shown compellingly that Indochina was more than a mere colonial construct: it was embraced by many Southeast Asians under French colonial rule as a viable identity, state, and spatial conception. It featured a web of networks and beliefs. In short, Goscha demonstrated that “Vietnam” (a term only widely used after the 1940s) was no more inevitable than “Indochina” was somehow destined to fail.16 Federalism could operate in many ways, and was not necessarily less coercive a form of colonial rule than any other. For one thing, ethnic Vietnamese officials proved crucial collaborators in ruling French colonial Laos and Cambodia, thereby sometimes giving the impression to local populations that they were subjugated by two imperial powers, rather than one. Furthermore, French colonial authorities sometimes brandished their federalist model as a bulwark against communist threats in the region. As for the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, their stakes in federalist schemes varied. Some revolutionaries embraced the concept of an “Indochinese nation.” Others brazenly envisioned a “Soviet Union of the Indochinese Republic.” One sticking point involved the legal status of ethnic Vietnamese people residing in Cambodia: were they to be assimilated into a Cambodian rubric, or be considered Indochinese citizens? Even after three independent nation-states – Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – emerged from 15

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 123–132. Christopher Goscha, Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2012), 7–9.

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the power vacuum resulting from a chain of events in 1945, Indochinese federal schemes did not die at once, enduring in many forms across the political spectrum.17 Similarly, in French West Africa, against the backdrop of the 1956 loi-cadre that set the stage for decolonization, federalist and nationalist visions dueled. As Frederick Cooper and Jean-Pierre Bat have contended, there was nothing foreordained about nationalism’s victory. Senegalese politician Mamadou Dia, himself a product of the École William-Ponty, teamed with his Malian counterpart Mobido Keïta to champion the federalist cause. Dia deemed the nation-state “imperialist” and counterproductive, and advocated a “multinational state.” Practically speaking, such a federal structure would have offered an outlet to the sea for landlocked regions that have today become Niger, Burkina-Faso, and Mali. Moreover, they could continue to share a common currency (which ended up happening anyway). In the historical realm, federalists sought to revive medieval notions of a greater Mali. So why did the scheme fail? The federalist project came undone for several reasons. The main one involved the stubborn opposition of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. The Ivoirian statesman conceived of federalism not between West African states, but rather within a French orbit, likening Côte d’Ivoire to the French region of Brittany, which he contended had similarly “found its own unity in the midst of a French ensemble.” Houphoüet-Boigny’s pragmatist antifederal approach eventually gained the edge over Keïta’s more idealistic vision. Ultimately, Houphoüet-Boigny partnered with Paris’s powerful African hand Jacques Foccart to doom the project, building a coalition against it with the support of Haute-Volta’s (later Burkina Faso) and Benin’s representatives.18 In Central and Equatorial Africa, as well, several schemes called for maintaining the colonial federation once known as French Equatorial Africa under a new guise. As with French West Africa, this would have benefited landlocked countries such as Oubangui-Chari (the modern-day Central African Republic). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the call for continued federalism came from there. An Oubanguian abbot by the name of Barthélemy Boganda wished to rebaptize and reconfigure French Equatorial Africa, while retaining 17

18

Ibid., 48–49, 61, 75, 88, 101, quotes at pges 75, 88; Jean-Pierre Bat, “L’AOF, fédération ou balkanization?,” ibeafrica4.blogs.liberation.fr/2017/05/10/laof-federation-ou-balkanisation/; Jean-Pierre Bat, Olivier Forcade, and Sylvain Mary (eds.), Jacques Foccart: Archives ouvertes, 1958–1974 (Paris: PUPS, 2017). Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 215–216, 256, quotes at 215, 256.

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its old federal borders. The new union would be called “Centrafrique” – a name which only Oubangui-Chari ultimately adopted (much as the name Mali only stuck to former French Soudan, which had most promoted the original alliance).19 Boganda’s proposal was eminently sensible and historically grounded, beyond the mere issue of a maritime outlet. For decades, elites from Oubangui-Chari and Gabon had been trained at Brazzaville in Moyen-Congo (today the Republic of Congo) or even in Dakar, Senegal. Art schools, military academies, and other institutions attracted Africans under French rule to multiple imperial hubs, starting with Brazzaville. This history of mobility, overlaid on the many strata of colonial belonging, would have lasting effects, as federal options receded and nation-states emerged. Thus, at the moment of independence in 1960, it was unclear where an ambitious officer by the name of Jean-Bedel Bokassa would end up. Born in Oubangui-Chari, he subsequently enlisted, trained, and served many years in French uniform in Moyen-Congo (Brazzaville) as well as in Indochina, and claimed the right to remain in the French army. He could equally have ended up in the ranks of the Republic of Congo’s military, given that his military file reads: “colony of origin: Moyen-Congo.” In the words of a 1963 French report, in September 1961 Captain Bokassa had been assigned to the Central African Republic’s army, essentially on the request of the nation’s first president, “without having been consulted” and “with real bitterness.”20 Still, Bokassa hedged his bets, retaining dual French and Central African citizenship. He would eventually become dictator for life and self-styled emperor of Central Africa. One of the most jarring aspects of his cult of personality, and his 1977 coronation, involved the explicitly Napoleonic references he cultivated, and the near absence of African ones. When he was finally overthrown, with French complicity, in 1979, Bokassa brandished his dual citizenship so as to obtain asylum in France.21

Grande vs. Petite Patrie Bokassa’s retention of French citizenship, along with Houphouët-Boigny’s association of Côte d’Ivoire with Brittany, both beg for explanations. Such links were actually nothing new; they featured long colonial roots. A myth long held that African and Vietnamese schoolchildren had learned only of 19

20 21

Jean-Pierre Bat, Le syndrome Foccart: La politique française en Afrique de 1959 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 85. Service historique de la Défense, Vincennes, SHD 2831/67. Bat, Le syndrome Foccart, 381.

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“their forefathers the Gauls” in history class. Here was a vignette that spoke to the absurd ends of republican homogenizing impulses and to cultural alienation fostered by colonialism. In many ways, the phenomenon was a corollary of what happened in metropolitan France itself: there, an assimilationist French republican system had purportedly “hunted down all traces of local culture” and relentlessly chiseled away at them.22 The problem is that the story turns out to be at least partly apocryphal, in both French and colonial settings. As Daniel Hémery and Pierre Brocheux observe, in French Indochina the “our forefathers the Gauls” mantra was “more of a symbol of educational routine than the accurate reflection of a political goal.”23 Similarly, in West Africa, Alice Conklin has shown mounting French, as well as African, reticence between the two world wars with regard to the idea of assimilating West Africans outright – assimilation, both at home and abroad, having been one of the French Republic’s mantras in the late nineteenth century.24 In the past three decades, scholars examining mainland France have likewise taken aim at the Gaulish vignette and the ultra-assimilation it implies. Those studying the question of how multilayered identity worked assert that, on the contrary, French educators after 1870 began fostering a cult of the region (literally petite patrie, or small country, an equivalent of the German Heimat), not to challenge the nation, but rather to buttress it. Thus, young Bretons, Basques, and Savoyards were taught the folklore of their land in an effort to blend localism and nationalism. The counterargument could be made that local identities had already been steamrolled in late nineteenthcentury France; yet the point remains that the state actively fostered dual belonging. The popular late nineteenth-century schoolbook Le tour de France par deux enfants encapsulates this duality. Two Alsatian children (revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine at the hands of Germany was a rallying cry of the French Republic after 1871) lead the young reader across France’s different provinces, making the nation known and understood in a manner reminiscent of the Tour de France cycling race that originated shortly thereafter in 1903. In the colonies, as well, the same dynamic was at work. In 1928, one Jean Marquet penned Les cinq fleurs: L’Indochine expliquée. Its plot line was straightforward. 22

23 24

Stéphane Gerson, “Une France locale: The Local Past in Recent French Scholarship,” French Historical Studies, 26/3 (2003), 548. Brocheux and Hémery, Indochina, 218. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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Influenced by a dream, a father had his five sons travel the five lands of Indochina. Their peregrinations lent themselves to teaching history and geography, and to revealing colonialism’s modernizing and transformative impact. In Le tour de France, the children hailed from provinces recently lost to Germany, whereas in Les cinq fleurs, the travelers were all ethnic Vietnamese. Still, the overarching theme of celebrating difference through unity was strikingly similar.25 Les cinq fleurs was written in French, and stressed French transformations in the realm of transportation, communication, and sanitation. In both narratives, the protective nation, the introducer of progress, was France. The province was celebrated, be it Brittany or Laos, for its costume, folklore, and local color precisely as they faded before an onslaught of changes brought about by vectors including railways, radios, and roads. Mostly, in both cases, readers were urged to self-identify with both the small patrie and the greater one, in tandem. This layered construction of allegiances operated as a functioning mode for understanding colonial relations. Two examples demonstrate this point. The first occurred in August 1940, when the vast territorial ensembles of Equatorial Africa and mandate Cameroon sided with General Charles de Gaulle against the Vichy regime. Among Central Africans who volunteered in Charles de Gaulle’s Free French army between 1940 and 1943 (many were in fact forcibly enlisted), motivations included factors such as social advancement and wishing to defeat Nazi aggression and racism, but also a range of patriotisms. The latter encompassed Cameroonian, Equatorial African, and even French patriotism, but also a type of pan-imperial élan, as well as black nationalism.26 Second, when Gabonese leader Léon M’ba was working out his country’s new status, first within a French “community,” then as an independent state in the late 1950s, he told a French interlocutor, a man from Savoy: “I have been French longer than you have” – invoking Gabon’s annexation by France in 1840 and Savoy’s in 1860. M’ba, as we shall see, continued to consider himself French long after Gabon’s independence in 1960, and in fact attempted to fight that independence, requesting instead, in vain, full integration into France, in the manner of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, and French Guyana.27 Multiple identities often made for unintended outcomes of this sort. Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and the thinkers behind the Martinique-based journal 25 26

27

Goscha, Going Indochinese, 37–39. Eric Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 127, 148, 165. Louis Sanmarco, Le colonisateur colonisé (Paris: ABC, 1983), 210–214.

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Tropiques used the interplay between petite and grande patrie to their advantage, as they engaged in rediscovery and the celebration of blackness through Négritude. In 1941, in the context of Vichy-controlled Martinique, the Césaires and other Martinican thinkers celebrated black and indigenous forms of art, literature, poetry, and music. They did so with the blessing of colonial censors who enabled the publication of Tropiques. The island’s lead censor later admitted to having been duped. He had been persuaded that the Césaires were extoling Martinique in the same folkloric spirit as Frédéric Mistral had waxed about Provence. Now, however, he concluded that the journal he had once supported had actually promoted a message that turned out to be “revolutionary, racial, and sectarian” – in short, a slippage had taken place, leaving no room for the grande patrie.28

Colonialism Sowing the Seeds of its Own Undoing The example of Tropiques suggests some of the ways in which the colonized could turn colonial dynamics to their advantage. Indeed, many elements of anticolonial nationalism were forged in part in colonial hearths. Thus, the French dethroning of the queen of Madagascar, and the French nominal retention of the emperor of Annam, would each have lasting indirect consequences. In some contexts, however, the impact was far more direct. In these cases, colonial powers proved remarkably easy targets for subversion, or even inadvertently dug their own imperial graves. The phenomenon was widespread, and far exceeds the boundaries of the French colonial empire. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson relates the case of Dutch celebrations in colonial Java of the centennial of the 1813 liberation of the Netherlands from French occupation. On that occasion, Indonesian nationalist Suwardi Surjaningrat famously noted: “If I were a Dutchman, I would not organize an independence celebration in a country where independence of the people has been stolen.”29 This was one of countless refractions, unintended consequences, and subversive readings of imperial pageantry. Certainly, many colonial ideas were coopted and redirected. In 1925, the anticolonial Vietnamese reformer Nguyen An Ninh identified a category that was serving as an engine of change: “Gallicized youth.” He explained: “They received from the hands of the metropolitan French the condemnation of the political regime imposed on Indochina by the French colonialists, who, after 28

29

Eric Jennings, Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 189. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 117.

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all, cannot prevent them from reading Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire.”30 Ironies of this sort were legion. By the 1930s, French colonial Indochina resembled a police state. In 1932, its incarceration rates stood at three times those of France. As Peter Zinoman has demonstrated, prisoners were stacked in archaic, punitive, and corrupt establishments, where common felons were heaped in pell-mell with political prisoners. And so, ironically, these very institutions served as incubators of anticolonial activism: not only were revolutionary networks fostered in jail, but so too did inmates “internalize the parameters of a new national space.” Passing through a French colonial cell not only became a badge of honor and a kind of revolutionary classroom experience, but also helped to forge the Vietnamese nation.31 In some cases, the colonizers dispensed an explosive cocktail of reductionist identities and imperialist othering that was appropriated by nationalists and revolutionaries alike. After France fell to Germany in 1940, the xenophobic Vichy regime came to power. It wasted little time exporting its essentialist and hierarchical ideology overseas. In French Indochina, these doctrines were deployed as a kind of control fire with which to contain Japanese ambitions, as well as a way of actualizing Vichy’s nostalgic and oligarchic ethos. This dynamic resulted in surprising connections and synergies. Thus, Governor Jean Decoux’s administration explicitly associated the cult of France’s new authoritarian leader, Philippe Pétain, with that of Confucius.32 The colonizers even sought to codify flags, anthems, and other national trappings. In Annam (central Vietnam), in 1941, Decoux’s officials liaised with experts so as to determine which standards and flags embodied the nation and which represented the sovereign, and when each one should be flown.33 In Laos, Vichy’s officials invented nothing short of a national anthem, aimed partly at countering Thai ambitions. It included the following verses: “Our race once enjoyed great renown in Asia, back when the Lao were united. Today once again, the Lao have learned to love their race once more and are lining up behind their leaders . . . They will allow no nation to trouble them or seize their land.”34 In Cambodia, Decoux’s advisors 30 31

32

33 34

Truong Bun Lam, Colonialism Experienced, 194. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 63–40, 66, quote at 66. Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 151–157. ANOM RSTNF 1617. No author, Hymnes et pavillons d’Indochine (Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient, 1941); Eric Jennings, “Conservative Confluences, ‘Nativist’ Synergy: Reinscribing Vichy’s

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drafted a new military instruction manual. French officers wrangled over which symbols the manual should include. Featuring a Garuda bird would be unwise, contended one official, for that creature had been coopted by Siam (later Thailand) as a national symbol. Instead, this official recommended adding an Angkor-era Hanuman monkey.35 In Hanoi in May 1941, the celebration of Joan of Arc was twinned with that of the Trung sisters, national heroines who had thrown the Chinese out of what would later become Vietnam in 40 C E. “20,000 youngsters from Tonkin schools celebrated the cult of [all three] heroines with historical reconstitutions that were extremely well executed and elicited considerable emotion,” noted one Vichy report.36 The colonizers evidently believed they were harmlessly tinkering with the identities of “petites patries.” Yet this provided key openings for resistors; for example, Decoux became the first French governor to use the term “Vietnam.” Even the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai, long considered a French puppet, seized the moment, submitting to Decoux a draft of a speech that read: “ten centuries spent under the orbit of China were not able to quell the conscience of our race, which crystalized to the point that Ngo-Quyen needed only to raise a finger . . . for all of the people to rally behind him and liberate the homeland.”37 As with the Trung sisters, little imagination was needed to substitute modern French colonialism for ancient Chinese oppression in such narratives. Soon, Decoux’s staff disclosed with horror that the nationalist flames were turning on the French. Thus, in August 1942, Tonkin’s security services reported unsettling developments. A Vietnamese scouting organization composed of university students, which had received the full blessings of Decoux’s government, was busy digging wells, dispensing medical advice, and disseminating “sports propaganda” in the village of Tuong-Mai (HaDong province). So far, so good. However, several disquieting issues quickly arose. First, a law student harangued the villagers about the need to rehabilitate and release political prisoners from colonial jails. Second, another student, previously tied to the Dai Viêt Dân Chinh movement, explicitly dispensed “nationalist sentiments” among the villagers.38 In response,

35 37 38

National Revolution in Indochina,” French Historical Studies, 27/3 (Summer 2004), 612–614. ANOM GGI CM 412. 36 ANOM 1 Affpol 2196, file 7. ANOM 14 PA 28, Projet de proclamation au peuple d’Annam. ANOM RSTNF 6237. The Dai Viet party seized on Vichy’s permissive discourse in the matters of nationalism and youth movements. See François Guillemot, “La tentation ‘fasciste’ des luttes anticoloniales Dai Viet: Nationalisme et anticommunisme dans le Viet-Nam des années 1932–1945,” Vingtième Siècle, 104 (2009), 61–62.

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Vichy disbanded the scouting group that very summer, yet it was clear that the damage was done: the very mechanisms and messages on which the regime was relying to dispense its reductionist message had “gone nationalist.”

Recasting the Past The earlier examples of colonizers spurring the celebration of the Trung sisters and adding Angkor-era symbols to military manuals are not eccentric exceptions to the norm. In fact, manipulating the past of colonized societies proved a mainstay of many colonial powers. It took place as part of a dialectic. In her study of colonial Cambodia, Penny Edwards persuasively demonstrates that “In Cambodge, nationalists did not produce a national culture. Rather, the elaboration of a national culture by French and Cambodian literati eventually produced nationalists.” Edwards takes aim at enduring representations of Khmer identity and culture as somehow unchanged, a kind of “primordial continuum” from the times of Angkor Wat on. She shows that, in fact, during the long colonial era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Cambodian literati and French colonial specialists and educators alike crafted everything from Cambodian syncretic architecture to costume and arts. At the same time, colonial archeologists charted lines to the Khmer present, or at least a formula for “rebirth” and regeneration, by way of the wonders of Angkor. This said, crafting Khmerness (Khmeritude) proved tricky in many respects. The capital Phnom Penh, for instance, emerged as a religiously, culturally, and ethnically diverse city, attracting Indians from Pondicherry, Vietnamese from the Mekong delta, and Chinese entrepreneurs, in addition to Khmers of various classes. In the end, conceptions of a Khmer national character or even a “Khmer soul” were promoted and embraced from within, by Cambodian elites such as Thiounn Sambath, the country’s Palace Minister. Engagement with colonial ideas and instruments of power proved crucial, of course, but it would be wrong to suggest that Khmerness was above all some sort of orientalist projection. Nor, of course, was the colonial relationship the only vector responsible for forging national patterns from without. In the case of Cambodia, events in neighboring Siam dictated, for instance, the urgency some felt to make Buddhism the national religion.39 39

Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 7–9, 61, 66–79, 109–118, 165 (quote at 7).

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In colonial Algeria, the dynamic was no less elaborate. French officials fostered a concept of Latinness, explicitly rooting their empire in the legacy of ancient Rome, thereby seeking to elide the Arab and Ottoman pasts, and situating France in its supposedly rightful place on the south side of the Mediterranean. The notion further abetted the integration of so-called “neo-French” – be they Maltese, Spanish, or Jewish – into a settler class. At the same time, after 1870 France set about profoundly altering indigenous society, overturning property law and traditions of naming, imposing the French system of a single last name.40

National Trappings: Inventing Flags, Anthems, and State Mottos In 1960, four years after Tunisia and Morocco declared their independence, the vast majority of France’s former African colonies formally followed suit. We have seen that previous plans to build vast federations in West and Central Africa had by then crumbled. Consequently, nation-states had to be improvised. Throughout France’s former African domain, flags were rapidly invented. Jean-Pierre Bat has studied the case of the Republic of Congo at its moment of independence. Fulbert Youlou, the controversial abbot who had once appropriated the legacy of Congolese anticolonial activist André Matswa, had become prime minister in 1958. However, the Republic of Congo only formally gained independence in 1960. In reality, Youlou, and the Republic of Congo which he led, represented key cogs in a nebulous network of influence known as Françafrique – literally Frenchafrica – a corrupt informal neocolonial pact between France and leaders it more or less propped up in power in its former colonies. In 1959, knowing full well that France retained considerable influence over his regime, Youlou set about casting the trappings of nationhood as a kind of window-dressing, Bat contends. Youlou explained the choice of colors for his country’s first flag as follows: green symbolized the promise of economic and social hope; red signified the courage and ardor of the Congolese people who now “gained their place among civilized nations.” However, the head of the National Assembly of the new republic, Alphonse Massembat-Debat, 40

Raphaëlle Branche, “‘Au temps de la France’: Identités collectives et situation coloniale en Algérie,” Vingtième Siècle, 117 (2013), 199–213; Patricia Lorcin, “Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria’s Latin Past,” French Historical Studies, 25/2 (2002), 295–329.

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provided an alternate reading: to him green symbolized hope but also the country’s lush forests; red marked the ardor of youth and spontaneity; finally, yellow stood for heart and spirit. Yet, in reality, designs and patterns had largely been dictated by Paris, which explains the recurring motif of red, green, and yellow in the flags of nearly all these new republics (with the exception of Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon). General de Gaulle’s Africa hand, Jacques Foccart, thus had to break the news to Gabon’s president, Léon M’ba, that he could not retain the French tricolor in the corner of his nation’s flag, as Australia and New Zealand had done with the Union Jack in theirs. There remained the sticky question of how to arrange the green, yellow, and red, without outright plagiarizing the flags of Congo’s neighbors. Youlou immediately consulted the French high commissioner Guy Georgy on the matter. Georgy’s laconic answer must not have seemed very helpful, as he advised “placing the three colors on the bias, in any random order.” In other words, Paris continued to control the flag’s message – ruling out a tricolor in the corner – leaving the new republics to dispose of the aesthetic dimension alone. In addition to flags and anthems, national mottos needed to be coined, all inspired by a variation on a French triptych. France’s national motto since the late eighteenth century had been “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” save for a hiatus under the Vichy regime between 1940 and 1944 when it became “Work, Family, Fatherland.” Here, too, bricolage and emulation were the order of the day. Niger adopted the motto “Fraternity, Work, Progress,” while the Central African Republic coined “Unity, Dignity, Work” and Chad opted for “Unity, Work, Progress.” French consultants provided suggestions in the realm of heraldry; Chad’s national crest, dating from 1970, features a fascinating fusion of European aristocratic codes with allusions to Lake Chad. Decisions were hastily taken with respect to anthems, as well. A journalist of Spanish origin, who had been tasked with writing the lyrics of the Republic of Congo’s new anthem, admitted to the French high commissioner that he knew nothing of Bantu cultures. Perhaps someone better versed in them could take on the task? High Commissioner Georgy would not hear of it. “Generally, these sorts of things don’t stand out for their originality,” he declared, before laying out a formula: the word “arise” or “awaken” should be included because “people had supposedly been lying down or creeping prior to independence.” “Night” should also be invoked and then sunrise, as well as bravery, “a willingness to die so that the torch of liberty would never be extinguished, that God was on their side, and that they must remain 126

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united.” The cynical formula was followed to a T: the result was “La Congolaise.”41 Such postcolonial ironies abound and endure to this day. On one of Brazzaville’s main squares stands an African version of the Statue of Liberty. No nod to France’s 1886 gift to America here. Instead, Congolese president Sassou Nguesso had it commissioned in North Korea (after sending a delegation to see the original in New York in 2009), at least partly to counter the impression he had cozied up to the former colonizer by having a mausoleum erected to Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a colonial explorer.42

Conclusion This bricolage around national trappings can seem rather derivative, involving borrowing and rearrangements around a single theme – for instance, a vast jigsaw puzzle composed of the colors green, red, and yellow, or an appropriation of America’s most famous statue. Overall, anticolonial nationalism reveals itself to have been above all contingent, syncretic, and the result of complex interplays, few of which were predetermined. In a broader sense, the range of chronological and geographical variations this chapter has surveyed renders it challenging to sketch a single framework around identity and nationalism in the French colonies, beyond certain leitmotifs and trends. These include the notion of endurance: of imperial models, of France’s “first empire,” of interplay between the so-called grande and petite patries, and of federal or supranational alternatives, most notably. This chapter has considered cases of empire at once enduring and undergoing restructuring, and ways in which nations were forged and nationalism was refracted, within multiple French colonial settings. It cannot claim exhaustiveness, of course. Among the topics that warrant further analysis is the question of settler ultra-nationalism as the counterthesis to indigenous nationalism. Franco-Tunisian colonial critic Albert Memmi contended in 1966, in the wake of the Algerian War: “Any colonial nation carries in it . . . the seeds of a fascist temptation . . . Colonial fascism . . . represents a permanent danger, a pocket of venom constantly threatening the 41

42

Jean-Pierre Bat, “Congo An 1: Décolonisation et politique française au CongoBrazzaville (1958–1963),” Ph.D. thesis, École des Chartes (2006), vol. I I, 413–416. On the aborted Gabon flag with a small tricolor insert, see Jean-Pierre Bat, Le syndrome Foccart, 375. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II, 55.

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Metropolitan organism.”43 Also of importance is the issue of some former colonies (the “old” colonies) opting in 1946 to be subsumed into France – this occurred by referendum in Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyana. Finally, the topic of nationalism in France’s lost colonies (Mauritius, Québec) speaks to settler identities in contexts of imperial competition and double occupations.

Further Reading Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Bat, Jean-Pierre, Le syndrome Foccart: La politique française en Afrique de 1959 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Dubois, Laurent, Avengers in the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Edwards, Penny, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). Goebel, Michael, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Goscha, Christopher, Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2012). Jennings, Eric, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe and Indochina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 43

Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé (Utrecht: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1966), 100–101.

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Germany as a “Global Nation,” 1840–1930 mark hewitson

Introduction The main debates about nationalism during the past two decades have concentrated on the effects of changing means of communication and processes of de- and reterritorialization. The entangled web of relations which traversed national boundaries did not produce “the utopia of a post-national history,” but the “stabilization and territorialization of the nation-state,” in Sebastian Conrad’s view.1 Whereas the dynamics of nationalism have generally been located within nation-states, as “imagined communities,” “invented traditions,” or reactions to modernization, Conrad’s own case studies show that “the shifts and changes in the discourse of nationalism . . . appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but just as much of the larger process we retrospectively call globalization.”2 The term, which came into common use in the 1980s and 1990s, denotes movement across space (transport and trade), communication between distant points (telegraphs and telephones), and shifting perceptions of distance and space, or what the sociologist Roland Robertson has called “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.”3 This reconfiguration of space has been linked to transnationalism, in which social interaction has been understood as “flows” and “networks,” as well as spatially defined (or imagined) “structures.”4 Transnational networks did not necessarily develop “in opposition to the hardening boundaries of nationalism and of empire,” which they regularly 1

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Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, C. H. Beck Verlag, 2006), 26. Sebastian Conrad, “Globalization Effects: Mobility and Nation in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914,” Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), 64. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992); “Interview with Roland Robertson,” Globalizations, 11 (2014), 447. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Erweiterung oder Alternative?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 27/3, (2001), 474–479.

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accompanied and reinforced, writes Emily Rosenberg: nonetheless, they did beckon “beyond territoriality toward a newer world in which fast-moving technologies of representation, with multiple and shifting codes of meaning, challenged the fixity of space and identity.”5 It is this relationship between networks of communicative interaction, on the one hand, and spatiality and territoriality, on the other, which transnational historians investigate. Influenced by the “spatial turn” and postcolonialism, historians of Germany have focused above all on the relationship between globalization and imperialism, including the development of a precolonial imaginary which modified, reinforced, and subverted stereotypes of the “other” and informed debates about Germany’s place in the world.6 Part of those scholars’ case is predicated on a putative radicalization and racialization of national discourses, affecting the “Germanization” of Prussia’s eastern territories and the adoption and implementation of policies in German colonies, which led in their most extreme forms to massacres, famine, and genocide in Southwest Africa during the Herero War in 1904–1907 and in East Africa during the Maji Maji rebellion in 1905–1907.7 Another, less well-defined part of the case concerns foreign policy during the alleged transition from a system of great powers to “world empires.”8 To what extent did contemporaries’ fears of losing out in the partition of the world and their reevaluation of the states’ system alter their conception and judgment of imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany as a nation-state and an empire (or Reich)? Was there a path, as Jürgen Zimmerer has put it, from Windhoek to Auschwitz?9 Since Germany was the site of the most notorious and catastrophic instance of 5

6

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Emily S. Rosenberg, Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012), 6. “AHR Forum: Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective,” American Historical Review, 117 (2012), 698–813. For a discussion of the meaning of “precolonial imaginary,” see Suzanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). On the “East,” see Vejas G. Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71–219. On Africa, Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); John Iliffe, “The Effects of the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905–1906 on German Occupation Policy in East Africa,” in Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (eds.), Britain and Germany in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 557–575. Sönke Neitzel, Weltmacht oder Untergang. Die Weltreichslehre im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 1999); Sönke Neitzel (ed.), 1900: Zukunftsvisionen der Großmächte (Paderborn: Schöningh Signatur, 2002); Heinz Gollwitzer, Die Geschichte des weltpolitischen Denkens, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1972–1982). Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2011).

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hypernationalism in the twentieth century, the question of the “roots” or “mechanisms” of nationalist radicalization has long informed historical debate there.10 Over the past decade or so, much of this debate has centered on transnational and postcolonial approaches to a globalizing world; in the words of Thomas Kühne, “numerous articles and volumes have suggested that we should trace back the roots of the Holocaust, or more broadly of Nazi violence, not so much to traditions of racism and anti-Semitism, to the brutalizing experience of the First World War or to radical nationalist ideologies, but to Europe’s and Germany’s colonial and imperial past.”11 In the subsequent dispute between historians, the relationship between internal and external causes of extreme forms of nationalism has been subjected to renewed scrutiny, cutting across older theses about Germany’s “special path” (Sonderweg), pan-Germanism (looking back to the project of Groβdeutschland in the 1850s and 1860s), expansion in Central Europe (Mitteleuropa) and the east (Lebensraum under the Nazis), and racial and anti-Semitic stereotyping and persecution.12

Globalization and the Industrial State It is tempting to assume that the varying economic and communicative flows and networks of globalization converged. Certainly, for German historians such as Cornelius Torp, the “compression of time and space was caused by the transportation and communication revolutions in the nineteenth century and the enormous, rapid increase in the worldwide economic integration which accompanied these revolutions.”13 For this reason, economic and other historians have labeled the decade before 1914 “the first wave of globalization, indeed, globalization’s belle époque.”14 The theoretical literature on economic and communicative interaction is more heterogeneous, however.15 Theodore Levitt’s emphasis on “the emergence of global markets for 10

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Louis L. Snyder, Roots of German Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research, 15 (2013), 339. Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Der Holocaust als ‘kolonialer Genozid’?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33/3, (2007), 439–466. For the discussion about Kleindeutschland and Großdeutschland, see Mark Hewitson, Nationalism in Germany, 1848–1866: Revolutionary Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Cornelius Torp, “Imperial Germany under Globalization,” in Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds.), Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 297. Ibid. 15 Robertson, Globalization.

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standardized consumer products on a previously unimagined scale of magnitude,” which distinguished between global corporations producing goods for a world market and multinational companies varying their output in accordance with local peculiarities, differs from accounts which stress the integration, rather than standardization, of economies.16 Even in respect of economic integration in the broad sense, scholars have identified distinct groups of “hyperglobalizers” for whom “peoples everywhere are increasingly subject to the disciplines of the marketplace,” “skeptics” for whom “globalization is essentially a myth” concealing the reality of an international economy of regional blocs and powerful national governments, and “transformationalists” for whom “contemporary patterns of globalization are conceived as historically unprecedented such that states and societies across the globe are experiencing a process of profound change as they try to adapt to a more interconnected but highly uncertain world.”17 Critically, consciousness of the world as a whole rarely seems to coincide with economic integration or compression. Indeed, for the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, it is the disjunctures between economy, culture, and politics which stand out: his five dimensions of “global cultural flow” are, correspondingly, “not objectively given relations which look the same from every angle of vision,” but are “deeply perspectival constructs, inflected very much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of actors,” including nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, subnational religious, political, or economic groupings and movements, and, even, intimate face-to-face groups such as villages, neighborhoods, and families.18 It is these disjunctions, together with ignorance of and indifference to globalization, which I investigate here. The case made by Conrad and Torp rests on the “worldwide extension of economic activities and networks, a growing intensity of goods, services and capital flows beyond state borders and the increasing international interdependency of economic transactions,” which had begun in the midnineteenth century and had continued to the present.19 By 1913, Germany’s share of world trade was 12.2 percent (compared with 9.5 percent in 1874–1878) 16

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Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” Harvard Business Review, 61 (1983), 92–102. David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999), 2. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture, Society, 7 (1990), 296. Cornelius Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung. Wirtschaft und Politik in Deutschland, 1860–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2005), 13–14.

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and its share of the world’s GDP was 8.7 percent (compared with 3.9 percent in 1820).20 External trade – that is, the sum of imports and exports – had reached 34 percent of German gross national product by 1914, which was comparable to the figure for the Federal Republic of Germany’s “open” economy of the 1970s, following a period of “deglobalization” (Roland Robertson) in the interwar era.21 Economic openness was linked to other challenges which had the potential to alter public opinion, including mass migration, industrialization and diversification, the insecurity of labor and changes of working practices, the creation of diaspora, and new conceptions of territory, citizenship, and identity.22 Uncertainty, mobility, and apparent proximity gave rise to three aspects of the transformation of the national which can be understood as specific products of the connection to processes of globalization, writes Conrad: first, the reinforcement of the borders of the nation-state; second, the unleashing of a debate about the “Germanization” of the “eastern marches,” the plight of a so-called “Auslandsdeutschtum,” and about what it was to be German (Deutsch-Sein); and, third, the addition of “elements of racial thought” to nationalism in Germany, giving it a colonial dimension and leading to ethnic stereotyping of Jews and migrant groups, visible in turn-of-thecentury fears of a “yellow peril.”23 Each of these aspects seems to have been exacerbated by defeat in the First World War, the reordering of the states’ system and expropriation of German colonies at Versailles in 1919, and economic crisis and political conflict during the 1920s and early 1930s. Autarky, racism, and expansionism under National Socialism were purportedly the extension of such proclivities. The destabilizing effects of capitalism and industrialization were profound but uneven in Germany between the mid-nineteenth and midtwentieth century. They were arguably felt most acutely during economic downturns, especially the 1840s, 1870s–1880s, and 1920s. The fact that the Weimar Republic was widely perceived to be an “industrial state” (Industriestaat), dependent on the world market, contributed to contemporaries’ anxiety and despair during the inflation and hyperinflation of 1918–1924 and the depression of 1929–1934.24 The United States appeared to 20

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Torp, Herausforderung, 62; Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 A D: Essays in Macro-economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 379. Sebastian Conrad, “Transnational Germany,” in James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 227. Conrad, “Globalization Effects,” 43–66. 23 Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 321–322. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), 309–627; Harold James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 1924–36 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), 283–323.

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many to be pivotal to the functioning of a global economy, acting as an imperial power in Europe as well as in Latin America. The “offer of a loan by the US is the first symptom and the first step towards a lasting seizure of property,” wrote one economist in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1923.25 For pan-Germans like Alexander von Brockdorff in Amerikanische Weltherrschaft? (1929), We Germans are today the objects of dollar-diplomacy; look at the Dawes Plan and the fatal fact that at the end of November 1928 1,153 million dollars of German debt securities were circulating in the Union; today it is even more. And how many shares of German enterprises are in American hands; how many German enterprises are part of international businesses and agreements, over which the power of decision resides in New York!26

Even in the 1920s, however, criticism of America and fear of Germany’s exposed position in the world market were mixed with and countered by admiration and optimism. “Whoever goes through the world with an open mind dates a new period of his life from his trip to America,” declared the social reformer Alice Salomon, looking back on her trips – and those of her contemporaries – to the United States in the Weimar era: “He expands his European experiences to a ‘world view.’ He learns to think without the assumptions with which he was raised . . . He grasps more sharply the past of his own nation . . . Simultaneously, he glimpses the future of humanity.”27 Germany’s global predicament was never clear-cut. Thus, although the radicalization of nationalism which occurred in the 1920s and early 1930s was often tied by contemporaries to judgments and assumptions about the workings of the world market and the activities of “world powers” (or “world empires”), the significance of such ambivalent perceptions is difficult to evaluate. Throughout the century after 1840, external trade comprised a relatively small proportion of total production and commerce. At the high point of prewar globalization in 1913, exports constituted 12.2 percent of the Reich’s gross national product.28 More than three-quarters of those exports in the decades before the First World War went to other European states.29 By 1919, the value of German exports had slumped to 2,588 million marks from

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Arthur Salz, “Der Imperialismus der Vereinigten Staaten,” quoted in Egbert Klautke, Unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten (Stuttgart: Steiner 2003), 159. Cited in ibid., 164. Quoted in Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9. Torp, Herausforderung, 30. 29 Ibid., 77, 81.

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10,199 million in 1913.30 Wilhelmine commentators such as Karl Helfferich, a former diplomat and director of the Deutsche Bank, were aware that Germany was participating in “the peaceful competition of nations,” but they – like much of the public – were captivated above all by what had been “made in Germany,” in the words of a prewar slogan: “If it has been the goal of our economic development to bring forth an ever greater mass of useful economic effects . . . then one can say that organizational advances have brought us nearer to this goal at the same pace as have the achievements of economic technology.”31 The consequences of such a transformation, during which the national wealth of the Reich (300 billion marks) had surpassed that of Britain (230–260 billion) and France (232 billion), seemed to be largely internal, even if eliciting envy “in the outside world.”32 At the same time, “the great chasms in the internal construction of our national body (Volkskörper) – the relationship between city and countryside, in terms of occupational and social integration, property relations – have created conditions of tension which manifest themselves in the glaring restlessness of our age in all spheres of the life of the community,” wrote the author of Deutschlands Volkswohlstand, 1888–1913 (1913).33 For critics like the sociologist Georg Simmel, writing in 1900, “the instability and restlessness” of contemporary life was manifest in a “mania for traveling,” but also – and more importantly – in “the tumult of the metropolis,” the “wild pursuit of competition,” and “the typically modern disloyalty with regard to taste, style, opinions and relationships.”34 It was these forms of movement and change within Germany, together with the consolidation of what Charles Maier has termed the internal grids (railways, telegraph lines, industrial heartlands, regional produce, electricity networks), “identity,” and “decision” space of a national territory, which attracted most attention.35 The movement of people in Germany was predominantly internal. There were, in the second half of the nineteenth century, marked increases in emigration, with more than 1 million people leaving the German states in 1846–1857 and 1864–1873, respectively, and 1.8 million 30

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At 1913 prices; Feldman, The Great Disorder, 600. By 1922, they had recovered to 6,199 million marks. Karl Helfferich, Deutschlands Volkswohlstand, 1888–1913, 3rd edition (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1914), 47. Ibid., 114–115, 126. 33 Ibid., 125–126. Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1989), 675. Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History,” American Historical Review, 105 (2000), 816; Charles S. Maier, “Being There: Place, Territory and Identity,” in Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranović (eds.), Identities, Affiliations and Allegiances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76–77.

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in 1880–1893.36 Immigration also increased from 433,000 in 1890 to 1.26 million in 1910, to which seasonal and temporary migrants should be added, along with 5.1 million migrants – “eastern Jews” and others – passing through Germany on their way to the United States and elsewhere.37 Most recorded immigrants, however, came from surrounding European states (1,236,000), especially from Austria-Hungary (667,200), with the rest of the world accounting for a mere 24,000 residents. There are few indications that these German speakers were viewed differently from those of the Kaiserreich’s individual states, the burghers of which – as Thomas Mann reminded his readers in Buddenbrooks (1901) – had in the recent past been incomprehensible to each other. Transitory cities such as Berlin grew by 950,000 inhabitants between 1880 and 1910 and it saw a total of 11.3 million people arrive or leave during the same period.38 Yet the majority of those migrants were Germans moving from the countryside, with 16–17 million settling beyond the state of their birth.39 Among the population of German cities, 20–40 percent were rural migrants. Such mobility contributed to the turbulence and excitement of urban centers, but it did not necessarily remind neighbors or onlookers of “foreigners” or migration overseas. It has been estimated that there were only 207 Chinese inhabitants in Hamburg, the Reich’s largest Chinese community, by 1910. In this sense, globalization had not come home. Alfred Bell, a member of Cameroon’s ruling family, was not alone in remarking that few Germans had seen people whose “skin happens to be dark”: “We have always been represented as such wild cannibals and savages, that as yet they have had neither time nor opportunities to learn that intellectually, at all events, we are not quite as black as painted.”40 Most contemporaries had little direct contact with 36

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Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, and Jochen Oltmer (eds.), The Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 69. See also Klaus J. Bade, Land oder Arbeit? Transnationale und interne Migration im deutschen Nordosten vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Osnabrück: published by the author, 2005), 268; Torp, Herausforderung, 43. Bade, Land oder Arbeit?, 276; Sebastian Conrad, “Wilhelmine Nationalism in Global Contexts: Mobility, Race and Global Consciousness,” in Müller and Torp (eds.), Imperial Germany Revisited, 286. Thomas Mergel, “The Kaiserreich as a Society of Migration,” in Müller and Torp (eds.), Imperial Germany Revisited, 271. Ibid., 272. Alfred Bell, cited in Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 33–34.

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foreigners, especially those from overseas, and little knowledge of globally traded goods.

Imperialism and World Empires European states had come into extensive contact with the rest of the world during the nineteenth century, redirecting citizens’ attention to other parts of the globe (see Figure 7.1). Partly because Germany only started to acquire colonies from 1884 onwards and was forced to give them up in 1919, historians’ attention has shifted toward “precoloniality” and the ramifications of globalization for states without overseas empires.41 For Conrad, “The colonial character of Imperial Germany can be grasped only by seeing it as part of the global interactions in a world deeply structured – albeit unevenly – by capitalism and imperialism.”42 The “global turn” has encouraged scholars “to abandon the Schutzgebiete (protectorates) paradigm of German colonialism” and to look beyond Africa and Asia to European powers’ imperial relations with much of the rest of the world.43 The ministers of German states, politicians, journalists, and members of a reading public were all aware of a wider world and its colonization by European powers before and after the Reich’s own colonial era, modifying their understanding of “empire” and challenging existing narratives of the nation-state. Global historians have rewritten the story of the nation-state, arguing for the perseverance of imperial structures into the twentieth century. In Germany, such structures were both continental and maritime, leading to an increasing entanglement of colonial knowledge and practice, “generated and disseminated under conditions of transnationality,” in Prussia’s eastern territories and in the Reich’s colonies overseas.44 In this sense, the acquisition of colonies in the 1880s and Weltpolitik in the late 1890s would seem like a continuation of Germany’s status as an empire, not a new departure. Globalization, territorial expansion, colonization, pan-Germanism, and nationalism are difficult to separate in this reading of events. 41

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Zantop, Colonial Fantasies; Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 188–224. Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41 (2013), 545. Ibid. The model of “protectorates” denoted the control and administration of territory, whereas imperialism in a broader sense rested on spheres of influence and a Europeanled trading network. Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism,” 547; Edward Ross Dickinson, “The German Empire: An Empire?,” History Workshop Journal, 66 (2008), 129–162; Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as a Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).

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Figure 7.1 “Imperator, the biggest ship in the world, blessed by Henkell Dry (Sekt),” Simplicissimus, 27 May 1912. The advertisement associates the glamor and scale of ocean liners and travel overseas with German industry and German “champagne.”

Few, if any, scholars would disagree with Matthew Fitzpatrick’s claim that “early German imperialism” – that is, plans for an overseas empire from the 1840s onwards – was a “serious nation-building undertaking,” supported “by those liberals who campaigned for an active imperialist strategy and by those other conservatives, socialist and Catholic Germans who opposed the

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imperialist and nationalist projects of an emergent liberalism.”45 Between 1884 and 1900, Germany had acquired the fourth-largest overseas empire in the world, after the British, French, and Portuguese empires, stretching from Togo and Southwest Africa to Kiautschou and Samoa.46 As the explorer and founder of German East Africa Carl Peters pointed out, the Reich’s colonies had a surface area almost three times larger (2,670,000 km2) than that of the Reich itself (940,869 km2).47 Such changing circumstances compounded the precolonial longings and assumptions of some observers and the increasingly global outlook of others to ensure that, by the turn of the century, “the focal points of foreign-policy attention moved to distant places like the Taku forts, Venezuela, Agadir, and Samoa”48 and that the notions of “world empires” and “world policy” had become unobjectionable.49 “It was not a question of simply reiterating a slogan,” proposes Neitzel: “Rather, the idea of so-called world empires (Weltreichslehre) stood behind it, a theory according to which, not the military disputes of nation-states, but the economic conflicts of vast, powerful empires and trading blocs would determine the twentieth century.”50 Although some parties, such as the National Liberals and Free Conservatives, were more enthusiastic than others, such as the Center Party, all paid at least lipservice to Weltpolitik, which had been inaugurated by Secretary of State at the Foreign Office Bernhard von Bülow’s speech to the Reichstag on 6 December 1897, when he had announced that “we don’t want to put anyone in the shade but we, too, demand our place in the sun.”51 Even the radical socialist Rosa Luxemburg admitted in 1900 that “the era of world politics is now here to stay.”52 The question, though, is how important the goals of Weltpolitik were in comparison with those of domestic politics, including Germanization in the east, and the relations of the great powers in Europe. There is little sign that the shift to Weltpolitik revolutionized policymaking. In the first phase of colonization, Bismarck and the supporters of colonialism 45

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Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. Dirk van Laak, Über alles in der Welt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). C. Peters, England und Engländer, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I I I, 179. Sebastian Conrad, “Transnational Germany,” in J. Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 226. Neitzel, Weltmacht oder Untergang; Sönke Neitzel, Kriegsausbruch. Deutschlands Weg in die Katastrophe, 1900–1914 (Munich: Pendo, 2002), 17–68. Neitze, 1900: Zukunftsvisionen, 56. Quoted in Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Modern World, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–2. Rosa Luxemburg, cited in Michael Fröhlich, Imperialismus. Deutsche Kolonial- und Weltpolitik, 1880–1914 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 74.

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in the press had insisted that the new venture should not upset the great powers.53 Later, historians such as Otto Hintze predicted that a balance of power would be established between the new world powers similar to that which had existed between the states of the Concert of Europe. “The quest for supremacy is not irreconcilable with this,” he went on: “It has been, as it were, the motor of political progress in the history of states up until now, yet it has not led to the dominance of a single power, but rather to increased counter-efforts which have, indeed, always reconstituted and maintained the balance-of-power system.”54 According to Theodor Schiemann, the historian and foreign affairs specialist of the conservative Kreuzzeitung, the states’ system was still essentially European, with “an English superiority (Übermacht) on the seas, a Russian superiority in the Orient, a French–English superiority in Africa, and the superiority of Germany on the European continent, which today again claims its rights, but which was artificially held back.”55 As a consequence, Schiemann assumed that conflict during both the first and the second of the Moroccan crises in 1905 and 1911 – although war was unlikely to occur on such a flimsy colonial pretext – would be European in cause and effect, involving continental armies and deriving from the relations between European states. The Reich should use its continental superiority to gain concessions overseas, but it would probably not need to go to war to achieve such aims, which were, in any case, secondary to its continental interests.56 Hans Delbrück, the military historian and editor of the Preußische Jahrbücher, generally agreed: military conflict was unlikely, he wrote, despite the fact that the European balance of power, which had still obtained during the first Moroccan crisis, was now only relevant insofar as it guided the actions of the other European powers and convinced them of the need to unite against the single most powerful continental state, Germany.57 The principal danger of war was not to be found in “individual questions” such as those of Morocco or Turkey or in “the thirst for revenge of the French or the desire of the Russians for Constantinople,” but in “the jealousy of England toward Germany,” which in turn stemmed from British fears that the Reich’s navy constituted a threat to 53 54

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Preuβische Jahrbücher, 59 (1887), 286. Otto Hintze, “Imperialismus und Weltpolitik’ (1907), in Gerhard Oestreich (ed.), Otto Hintze. Staat und Verfassung, 2nd revised edition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962), 469. Theodor Schiemann, Deutschland und die große Politik (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1906), 14 June 1905, 172. Accordingly, Schiemann remained optimistic in 1911–1912; ibid. (Berlin, 1912), 13 and 27 September, 18 October 1911, 247, 265, 298. Hans Delbrück, Vor und nach dem Weltkrieg, 28 November 1905, 26 July 1908, October 1909, 24 July 1912, December 1913, 132–135, 205–212, 309–310, 368–378, 397–401.

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the country’s own security – “a question of life or death” (Lebensfrage).58 In other words, Delbrück explained even the Anglo-German antagonism in terms of European politics, not colonial rivalries.59 Much of the diplomatic establishment in Germany shared similar assumptions. The Reich Foreign Office was, to a greater extent than its more colonial-minded foreign counterparts, founded on the primacy of European affairs. Accordingly, the Political Division (IA), which constituted the fulcrum of the policymaking apparatus, concentrated on Europe.60 The other departments, including the Kolonial-Abteilung, which was established in 1890 and only became an independent Colonial Office in 1907, were separate and were believed to be repositories for the least talented members of the service. All the secretaries of state after the turn of the century had passed through European embassies, which continued to be the most prestigious and the best staffed. Few wanted postings outside Europe. Bülow, who boasted that “I have written and spoken French as fluently as my mother tongue” from childhood, spelled out in private correspondence that, although the task he was set “was to make possible our transition to Weltpolitik (trade, shipping, overseas interests, the consequences of the huge development of our industry, our increasing prosperity, the increase in our population) and above all the building of the German navy,” he also had to persist in “preserving German dignity and our position on the continent.”61 In his public account, which came out first in an English translation early in 1914, the former chancellor maintained that “We did not plunge into world politics, we grew, so to speak, into our task in that sphere, and we did not exchange the old European policy of Prussia and Germany for the new world policy; our strength today is rooted, as it has been since time immemorial, in the ancient soil of Europe.”62 “It is the task of our generation at one and the same time to maintain our position on the continent, which is the basis of our international position,” he contended in November 1906: “the task which Germany must perform at the present time, and, as far as one can judge, will

58 59

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62

Ibid., 26 June 1908, 207. Hans Delbrück, “Über die Ziele unserer Kolonialpolitik,” Preuβische Jahrbücher, vol. 147 (1912), 503–513. Lamar Cecil, The German Diplomatic Service, 1871–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Bernhard von Bülow to Rath, 12 February 1912, cited in Katherine A. Lerman, “Bismarck’s Heir: Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and the National Idea, 1890–1918,” in John Breuilly (ed.), The State of Germany: The National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a Modern Nation State (London: Longman, 1992), 113. Bernhard von Bülow, Imperial Germany, 6th edition (London: Cassell, 1914), 10–11.

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have to perform in future” was “an international policy based on the solid foundation of our position as one of the Great Powers of Europe.”63 Bülow’s successor as chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, continued this pursuit of a strong world policy by staying strong on the European continent, in the words of his famous speech to the Reichstag during the second Moroccan crisis.64 Throughout the prewar period, he referred almost exclusively to the alignment of European powers, the maintenance of European peace, and the possibility of a European – rather than world – war. His main policy was reconciliation with Britain, which was intended to “decisively strengthen our position in the European concert in material and moral terms,” and his “main goal” arguably continued to be the “loosening of the entente.”65 As he attempted to counter the most extreme versions of naval policy in the years between 1911 and 1914, Bethmann was sensitive to the continental European basis of German power. Political parties and public opinion followed such a lead, in part because prewar diplomatic crises repeatedly focused their attention on the Russian, French, and British threats to Germany’s security on the European continent, and in part because the press was Eurocentric. In major political periodicals on the eve of the First World War, between 17.8 (Grenzboten) and 28.6 percent (Hilfe) covered colonial affairs, as a percentage of foreign coverage, and between 71.4 and 82.2 percent focused predominantly on European politics.66 Even at the height of Weltpolitik after the turn of the century, there is evidence that the traditional European great powers remained the object of newspapers’ attention. In the Kreuzzeitung in the same period (1900, 1906, and 1912), 36.9 percent of articles were on France, 28.6 percent on Britain, 26.6 percent on Russia, and only 7.9 percent on the United States. In the Catholic Germania and the left-liberal Freisinnige Zeitung, the corresponding figures were 35.7 and 32.3 percent on France, 31.1 and 31.6 percent on Britain, 21.6 and 24.6 percent on Russia, and 11.6 and 11.5 percent on the USA.67 Reportage of foreign affairs had increased – from 13.92 percent of the Frankfurter Zeitung (excluding advertisements) in 1888 to 27.88 percent in 1913 – and the boundary between foreign and domestic politics had become 63 64

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Ibid. Cited in Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 90. Bethmann, cited in Konrad H. Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 113, 126. The sample comes from 1907; Hewitson, Germany and the Modern World, 47. Mark Hewitson, National Identity and Political Thought in Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), 9.

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less pronounced.68 By 1910, the foreign section of the Berliner Tageblatt, Vossische Zeitung, National-Zeitung, Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, Kölnische Zeitung, and Dresdener Nachrichten was between half and three-quarters of the length of the domestic section.69 In the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger and Neue Preußische Zeitung, the section on foreign affairs was as long or longer than the domestic one.70 Most foreign coverage was European, juxtaposed with domestic news, as the front-page headlines of the BZ am Mittag on 2 August 1909 and 19 March 1914 intimated: “Murder in Berlin N,” “KaiserFriedrich-Museum Robbed,” “Iswolsky on the Political Situation,” “Z II in Cologne,” “Highseas Tragedy in the North Sea,” “Civil War in Ireland?” and “Family Drama in Berlin N.”71 Such reports hinted at the rivalry and proximity of European states, viewed through a national lens. During the First World War, national competition and cooperation turned rapidly into national enmity, but it continued to be directed at the great powers – as nation-states – rather than at “world empires.”72 The lessons of the war which had been learned by German leaders seemed still to relate to the power politics of nation-states, including the United States and USSR, which was usually referred to as “Russia.”73 Even advocates of greater cooperation on the European level normally started from a set of national lessons.74 Interstate relations had changed, declared the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs Gustav Stresemann at the University of Heidelberg on 5 May 1928, in line with the transformation of the social basis of states and the introduction of ideological conflict from the French Revolution onwards.75 Yet, whereas Otto von Bismarck had understood such transformations, exercising moderation in his conduct of power politics in order to construct a peaceful international order, his successors had failed to 68

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O. Groth, “Die politische Presse Württembergs” (1915), in Winfried Schulz (ed.), Der Inhalt der Zeitungen: Eine Inhaltsanalyse der Tagespresse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1967) mit Quellentexten früher Inhaltsanalysen in Amerika, Frankreich und Deutschland (Düsseldorf: Rheinisch-Bergische Druckerei- und Verlagsgesellschaft, 1970), 117, 123. Paul Stoklossa, “Der Inhalt der Zeitung,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 66 (1910), 560–561. Ibid. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 1900, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 140. Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 130–170. Mark Hewitson, “The United States of Europe: The European Question in the 1920s,” in Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria (eds.), Europe in Crisis (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012), 15–34. Cited in Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 344–345.

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understand the same lesson, permitting a “system of international anarchy . . . of alliances and counter-alliances” and allowing Europe “to tear itself apart” in 1914.76 Stresemann’s hope after 1919 was not to abandon the “ruthless application of the principle of national power,” since a majority of Germans and the French government – as it demonstrated with the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 – seemed unwilling to accept such a change of course, but to “create a system of international understanding based on equal rights” of nation-states, given that most Europeans desired peace and that “a new conflagration would deliver our continent to utter ruin as a result of the horrifying escalation of the technology of destruction.”77 Politics in the 1920s had certainly become more “international,” as could be seen at the League of Nations in Geneva, but it continued to be dominated, as far as German politicians and commentators were concerned, by the national rivalries of European states.

Radical and Ordinary Nationalism Nationhood, writes Michael Billig, not only implies “a distinctive imagining of a particular sort of community rooted in a particular sort of place,” but also “an international context, which itself needs to be imagined.”78 “Thus, foreigners are not simply ‘others,’ symbolizing the obverse of ‘us’: they are also like ‘us,’ part of the imagined universal code of nationhood” (or an international world), and different from a “secluded ethnocentric mentality,” he goes on.79 The formation of nation-states necessitates internal consolidation within an external “world” of other nation-states over a long period. Transnational connections cut across such international – or interstate – relations, but they rarely render them redundant.80 Conrad concedes that relations within Europe were of greater importance than entanglements with extra-European societies (except the United States).81 He has also subsequently argued that the transformation of national discourses was as much the effect of internal trajectories as it was that of a larger process of globalization.82 On this reading, German nationalism was shaped by a longer tradition that reached back at least to the Napoleonic 76 78 80

81

82

Ibid., 416–417. 77 Ibid. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), 74, 83. 79 Ibid., 83. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004). Conrad, Globalisierung, 12; Jürgen Osterhammel, “Europamodelle und imperiale Kontexte,” Journal of Modern European History, 2 (2004), 157–182. Conrad, “Globalization Effects,” 64.

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Wars, characterized by Romanticism, the 1848 revolution, and the unification movement.83 Such nationalism constituted a “ubiquitous conceptual scheme,” an “internal paradigm of historical knowledge,” and a “space of social practice,” not a form of “false consciousness.”84 Globalization around the turn of the century did not supersede the nation, in Conrad’s opinion, but undermined and subverted it, provoking a radical backlash and a racialization of nationalist discourse. This account overstates the impact of transnational and global interactions at the same time as understating the resilience of preexisting national traditions and institutions. From the 1840s at the latest, the formation of a German nation-state was, for many liberals and democrats, at once a political project and a European question. “Unification nationalism,” more than separatism or reform nationalism in existing states, required the consent or inactivity of the great powers, which had an interest in the nineteenth-century states’ system in maintaining the weak German center of the European pentarchy.85 Liberals such as Johann Gustav Droysen had hoped in 1848 that Prussia was in a position to decide “the European question,” preventing the return of the “unbearable aspects of the system of 1815” which had led to “the disorder (Unheil) of 1848,” but it had failed to act, leaving reactionaries in Austria and elsewhere to dictate the course of events.86 The Prussian government had sought the alliance of “barbarity” against German unification and “educated Western Europe,” he went on.87 For the historian Droysen, “reactionary” powers – Russia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and, now, the Hohenzollern Monarchy – had “tried to work against a powerfully acting European crisis, to remove from Prussia, Germany and, where possible, Europe, those extensive changes of conditions and attitudes which have already established themselves, to dam the breaches in the dykes and to prevent inundation.”88 At the time, the press and public opinion, in Prussia as in the rest of Germany, were arguably less wary of the great powers than was Droysen, doubting that the states’ system, either in the form of a conservative Holy Alliance or a looser Concert of Europe, was sufficiently coherent and powerful to prevent German unification. Even in the autumn of 1850, as Austria and Russia imposed the London Protocol on Schleswig-Holstein in the face of Prussian opposition 83 84 85

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Conrad, “Wilhelmine Nationalism in Global Contexts,” 283. Conrad, Globalisierung, 334–335; Conrad, “Globalization Effects,” 65. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 96–122. Constitutionelle Zeitung, 12 December 1850, in Felix Gilbert (ed.), Johann Gustav Droysen. Politische Schriften (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1933), 291. Ibid. 88 Ibid., 336.

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and liberal uproar throughout Germany, the National-Zeitung still ridiculed the idea that “the Great Powers have spoken”: “We can answer that diplomats have only found the courage to interfere because of our impotence and inactivity. Everywhere, they only impose their laws on the weak, whilst they always rush, faced with the strong, to recognise faits accomplis.”89 The “old system of a European balance of power” had lost much of its relevance, commented the Preußisches Wochenblatt in 1852: the Holy Alliance was “very nice in theory,” but in reality it had “mostly turned into its very unholy opposite.”90 The reality of the “reaction” of the 1850s made such opinions about the marginality of the states’ system in domestic affairs seem contestable. It did not banish the idea, however, that unification was a worthwhile, largely domestic political objective. As a consequence, unificatory German nationalism was informed by a domestic political agenda and “internal” debates about a constitution. By 1848, it seemed obvious to the majority of German commentators that a national culture and political structure should coincide. “Up until a few decades ago, the common inherited particularity (Stammeseigenthümlichkeit) of a population was only viewed by statecraft in a very secondary way,” wrote the Badenese academic and diplomat Robert von Mohl in 1860: “One was almost proud to be able to show a great exemplary map of nationalities.”91 This had “altered radically,” he went on: Conditions and demands based on nationality have taken up one of the most important places in practical policy. Acquisitions and partitions of lands, which in part have existed for centuries, are now fought over because they do not correspond to the borders of nationalities. The formation of individual states is demanded solely on the basis of the descent of their populations, even at the expense of secession from – and the destruction of – a great whole, or through the merger of hitherto divided fragments.92

By the mid-nineteenth century, argued the former deputy of the Frankfurt parliament, nothing could stand in the way of “claims resting on the 89

90 91

92

National-Zeitung, 9 October 1850, in Nikolaus Buschmann, Einkreisung und Waffenbruderschaft. Die öffentliche Deutung von Krieg und Nation in Deutschland, 1850–1871 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003), 186. Prussia had gone to war against Denmark in 1848 over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. “Schleswig-Holstein” subsequently became a popular national cause in Germany and the object of a second Schleswig War in 1864. The London Protocol (1850) made the question an international one. National-Zeitung, 3 January 1852, in ibid., 209. Robert von Mohl, Staatsrecht, Völkerrecht und Politik, vol. I I (Tübingen: Verlag der H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1860), 333–334. Ibid., 335.

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observance of the particularity of the Volk.”93 The elements making up nationality were barely contested: for Mohl, these were the “facts” of “race” and “tribe,” “climate, the fertility of the soil and its products, historical events too, religion, important personalities,” and “a bodily and mental individuality which manifests itself externally in physique, mentally above all in language, but also in manners and morals, which ultimately rest on innate and constant natural attributes, but which are then determined more closely by historical events and are cultivated in the individual.”94 For most of human history, states – or “inclusion in a certain state organism” – had not been “a significant feature” of nationality, but as the state ceased to be “an end in itself” and began to exist “only to further the purposes of the Volk,” it was forced to take nationality into account.95 To liberals like Mohl, nations did not coincide with the old borders of dynastic states and they had rightly complicated, in a more representative era, state-building and politics. Such supposedly self-evident linkages between nationality, statehood, and the European states’ system remained in place after German unification in 1871. Globalization and imperialism in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s altered the scope and content of nationalism in Germany, reinforcing racial – or “tribal” – assumptions about the nature of the Volk and politicizing the idea of a German nation, but in unpredictable and contradictory ways (see Figure 7.2).96 The posturing and paranoia of the far right became more and more extreme, combining racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia. There was, wrote one correspondent of the Alldeutsche Blätter in 1907, “a broadly based conspiracy . . . with the aim of harming Germandom,” orchestrated by Jews, ultramontanes, Freemasons, and socialists at home, and by the same groups and other enemies such as the “Slavs,” the French, and the AngloSaxons abroad.97 Yet the majority of their compatriots were not radical nationalists. Indeed, they were more likely to treat the 600,000 or so “German-nationals,” from an electorate of 14.36 million (1912), as an object of ridicule. Extra-parliamentary associations such as the Navy League exerted pressure through supporters in the National Liberal, Conservative, and Free Conservative parties and, more erratically, through public campaigns, largely 93 96

97

Ibid. 94 Ibid., 339. 95 Ibid., 339–340. Azar Gat, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 244–327; Anthony D. Smith, The Cultural Foundations of Nations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 160–183; Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Cited in Roger Chickering, “We Men Who Feel Most German”: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1984), 79.

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Figure 7.2 “The African Menace (Die afrikanische Gefahr),” Simplicissimus, 19 April 1904. “It is high time that the government takes action against the Hereros with all of its might, otherwise the black beasts will finally come to Germany and end slavery amongst us.” The left-liberal satirical magazine alludes to the supposedly exotic aspects of the conflict in Southwest Africa in order to cast a domestic struggle between labor and an authoritarian state in a new light.

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in the press, but their party backing was limited: forty-five National Liberals, seventeen Conservatives, and twelve Free Conservatives in total between 1890 and 1914.98 The Alldeutscher Verband was used “as a favorite punchbag,” as one supporter put it in 1911.99 In the words of one liberal correspondent (and deputy) in Die Hilfe in 1910, “the Alldeutsche were completely without influence in Germany, where the government viewed them as a ‘very little desired element in German journalism,’” even if they were more troublesome in Germany’s borderlands.100 For the left-liberal editor of Die Hilfe, Friedrich Naumann, what marked out “Teutonic” – or radical – nationalism was its diversity, with “the feeling of the difference separating the German race from other races” lapsing into anti-Semitism when “questions of foreign policy recede in the popular consciousness during a long era of peace” and when “the struggles between Germans and Poles, Czechs, South Slavs and Romanians are only felt strongly by the inhabitants of mixed areas.”101 For other “new nationalists,” who were influenced by Nietzsche and distanced themselves from “the old, particularistic nationalism,” “the word ‘race’ loses its ethnographic content and becomes the expression of a better human quality altogether.”102 Such radical nationalists continued to be opposed, in Naumann’s opinion, by much more numerous adherents of Protestant and Catholic variants of nationalism, which referred, respectively, to the Enlightenment, Freiherr vom Stein, Bismarck, and the National Liberals (whose politics were “fundamentally German, but fully free of antiSemitism and clerical Romanticism”), or to “those elements of the Center which are neither Welf [Hanoverian] nor particularist,” coming in the process to represent “moderate Catholicism.”103 Nationalists of different kinds had little need to abandon racial and ethnic commonplaces. The marginality of racial theory in varying branches of social and cultural science did not serve to discredit it amongst members of the public.104 Scientific questions about “race,” after all, remained open and fascinating, whether involving the origins of humanity, the discovery of new 98

99

100 101 103 104

Konrad Schilling, “Beiträge zu einer Geschichte des radikalen Nationalismus in der Wilhelminischen Ära, 1890–1909,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cologne, 519–523; Rainer Hering, Konstruierte Nation. Der Alldeutsche Verband, 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 411. Wilhelm Lattmann, 9 November 1911, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des deutschen Reichstages, vol. 268, 7757. H. P. Hansen, “Nordschleswig,” Hilfe, 16/4 (1910), 56. Friedrich Naumann, “Deutscher Nationalsinn,” Hilfe, 20/13 (1914), 198. 102 Ibid., 679. Ibid. Ludwig Stein, “Rasse,” Neue Zeit, 50 (1905), 92; Friedrich Naumann, “Nationale Kultur,” Nation, 21 (1903/1904), 678–679.

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peoples and ways of life, the search for missing links between humans and apes in the evolutionary chain, or the investigation of the means of transmission of human similarities (August Weismann’s “germ plasm theory”).105 In this context, older racial myths and stereotypes persisted without the need for precise scientific validation. Many popular theories – of Chamberlain, Paul de Lagarde, and Julius Langbehn – were mystical, ranging back to the “Germanen” and summoning up vast military and cultural struggles for survival and ascendancy.106 In future, prophesied Langbehn at the end of his bestselling work on a “Germanic culture” encompassing Shakespeare and Rembrandt (which had reached its thirty-ninth edition after two years), Germans “will laugh at their current ‘scientific’ superstition,” developing a “sense of the essence” and becoming “German again!”107 In a similar vein, Chamberlain took issue in Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899) with Ernest Renan’s contention that “the fact of race . . . is diminishing in importance daily,” not least because “the most important nations of Europe resulted from mixed blood.”108 It was nonsensical, in the British-born author’s view, to search for the origins of a “pure race” – “What is such a thing as a physiologically ‘pure race’?” – instead of identifying new “individualities,” or nations, “which almost always derived from mixing, followed by inbreeding.”109 Such theories swirled around turn-of-the-century Germany, enjoying considerable popularity in the “German-national” constituencies of the right and rarely contested in detail on the left and in the center. What mattered most, however, was the use made of racial theory in national politics. Here, there was a salient boundary between radical nationalists and other national-minded politicians and their supporters. 105

106

107

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August Weismann, Das Keimplasma. Eine Theorie der Vererbung (Jena: Gustav Fischer 1892). On the search for a missing link, see Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 62–85. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Munich: Bruckmann, 1899); Paul de Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1886); Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1890); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 3–182. Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 380; see the second review, “Rembrandt als Erzieher,” Historisch-politische Blätter, 108 (1891), 900–910. Bernd Behrendt, Zwischen Paradox und Paralogismus. Weltanschauliche Grundzüge einer Kulturkritik in den neunziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel August Julius Langbehn (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984); Johannes Heinßen, “Kulturkritik zwischen Historismus und Moderne,” in Werner Bergmann and Ulrich Sieg (eds.), Antisemitische Geschichtsbilder (Essen: Klartext, 2009), 121–138; Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann, “Julius Langbehns ‘Rembrandt als Erzieher,’” in Marcus Müller and Sandra Kluwe (eds.), Identitätsentwürfe in der Kunstkommunikation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 295–318. Chamberlain, Grundlagen, vol. I, 344. 109 Ibid., 345, 347.

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After the bloodletting of the First World War, the establishment of the Vaterlandspartei in 1917, and the incomplete defeat of 1918, right-wing nationalism in Germany became more radical.110 The expropriation of colonies and the existence of diaspora in Eastern Europe contributed to this radicalization, but the perceived “dismemberment” of the Kaiserreich in the Versailles Peace Treaty (1919) was much more important, with German territory widely believed to lie beyond the Weimar Republic’s borders. A small but prominent group of conservative intellectuals and a much larger number of Conservative (DNVP), German People’s Party (DVP), and, later, Nazi (NSDAP) politicians and voters toyed with “revolution,” or the replacement of the republic. “The new nationalism is a religious and cultural concept because it pushes toward totality and does not tolerate being limited to the purely political,” wrote Edgar Jung in “Germany and the Conservative Revolution” in 1932, but it had been closely connected from the start to a “counterrevolution” against the republican regime and the postwar international order.111 As in “German-national” circles before 1914, politics and nationality seemed inseparable, with opposition to the existing order pushing conservative revolutionaries and others on the right toward extremes. The “totality” and millenarianism of Jung’s “Third Reich,” like that of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, went beyond “a conceptual world referring to conquest, imperialism, militarism and denationalization”: “It will ruthlessly revise all human values and dissolve all mechanical forms . . . It will be a great Conservative Revolution which prevents the dissolution of Western humanity, founding a new order, a new ethos and a new Western unity under German leadership.”112 As Oswald Spengler made plain in his bestselling Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918– 1922), which he had begun in 1912 but which he revised and largely wrote after 1914, the “new nationalism” was framed against a transformed backdrop of Europe’s self-destruction in the First World War, the threat to the “West” from “Slavs” in the east, a punitive peace treaty, and an illegitimate political regime.113 For Spengler, Germany was the last dynamic nation in the West, whose mission was to ward off, but not prevent, the inevitable 110

111

112 113

Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik. Die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (Munich: Deutschen Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), 113–213. Edgar J. Jung , “Deutschland und die konservative Revolution,” in Edgar J. Jung, Deutsche über Deutschland. Die Stimme des unbekannten Politikers (Munich: LangenMüller 1932), 369–382. Ibid. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1922–1923).

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decline of its ten-generation-long “culture.”114 This radical vision of the world corresponded to the changed political circumstances of Germany and Europe after 1918. Although it rested on a global history of humanity, it comprehended the threat to Germany in traditional, Eurocentric geographical (West versus East) and historical terms (the rise and fall of Greece and Rome). “Völkisch” nationalism, together with the concepts of a “Volksgemeinschaft,” “der völkische Gedanke,” and “die völkische Bewegung,” entered common usage during the 1920s in order to distinguish radical right-wing variants of nationalist thought, which denoted a deep-rooted culture or ethnicity based on descent, from other forms of nationalism, with which right-wing variants continued to compete. In the prewar period, the label “völkisch” was neither widely deployed nor distinct, as Uwe Puschner concedes: it first appeared in Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon in 1909 with a three-line entry, stating that it was “a Germanicization of the foreign word ‘national.’”115 After 1918, the terminology of nationalism had altered, betraying the radicalization of the right in the postwar republic. A “völkische Weltanschauung,” according to Hermann Meyer in Der deutsche Mensch (1925), “places the word völkisch in direct opposition to its synonym national.”116 “Nation” and “national” in this reading denote citizenship and political organization, close to the historical meaning of “Staatsvolk” and influenced by French and English references to the League of Nations. “Völkisch” alluded to ethnicity and heredity, revealing the propinquity of “race” and “culture.” In Jung’s opinion, the Germans would lead the conservative revolution because they were “the biologically most powerful people (Volk) in Europe.”117 To Moeller van den Bruck, race was the foundation of blood underpinning all historical events.118 Yet, for the author of Das Dritte Reich (1923) and many other right-wing commentators, culture – embodied in Spengler’s definition of the Volk as “a unity of the soul” – remained preeminent.119 Race, which appeared to be traceable in the artifacts and buildings of historical groups, 114

115

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117 118

119

Ibid., vol. I I , 781–783. See also Rolf Peter Sieferle, Die konservative Revolution. Fünf biographische Skizzen (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1995), 106–131. Quoted in Uwe Puschner, Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich: Sprache, Rasse, Religion (Darmstadt: WBG, 2001), 27. Hermann Meyer, Der deutsche Mensch. Völkische Weltanschauung und deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (Munich: Lehmann, 1925), 5; Stefan Breuer, Grundpositionen der deutschen Rechten, 1871–1945 (Tübingen: Diskord, 1999), 148–155. Jung, “Deutschland und die konservative Revolution,” 369–382. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 201–206; Carl Schmidt, Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1923), 50. Moeller van den Bruck talked of “geistige Rassezugehörigkeit”; Spengler, Untergang, 747.

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was a historical illusion, in Spengler’s view, resulting from the fact that early histories were written about ruling dynasties, whose blood ties had been transferred mistakenly to the nation as a whole.120 “The Volk is a group of men who feel themselves to be a whole,” he concluded, after examining the ways in which environment – or the “soil” – and history had produced a sense of belonging and shared consciousness.121 In contrast to biological determinism, with Darwin pitted against Nietzsche, “race” was rarely objectionable in itself to those on the right – and to many in the center and on the left – but it also regularly played only a secondary part in völkisch nationalism. When the National Socialists made race the foundation of their ideology, movement, and regime, few of their supporters and collaborators seem to have been put off by the idea. Most, though, seem to have prioritized other elements – economic activism, scapegoating, authoritarianism, revision of Versailles – of the NSDAP’s racist and nationalist program. In this sense, despite its expansionism, its conspiracies of “world Jewry,” and its downfall in a world war, the “hybrid” racial nationalism of the Nazis continued to be an internal or European affair.122

Conclusion Racial, ethnic, and national distinctions and hierarchies are always founded on contemporaries’ perceptions of a wider world, even if only referring to distant lands and unknown groups over “there,” yet what matters is how that world is understood and related to individuals’ own society “here.” The transnational case about the radicalization and racialization of nationalist discourse as a result of globalization is more specific than this general distinction, proposing that increased migration, economic integration in a world market, and a transformation of the means of communication led to de- and reterritorialization, heightened uncertainty about the security of borders, and fear of culturally different religious, ethnic, and national groups. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was characterized not merely by states’ surveillance of borders but by their increased attention to the development of territory within those borders, devoting “all [their] human energy and material resources” to territorial exclusion by means of infrastructure.123 Borders assumed greater significance because no place 120 122

123

Ibid., 696–754. 121 Ibid., 747. Stefan Breuer, Nationalismus und Faschismus. Frankreich, Italien und Deutschland im Vergleich (Darmstadt: WBG, 2005), 146–161. Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 325.

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within them “should be free of state control” and because the state “demanded more of its citizens (military service) and offered them more (social welfare).”124 Conrad disagrees with Charles Maier’s claim that territorialization during modernity had been followed by deterritorialization after the 1970s, as states – especially but not only Western ones – became entangled in “processes of global networking.”125 For the Berlin historian, processes of de- and reterritorialization were concurrent – not consecutive – throughout, helping to explain why nationals became preoccupied by borders – imposing immigration checks, hygienic controls, fingerprints, passports, and citizenship laws – and why they were more likely to look on internal and external opponents or rivals in racial terms.126 Although some of these “globalizing effects” can be discerned amongst “German nationals” in the 1890s and 1900s and in the “völkisch” splinter groups and movements of the 1920s, they continued to be opposed by mainstream parties and majority opinion, which put forward alternative conceptions of a German nation-state, national interest, power politics, and German culture. Within the varying strands of unificatory nationalism that emerged and were consolidated in the mid-nineteenth century, the most significant questions concerned the enactment of a German – or Reich – constitution, the demarcation of a national territory, the creation of political institutions, the development of a national market, and the conduct of foreign policy in a European states’ system which had Germany at its center. These moderate forms of nationalism, which rested on a more or less unquestioned attachment after 1871 to the territory and institutions of the Kaiserreich, continued to inform party politics, distancing many National Liberals and Conservatives from the radical pan-Germanism of the extra-parliamentary leagues. “We quite often supported [the government] against the attacks of the Alldeutscher Verband and other national hotheads,” noted the Conservative politician Kuno von Westarp in his memoirs.127 For his part, the pan-German leader Heinrich Claß openly admitted that “the Alldeutscher Verband stood almost always alone and out on a limb in its political struggle,” which was understandable “in an era in which attention to the wishes of those in the highest positions on the part of all national circles dampened down the unleashing of the struggle.”128 “The political parties standing 124 127

128

Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Conrad, “Globalization Effects,” 44–45. Kuno von Westarp, Konservative Politik im letzten Jahrzehnt des Kaiserreiches, vol. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1935), 382. Heinrich Claß, Wider den Strom (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1932), 266.

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on the national side saw in the pan-German League an uncomfortable admonisher and kept their distance from it, even though many of their most reputable members belonged to the league,” he went on.129 Attempts to set up connections “diagonally” under his predecessor Ernst Hasse were bound to fail “because the ties of the deputies to their parties were stronger than to the pan-German business.”130 In other words, contemporaries’ national attachment to the German Empire outweighed their sympathy for individual policies – about the army, navy, colonies, eastern territories, or social democracy – pursued by radical nationalist associations. The declaration of a republic in November 1918 amidst the contested conditions of Germany’s defeat in the First World War altered that balance of affiliations and allegiances for many in the center and on the right. The racial schemes and conspiracies of the 1920s drew on those of the prewar era, in which anxieties about racial mixing, world empires, assimilation, defense of the “eastern marches,” expulsions, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia had started to merge with each other. However, it is misleading to suggest that the colonial practices or, even, global racial hierarchies of the German Empire were transferred to policies of expansion – or “push” – toward the east.131 Stereotypes of Poles, “Slavs,” and Jews had a long history in Germany, antedating German colonialism and globalization by many decades.132 Historians who have accounted for the Holocaust by referring to German and European colonialism – rather than the longer histories of racism and anti-Semitism or the shorter-term impact of the First World War – have failed to explain why racially defined “colonial archives” and massacres in the empires of other European states were not translated in the interwar era into “genocidal totalitarianism,” writes Kühne.133 For Hannah Arendt, the “totalitarian imperialism” of the Nazis was preceded not by “the British, Dutch or French version of overseas rule” but by the “German, Austrian and Russian version of a continental imperialism which never actually succeeded, and therefore is neglected by students of imperialism, but which in the form of the so-called pan-movements – pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism – was a very potent political force in Central and Eastern 129 131

132 133

Ibid., 266–267. 130 Ibid., 267. Shelley Baranowski, “Against ‘human diversity as such,’” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (eds.), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York, Columbia University Press, 2011), 51–71, and Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Gerwarth and Malinowski, “Der Holocaust als ‘kolonialer Genozid’?,” 453. Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust,” 339.

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Europe,” premised on the treatment of “European peoples as colonials under the rule of a master race of Germanic or Slavic origin.”134 The tribal nationalism of the pan-Germans, which Arendt described, itself derived from and could still be found in the borderlands of Austria-Hungary, the populations of which coexisted in mutual suspicion of each other and without a state of their own.135 In the interwar period, after the supposed dismemberment of Germany and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, with proxy wars on the eastern border and paramilitary violence at home, more Reichsdeutsche (or those living on the territory of the Kaiserreich) were willing – in an “illegitimate” republic and in conditions of economic hardship – to countenance the racial stereotyping and scapegoating of völkisch nationalism.136 Yet a large majority, who had little knowledge of the eastern borderlands and whose political affiliations had long been tied to the German Reich (which continued to exist in the Weimar Constitution as a legal and territorial entity), remained opposed to the precarious, self-evident truths of the radical nationalists. From this point of view, global mobility and transnational interactions played only a minor role in the transition after 1930 to the most notorious instance of racist hypernationalism in twentieth-century history.137

Further Reading Breuer, S., Nationalismus und Faschismus. Frankreich, Italien und Deutschland im Vergleich (Darmstadt: WBG, 2005). Berger, S., Inventing the Nation: Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2004).

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Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarian Imperialism,” Journal of Politics, 20 (1958), 37–38; Dirk A. Moses, “Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, and the Holocaust,” in Langbehn and Salama, German Colonialism, 74. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 224–246. Timothy S. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). For a long time, this debate was tied to the notion of Germany’s “special path’ (Sonderweg): David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Jürgen Kocka, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), 3–16; James J. Sheehan, “Paradigm Lost? The “Sonderweg” Revisited,” in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006), 150–160. On the connection between this debate and another about imperialism, see Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-history of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History, 41 (2008), 1–27.

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Germany as a “Global Nation,” 1840–1930 Breuilly, J., The Formation of the First German Nation-State, 1800–1871 (London: Palgrave, 1996). Conrad, S., German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Conrad, S., Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Dann, O., Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1770–1990 (Munich: Beck’sche CH Verlagsbuchhandlung Oscar Beck, 1993). Gosewinkel, D., Einbürgern und ausschließen. Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001). James, H. A, German Identity, 1770–1990 (London: Routledge, 1989). Liulevicius, V. G., The German Myth of the East, 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Panayi, P., Ethnic Minorities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Turks and Others (London: Routledge, 2000).

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8

The Russian and Soviet Empire ronald grigor suny and valerie a. kivelson

Empires and nations pull in different directions. Empires are founded on principles of institutionalized differences and distinctions, both laterally between peoples or geographies and vertically between those on top whose superiority grants them the right to rule over others and those below whose inferiority condemns them to be ruled by others. Nations, in contrast, are imagined and affective communities that promote, at least rhetorically if not always in practice, the commonality, horizontal equivalency, and homogeneity of the population that constitutes the nation. A nation at its inception is a political claim that a shared culture, ethnic, political, or religious, gives a people the right to self-rule, and possibly to sovereignty and statehood. At one end of the political spectrum, empires operate through hierarchy and difference between subjects and rulers, while at the other end, nations function on the basis of equality and shared nature, whether ethnic, religious, or political, of their citizens. The experiences of the tsarist and Soviet empires demonstrate both how these ideal types illuminate the tensions that exist within empires and nations between differentiation and homogenization, and how imperial and nationalizing practices coexist within actual polities. Empires have contributed to the constitution of nations within them while at the same time limiting that development and working toward a transnational identification with the imperial state itself. We will refer to this kind of loyalty to the state, the ruler, or a dynasty, as opposed to loyalty to the people that constitute the nation, as “patriotism.”1 Emerging from centuries of political fragmentation (Kievan Rus’ and Appanage Russia) and conquest by an alien empire (the Mongols), the rulers of the first Russian state, Muscovy, appropriated the title emperor (tsar) from the Mongol (khan) and Byzantine (caesar) examples and boldly proclaimed 1

For a full account of the theory and historical research behind this chapter, see Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, Russia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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themselves superior to the lesser lords of other Russian and Tatar principalities and khanates. The first “Russian” state, Muscovy, was imperial almost from its outset, as it acquired one principality after another under Ivan III in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Muscovite Russia was a multiethnic and multireligious state, but one that self-identified as the paragon of Orthodox Christianity, ruled by a divinely ordained monarch who protected the lands and peoples of the tsardom. Ivan IV “the Terrible” declared himself tsar at his coronation in 1547. The people he ruled were largely speakers of Slavic languages, with Finnish, Baltic, and Turkic speakers included, and any sense of common identity was connected to allegiance to the tsar, a loyalty that was probably felt most strongly by the warrior, clerical, and civil elites. With the conquest of the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the mid-sixteenth century, Russia gravitated from a largely ethnically Russian state to an imperial amalgam of distinct and diverse peoples. Most residents of the tsardom probably remained untouched by sentiments of belonging to an abstract political entity. Regional and local identities, religious (Orthodox, Muslim, and pagan) and ethnic affiliations, all offered potent alternatives to the national or imperial frameworks that have preoccupied political theorists and political actors alike since the nineteenth century. In early modern times, when modern forms of mobilization were not available, other kinds of affiliations were clearly on view. The strongest sense of belonging came when those who lived in tsarist Russia felt threatened by outsiders, either from the west (Catholic Poland) or from the east (Turkic and Siberian tribes). Fear of losing their own way of life created a strong collective bond to the ethnopolitical community and led to cross-class alliances against the foreign threat. In the so-called “Time of Troubles” (Smutnye Vremeni), when the Rurikid dynasty lapsed and invaders seized the capital, ordinary people, led by a butcher and a prince, rallied to drive the Poles from Moscow and proclaim the young Mikhail Romanov the new tsar (1613). Russian nationalists and historians have seen this moment of collective consciousness as a “national awakening.” In the face of PolishCatholic invasion, Orthodox Russians rallied in defense of their land, but the animating power of their “national” awakening seems to have been fleeting. When the confrontation with the foreigners was over, that sense of relative Russianness dissipated and militants returned to their more fragmentary local, regional, and religious spheres. This episode of early modern mobilization in the face of foreign assault was analogous to a similar response to the invasion 200 years later by the French and more than a century after that by the Germans. Each time Russians were confronted by foreign attacks, the 159

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sense of national purpose coalesced, and in each successive episode it built self-consciously on earlier experiences, layering and solidifying an increasingly enduring, historically informed sense of unity. Like many other collective identities, Russianness defined itself most vociferously by what it was not. The foreign other was required for the fragile sense of political cohesion, especially as the empire expanded across the Eurasian continent and incorporated more and more non-Russian peoples. In the seventeenth century Russia expanded not only eastward through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean but also westward and southward into what is today Ukraine (“Little Russia”), Lithuania, and Belarus (“White Russia”). Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich proudly proclaimed himself “tsar of all Great, Little, and White Russia” as well as sovereign tsar and grand prince, by grace of God, of all Russia, Vladimir, Moscow, Novgorod, tsar of Kazan, tsar of Astrakhan, sovereign of Pskov, and grand prince of Smolensk, Tver, Iurgorsk, Perm, Viatka, Bolgar, and others, sovereign and grand prince of the Nizhnii Novgorodian lands, of Chernigov, Riazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Iaroslavl, Belozero, Liefland, Udorsk, Obdorsk, Kondinsk, and ruler of all the Siberian lands and of the great river Ob, and ruler of the Northern lands and sovereign of many other lands.

The Orthodox autocrat governed the largest country in the world, which soon, under his son Peter the Great, would become a European power with which the great powers would have to contend. To realize his ambition to be part of the Enlightened West, Peter I altered the traditional hierarchies of Muscovy based in genealogical lineages and established instead a systematic ranking that conferred social standing according to the length of time spent in obligatory state service and the level of posting within that service hierarchy, while also preserving an element of hereditary status and adding some consideration of merit. By its dress, language, and lack of facial hair, the Westernized elite was further distanced from the mass of the people. The new capital, St. Petersburg, became Peter’s “window to the West,” and his victories over the Swedes and Turks secured access to the Baltic and Black seas. Peter’s revolution turned the attention of those in power toward an imitation of Europe, away from Russian traditions, and a distancing from the simple folk (narod). Elite political attitudes centered largely on the state and the imperial space rather than developing any sense of a community of people engaged in common endeavor. Rather than the formation of a “nation,” Peter’s policies accentuated the chasm between

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society and the people. The upper classes elaborated a patriotic sense that went along with the emperor’s notion that he as well as all others were servants of a commonweal and a cause greater than themselves. Through the eighteenth century the nobility gained in power, prestige, and privilege, while the peasant serfs fell into servitude bordering on slavery. Emperors and empresses alike had to ensure the loyalty of their nobles, particularly the elite guards regiments, or they could end up murdered like the unfortunate Peter III (1762) or Paul (1801). The brilliant usurper Catherine II, the “Mother of the Motherland,” was particularly adept at manipulating her courtiers, as a string of lovers moved in and out of the councils of state and her bedroom. “Power,” as she told Diderot, “without a nation’s confidence is nothing.” The nation she spoke of here was first and foremost the courtiers closest to her. When the narod (the common people) spoke in the sanguinary revolt of the Cossack Emelian Pugachev (1773–1775), she brought the full wrath of the state down on those who had dared to question her right to rule. In the latter half of the eighteenth century an old word with myriad connotations took on the cluster of meanings that would make it one of the most powerful political concepts of modern times. “Nation” came to refer to a community of people separate from the state that grants legitimacy to the state authority. In the emerging discourse of the nation, a universal claim was made that those who have achieved a collective national consciousness ought to be free to rule themselves, to be the sovereign power in their own territory (the “homeland”). While the term “nation” (natsiia) was employed in eighteenth-century Russia, often to refer to foreigners, other forms of identification – social, ethnic, and religious – precluded the realization of any all-encompassing national consciousness. As a descriptor, Russian could refer to the empire writ large, including all of its non-Orthodox and non-Slavic areas and populations, but it could not refer to a Russian subject of another ethnicity, language, and faith. A Tatar could be understood as a Russian Tatar, as opposed to a Turk, but not as a Russian. Russian meant being Orthodox Christian as well as living in the tsar’s realm. For the secularized, Westernized elite, there was a patriotic, state-oriented loyalty to tsar and country and very little interest in the common people, except as the sentimental subjects of the new romantic sensibility that arose in literature and art of the latter part of the eighteenth century. The ideologues of the time were most concerned to replace or supplement religious justifications for autocracy with secular ones that promoted the rulers’ concern for their people’s

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welfare. This became Russia’s equivalent of the Western empires’ civilizing mission. As in other countries, so in Russia, toward the end of the eighteenth century, writers were fascinated by the new anthropological search for “national characters.” Influenced by the European Enlightenment, scholars in Russia – often Germans – made much of ethnic differences. When Baltic German barons, whose lands had been incorporated into the empire, became overly visible during the reign of the Empress Anna (1730–1740), “Russian” nobles feared the loss of their privileged status and condemned the access by those “foreigners.” Patriotism, like nationalism later, protected privilege, discouraged competition from others, and constructed solidarities among some against another. The empresses Elizabeth (1741–1762) and Catherine II (1762–1796) cleverly justified their ascensions to the throne as acts of restoration, bringing back the glories of Peter the Great, who despite his rejection of Muscovite traditions was now seen as authentically Russian. Catherine the Great erected a statue of Peter prominently on Senate Square, solidifying the connection of this German princess, now Orthodox tsarina, to her powerful progenitor. Just as Enlightenment Age Europeans busily classified peoples and plants, so Russian ethnographers helped as well, constructing a “Russian national character” as “easygoing, tolerant, warm-hearted, communal, spiritual, sincere, and loyal; the shortcomings attributed to them by Russian writers – superstitiousness, drunkenness, corruption, laziness, disregard for rules – were deemed logical, even endearing corollaries to these favorable qualities.”2 The very process started by Peter to Westernize Russia increasingly made people aware of what was distinctive about Russia and how much Russia differed from the West. Yet as the nineteenth century began, identities still clustered variously around locality, social position in the existing hierarchy, the ruler, the dynasty, the state, religion, and a sense of belonging to a particular ethnic community. As the major power resisting the innovations presented by the French Revolution of 1789, Russia was not prepared to succumb to the threat presented by the discourse of the nation, which in the next 100 years would legitimate the people’s power. In the fifty-three years from the accession of Catherine the Great (1762) to the death of her grandson, Alexander I (1825), the Russian Empire absorbed the lands of Poland, Finland, and the south Caucasus (the future Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia). Neither nationality nor the sovereignty 2

Alexander Martin, “The Invention of ‘Russianness’ in the Late 18th–Early 19th Century,” Ab Imperio, 3 (2003), 126.

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of other states was a concern for St. Petersburg. Security and glory, followed by trade and economic advantages, were paramount. Poland was a vulnerable victim to be divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Finland was a prize of war, taken from Sweden when Stockholm unwisely joined the Napoleonic coalition in 1809. Caucasia, the most difficult frontier to conquer, was wrested from the Ottoman and Persian empires during the early nineteenth century, in part justified as a benevolent act of liberation of Christian Armenians and Georgians from the repression of Muslim overlords. Poland became a kingdom within the empire that the Orthodox tsar ruled as king of a Catholic land. Finland became a Grand Duchy with the emperor as grand duke and head of its Lutheran church. Toleration of religious differences and local customs and laws extended not only to Poland and Finland but to Muslims and Jews, though the latter were largely restricted to living in the infamous Pale of Settlement (roughly in parts of present-day Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus). But tolerance did not mean equality or rights; it entailed obligations, discrimination, and restrictions as well. The imperial center ruled through difference while at the same time encouraging bureaucratic regularization and uniformity as much as possible. The moment of reckoning with the French Revolution and its aftermath came with the invasion by Napoleon in 1812. Later depicted as a popular national triumph against a foreign intruder, celebrated by Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace and by Petr Tchaikovsky in his “1812 Overture,” the war at the time was seen differently from the top and bottom of Russian society. The tsar and his closest supporters spoke of ridding the monarch’s empire of invaders, a divinely ordained triumph of autocracy supported by a devoted people. There could be no concession to the independent role of the people, which would have been a sinister threat to autocratic rule. The “nation,” such as it was, was embodied in the tsar himself. From below the war was more local than national, more a matter of self-defense or imposed obligation than voluntary engagement in a popular resistance to foreign tyranny. Yet in massproduced lubki, the wood-block prints commissioned to promote patriotism, the Russian people were shown to be humble, brave, strong, heroic men and women in contrast to the foppish, effete French. Those images competed with the celebration of the tsar himself. Generally not enthusiastic about the war, peasants were ready to defend their villages. Petersburg society feared that the peasants might rise up and support Napoleon if he promised emancipation of the serfs (he did not). The regime did what it could to stir up enthusiasm for the war. General Kutuzov paraded the venerated Icon of 163

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the Smolensk Mother of God before his troops at the battle of Borodino. Ultimately tens of thousands of ordinary Russians did not revolt against the autocrat but fought and died for their fellow soldiers or homes or simply out of fear of reprisal if they mutinied. The war had a profound effect on the Russian elites. Many noblemen marched in triumph in Paris after the defeat of Napoleon and returned to Russia with liberal and radical ideas about constitutional reform. Secret societies drafted plans that came to naught. When the new emperor, Nicholas I (1825–1855), marked his succession to the throne on Senate Square in St. Petersburg, a brief protest, the Decembrist Revolt, shook the regime, signaling that ideas about Russia’s future within the educated classes were deviating from the stolid, conservative thoughts of the tsar and his court. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century Russians hotly contested who made up the “nation.” Nicholas devised his own national ideology, known as Official Nationality, which promoted the triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality (Narodnost’),” which touted a subservient, faithful people who loved their monarch. But this artificial attempt to circumvent independent thinking about Russian society, politics, and its destiny failed to stop the emerging intelligentsia from discussing and formulating its own ideas about empire and nation. While the official tsarist view of what was national sought to preserve the hierarchies and privileges of a given state form and collapsed the nation into the ruling Westernized elite rather than the mass of the people, emboldened intellectuals staked out their own positions. The first concerted nationalist thinking in the Russian Empire followed on the heels of a sensational article in 1836 by Catholic nobleman Petr Chaadaev, which claimed that Russia had no history and therefore possessed a tabula rasa on which it could inscribe a unique future. The article provoked stealthy debates in upper-class salons, where conversation could bypass the strictures of censorship. Liberal Westernizers, who saw Russia’s future imitating Europe, were confronted by conservative Slavophiles, who celebrated pre-Petrine Russian traditions and the simple village communes of the enserfed peasants. For the Slavophiles, Russia’s national character consisted of a highly spiritual religiosity. Russians were peace-loving, collectivist, artistic, spontaneous, and freedom-loving. They manifested an organic unity in love that was called sobornost’ (roughly, spiritual collectivity or community within Orthodoxy). Their future lay in unity of tsar and people and the organization of society around the peasant commune. The socialists who succeeded the Westernizers and Slavophiles married their socialism to the peasant 164

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commune, and like the Slavophiles opposed the social disintegration and bourgeois individualism of European capitalism. As with other peoples in the early nineteenth century, Russia’s intellectuals, particularly poets, journalists, and historians, were in a sense thinking nations into existence or at least elaborating the characteristics, symbols, and signs that would make the nation familiar to a broader public. From Ivan Karamzin’s multivolume History of the Russian State (1816–1826), through the great synthetic works of Sergei Solovev and Vasilii Kliuchevskii, historians told the story of Russia as a tale of a recognizable polity, something like a nation-state, which heroically emerged from Rus, held off its enemies, and built a strong, resilient empire. In many ways their idea of Russia conformed to west European models, although they acknowledged and even emphasized its uniquely multiethnic composition. Karamzin’s contribution was particularly significant, for his work was extremely popular among educated readers, and it provided a colorful, patriotic narrative of Russia’s past up to the Time of Troubles. The poet Alexander Pushkin proclaimed, “Karamzin, it seemed, discovered ancient Rus’, as Columbus discovered America.”3 Ethnic Russians (Russkie) had acquired an origins story, as they constituted the dominant people who consolidated the state that embraced all the nationalities (Rossiiskie) that made up the empire. Russia’s greatest poets and novelists conceived of their country as an imperial nation. They were both enchanted by the peoples it conquered and convinced of the superiority of Russian civilization. The “literary Caucasus” of Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, and later of Tolstoy, was a scene of admired natural spontaneity and noble savages, combined with fear of excessive freedom and violence. Convinced that Russia was superior to the non-Russian natives of the peripheries, officials justified the violence that they meted out as necessary to their civilizing mission. The elite Russian sense of self was sutured to empire – that was their understanding of nation. Russians often viewed their fierce opponents through an erotic gaze, fascinated by the fierceness and freedom of the women and men of the mountains. Ironically, once the conquest was consummated, and native peoples themselves read the works of Russian writers, the humanism and moral concerns of Russian letters inspired opposition to the empire in which these literary classics had been conceived. The shock of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856) propelled intellectuals to think about their country’s fate and future. Both liberals and 3

Cited in Olga Maiorova, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 4.

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conservatives, and the more radical socialists who emerged later, imagined Russian society (obshchestvo) and the people as separate and distinct from the state and its bureaucratic and military establishment. While dreams for a constitutional monarchy, liberal democracy, or socialist state remained distant and utopian, liberal reformers who hoped that concessions would descend from an enlightened emperor, like Alexander II (1855–1881), contended with the generation of radicals and revolutionaries who turned from journalism to terrorism and assassinated the tsar-emancipator on 1 March 1881. Alexander had been a reformer but in the frame of preserving and enhancing autocracy. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 did not give full rights to Russia’s manorial peasants but bound them through debt and obligatory payments to their villages. A legal system was devised that provided peasant courts separate from those for the rest of the population. His son, Alexander III (1881–1894), ended the more liberal reforms and issued a series of counterreforms that increased the powers of the landed nobility. A heavy-set and authoritarian figure, the tsar was deeply anti-Semitic and advocated cultural Russification as a policy. The liberties enjoyed by Ukrainians, Poles, Armenians, and others were curtailed. In the eyes of the Russian state and its conservative supporters, the Russian people had three intimately connected branches: “Little Russians” (Ukrainians), “White Russians” (Belorussians), and most importantly, “Great Russians.” The greatest threat to this imperial concept of the Russian nation was the resistance of Ukrainian intellectuals and political activists who proposed that Ukraine was a separate nation with its own language, traditions, and history. Along with state patriotism, nationalism remained an elite phenomenon limited to the top of society. Conservative writers and officials advocated the unity of all Slavs, pan-Slavism, but such notions had limited influence in society or on imperial policy. Many Slavs, like the Poles, had no interest in a tight connection with the Russians. Polish noblemen had led two massive revolts against Russian dominance, in 1830 and 1863, after which the Russian authorities abolished Poland’s autonomous status. Rather than forge Slavic unity, pan-Slavic rhetoric stimulated particularistic national responses among various peoples. Even as Russian conservatives proposed an imperial patriotism, or even attempted to advance a hybrid form of nationalism wedded to autocratic rule, non-Russian intellectuals articulated their own visions of nationalism for their nations. Because of the nature of Russian autocratic rule, and the growing sense among government officials that minority nationalism would lead to separation from the empire, non-Russian 166

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nationalist movements from their infancy existed as illegal, underground organizations, subversive and revolutionary. More than half the population of the empire were not Great Russians, and no shared ties of nationness linked Buddhists and Muslims, Jews and Christians, Siberian tribesmen and Central Asian nomads together. Most harshly treated by the government were the Jews, most of whom were confined to the Pale of Settlement in western Russia and Ukraine, and the millions of Muslims brought forcibly into the empire with the conquest of Caucasia and Central Asia. Some peoples at certain times were favored over others, only to fall out of favor later. Baltic Germans were admired as fellow Europeanized nobles, only to be rejected as intrusive and overly ambitious foreigners. Armenians and Greeks were prized for their purported mercantile talents, though by the turn of the century Armenians were distrusted as subversive revolutionaries. In the 1890s the state embarked on a vast program of government-funded industrialization, and the growth of industry and the promotion of capitalist enterprises produced a small but growing urban working class. These social transformations laid the ground for a major alternative to nationalist solidarity – class allegiances and peasant- and worker-oriented socialist movements that were inclusive movements of all ethnic groups and religions. Often the most successful oppositional movements among non-Russians in the empire combined a social resistance to the regime and the rejection of capitalism with the emotions and language of a national, anti-imperial struggle. For nationalists the nation was real, natural, and would inevitably assert itself once imperial suppression had been eliminated. But in the Russian Empire, nationalist movements, among both those who touted ethnic “Russianness” and those who identified with other national groups within the empire, were still in the early twentieth century largely centered in the ethnic intelligentsias, among students and the lower middle classes of the towns, with at best a fleeting following among broader strata. Among peoples largely made up of peasants, like the Belorussians, Lithuanians, and Azerbaijanis, the paramount identification was with people nearby with whom they shared social and religious communality, rather than a sense of ethnic nationality. For these peoples neither nationalism nor socialism was able to mobilize large numbers into the political struggles that would decide their future. For several other nationalities, among them the Latvians and Georgians, class-based socialist movements were far more potent than political nationalism. For still other nationalities, like the Ukrainians, Finns, and Estonians, nationality competed with a sense of class for primary loyalty of the workers and peasants, with neither winning a dominant position. Faced 167

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by the threat of annihilation at the hands of Ottoman Turks, Armenians rallied around an inclusive, all-class nationalism and a socialist-nationalist party, the Dashnaktsutyun. For the Muslim populations of Caucasia and Central Asia, religion served as the most potent collective affiliation and mobilizing issue. The most clearly articulated national solidarity, tinged like many others by socialist aspirations, was among the Poles.4 The popular Polish Socialist Party (PPS) mixed its socialism with a heavy dose of Polish patriotism, while the more orthodox and internationalist Marxist party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) remained a minor splinter party. To the right of both socialist parties, which advocated armed resistance to the empire, the National Democrats eschewed revolution while embracing anti-Semitism and rejecting association with Jews, Ukrainians, and other non-Poles. The new languages of politics progressively eroded the legitimizing discourses of empire at the same time as rapid social transformations – the spread of capitalist relations, industrialization, increased social mobility, and urbanization – undermined the traditional hierarchies of estates (sosloviia) with nobles on top and peasants below. The tensions between society and the state, and the contradictions between an emerging capitalist industrial society in the towns and the autocratic authority, exploded in a series of revolutionary upheavals: massive strikes, mutinies, and peasant revolts in the years 1905–1907; a burgeoning urban resistance by workers in the years just before the First World War, 1912–1914; followed by the collapse of the empire in the February Revolution of 1917. The first revolutionary years, 1905–1907, witnessed an upsurge in intellectual and political interest in nationalism. Nationalist newspapers appeared, and ethnocentric parties contested the elections to the four dumas (parliaments). In the new public sphere, through duma elections and attention to national politics, the idiom and rhetoric of nation became more widespread, only to explode with the outbreak of the First World War. Many reformers in the military hoped that a civic all-Russian “nation” could be created in the empire, one that would be able to stand up to the more homogeneous nation-states of the West. At the same time, self-proclaimed “true Russian nationalists” spouted anti-Semitic slogans and launched pogroms against Jews. They proposed that the empire favor all Orthodox East Slavs, support them in their historic struggle against Catholic Poles and the Jews, and 4

Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 20–83.

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change electoral laws so that they promoted people of Russian nationality over others. Conservative officials supported the prosecution in the notorious Beilis Case, in which an innocent Jew was accused of the ritual killing of a Christian child. Patriotism is both the progenitor and the product of war. In 1914 Russians went to war with enthusiasm, some for their tsar, others for their homeland, still others for family and their fellow soldiers. Anti-German feeling swept the country. Yet, although some historians argue to the contrary, it seems the actual cohesion of a national community in Russia remained weak.5 After an initial patriotic upsurge of support, women, non-Russians, and in time workers and soldiers protested against the war. A massive Kazakh revolt broke out in 1916 against being drafted to serve in labor battalions to bolster the war effort. Rumors spread that the tsarist family itself was foreign, corrupt, debauched, and manipulated through the person of the Germanborn empress. Liberal politicians accused the government of incompetence bordering on treason. The rival warring empires – Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman – attempted to stimulate nationalism among the minorities of the opposing empire. When the tsar fell from power in early March 1917, the superficial cohesion that had sustained the state in the first years of the war swiftly dissipated. Polarized class divisions overwhelmed attempts by moderate socialists to unify the “vital forces of the nation” in the support of a democratic transformation. Instead of a cross-class civic Russian nation, two antagonistic clusters emerged. A cobbled-together solidarity of the lower classes – peasants, workers, and soldiers – opposed the middle and upper classes. Soldiers “voted with their feet,” deserting the front for their home villages. When the most radical mass party in the country, the Bolsheviks, seized power in October 1917, the contours of social division sharpened into civil war. Whatever buds of nationhood had appeared in war withered in the social polarization and rise of class, regional, village,

5

For a different argument on national solidarity in the First World War, see Joshua A. Sanborn, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: A Re-examination,” Slavic Review, 59/2 (2000), 267–289; Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011); Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, “‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914–1917,” American Historical Review, 109/1 (February 2004), 78–116; Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Mobilizing the Russian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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and ethnic identities that overwhelmed the cross-class connections of an imperial Russian nation. The February Revolution ended legal, social, religious, and ethnic discriminations and inequities among the peoples of the Russian Empire. The new revolutionary government was principally concerned about the unity of the state and was reluctant to grant national autonomy to the constituent peoples of the new republic. The Bolsheviks, however, supported “national selfdetermination” to the point of separation from Russia. Lenin was convinced that nationalism was the product of imperial oppression, and if a democratic Russia granted full freedom to the non-Russian peoples they would choose to stay with the new state. The Leninists wanted to preserve the largest state possible in anticipation of the international socialist revolution. They believed that with time nationalism would die away and history would eventually lead to the rapprochement (sblizhenie) and eventual merging (sliianie) of nations. Such a goal, it was optimistically predicted, could be reached not through force, but voluntarily, by the will of the workers. The hopes of liberals and moderate socialists for a constitutional solution to the problem of nationality faded quickly through 1917. In Ukraine a national assembly, the Rada, petitioned for local autonomy, causing a political crisis in the capital, now renamed Petrograd. With the Bolshevik takeover in October, in the name of Soviet power, various peripheries of the empire gravitated toward separation. At the end of the year Finland declared its independence. The political elites in the south Caucasus rejected the new Soviet government, and by the end of May 1918 three independent states – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia – vied for support from one or another of the warring parties, Germany, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. Germany backed Ukrainian independence. Civil war between the Soviets and the forces of restoration raged at the same time as ethnic wars. Once it had consolidated its power and pacified the country, the communist government organized the territory it ruled into a federalized constellation of ethnonational republics and autonomous regions under the overall authority of a single Communist Party. Combining propaganda with state terror, concessions to national feelings with a resolve to bring as much as possible of the old empire back into the Soviet state, the communists initiated a program of promoting national cultures and ethnic elites in designated “national” territories. During the years of the New Economic Policy (1921–1928), a time of retreat and patience awaiting the delayed international revolution, the Soviets forged a strategic compromise with the peasantry in both Russia and the national republics. The Soviet government, particularly under Lenin 170

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and through the 1920s and early 1930s, embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious project of “nativization” (korenizatsiia): teaching literacy in the native languages; promoting national cultures; and elevating local cadres into positions of power, displacing Russians over time.6 But at the same time the state organized campaigns against religion, the clergy, and Zionism, and attempted to carry out the unveiling of Muslim women. The communists had their own civilizing mission: to turn peasants into workers, villagers into urban dwellers, and bring enlightenment and socialism to one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. For more than a decade, Russian “great power chauvinism” was treated as a greater danger to Soviet internationalism than the nationalism of small nations, even as real power to make binding decisions steadily accrued to the central authorities. Beginning roughly in 1932, Soviet nationality policy began a gradual shift away from Lenin’s Russophobic program toward a growing identification of the Soviet project with the Russian nation. Korenizatsiia was scaled back; many national communist leaders who had promoted their own peoples were purged, jailed, or executed; Russian heroes and history were celebrated as the models for a new state patriotism. Under the dictatorship of Stalin, Russians became the state-bearing nation in the full sense as the country approached and then went through the Second World War. As defense of the “motherland” (rodina) became paramount in Stalin’s mind, the USSR became a nationalizing empire intent on founding its identity and security on a new “imagined community,” the Soviet people (Sovetskii narod). Made up of dozens of nations and nationalities, this new “people” was now to be largely identified with the practices and values stemming from the imperial Russian past. Alphabet reforms that had introduced the Latin script to different national literatures were abandoned, and the Cyrillic alphabet was imposed on all but a few nationalities, like the Armenians and Georgians, which were permitted to keep their ancient scripts. Ethnic interests were even more radically subordinated to considerations of economic efficiency and productivity. What was good for the Five-Year Plan – high targets for industrialization, impossible goals for grain requisition – was brutally enforced. The campaigns to collectivize Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s, resisted by hundreds of thousands of peasants, devastated traditional 6

For thorough discussions of Soviet nationality policies in the 1920s, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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patriarchal village leadership and coincided with attacks on the Church and the Mosque. In Kazakhstan nomads were forced to settle, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and migration beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. More than 5 million peasants died from starvation in Ukraine as a result of the forced requisitioning of grain during collectivization. Ukrainian national communist intellectuals and officials were tried and imprisoned, and most of the native communist leaders of the non-Russian republics perished in the Great Purges of 1936–1938. Soviet pseudo-federalism was a new form of empire. There were social and ethnic distinctions and hierarchies established in law and practice. Communist Party members, particularly the higher echelons (nomenklatura), had privileges and access to information that ordinary citizens did not enjoy. The various nationalities of the USSR were given greater or lesser status according to a Marxist evolutionary calculus that some peoples were more developed, more proletarian, or closer to achieving socialism than others. The effects of the Soviet Empire on its various peoples were contradictory. The nationalizing aspects of Soviet nationality policies undermined the Leninist goal of amalgamation and assimilation. The promotion of folklore and folk culture of Uzbeks and Armenians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians, emphasized what was different, unique, and purportedly authentic about a particular people. Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, two peoples linguistically and culturally close, were defined and designed as even more distinct from one another. The reification of national distinctions slowed down the formation of a common sense of Soviet identity. But at the same time decades of shared historical traumas, most palpably the catastrophic world war and the slow recovery from it, cemented bonds of sentiment passed down through generations. On a more quotidian plane, life experiences, beginning with Soviet education, youth summer camps, working the harvest, public rituals of celebration and grieving, common beloved canons of radio and television shows, repertoires of jokes, also tied the diverse peoples together. A single Soviet affective community that prided itself on its “friendship of peoples” (druzhba narodov), the harmony of the different nationalities living in peace together, coexisted with the loyalties and love, pride and hopes, embedded in distinctive nationalities. Communists were confident that the socialist solvent would homogenize the dozens of different social and ethnic groups. And even as Soviet cultural development promoted the multiplicity and variety of Soviet cultures, it limited the specific ethnic idioms in which the nationalities could express themselves. The result was a welter of paradoxes and contradictions. Ideologically internationalist, the Soviets consistently condemned nationalism and 172

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religion, even as they fostered national cultures and pride in the specificity of each nationality. Soviet anthropologists studied ethnogenesis in order to discover the primordial roots of essentialized national differences. Soviet comedies played on ethnic stereotypes. During the Nazi invasion, the regime deployed both Russian and non-Russian nationalism, as well as supranational Soviet patriotism, to mobilize and inspire resistance to fascism. As in the First World War, so too in the Second, nationalism flourished in particularly vicious manifestations. In western Ukraine and the Baltic region, the nationalism of non-Russians newly incorporated into the Soviet Union after the war was directed against the Soviets. Jews, often equated with communists, were disproportionately targeted. Anticommunist guerrilla movements operated in the border regions well into the 1950s, covertly aided by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Tens of thousands of Soviet officials and soldiers, and equal numbers of anti-Soviet insurgents, were killed before the Soviets crushed the resistance of the “Forest Brothers” in the Baltic region and the Bandera movement in western Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians were deported from the newly annexed regions. Yet, in many other parts of the USSR, a lasting effect of the war was the political and affective integration of Soviet and national identifications. For many people, the Soviet Union became the “fatherland” (otechestvo) and even more intimately the “motherland” (rodina). On the heels of shared suffering and sacrifice, victory solidified and sanctified the affective connection with the Soviet regime and Stalin. Soviet national patriotism took on a sharp edge in the harsh eight years from the victory over fascism until the death of Stalin in 1953. As the Cold War froze East–West relations, Soviet propaganda became virulently antiWestern, and anyone and anything remotely associated with Europe or America came under suspicion. Many people were accused of nationalism or Zionism and condemned as “internal enemies.” Exaggerated claims were made about the creativity and inventiveness of Great Russians, and restrictions on the cultures of non-Russians were tightened. A republic like Georgia took on the structure of a little empire, promoting the culture of the hegemonic Georgians over the subordinated Abkhaz and Ossetians. Stalin launched the anti-Semitic “Anti-Cosmopolitanism Campaign,” and prominent Jews, many of them loyal communists, were arrested, tortured, and killed. The campaign culminated in the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” when physicians close to the Kremlin were falsely denounced as assassins of high 173

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party leaders. Only Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 saved those doctors still alive from execution. The end of Stalin’s police regime ushered in a much more tolerant period of imperial management. The administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and their successors up to Mikhail Gorbachev and the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 represent more than half the Soviet period of Russian history. Often relegated to an afterthought, the post-Stalin years were formative in the consolidation of the national republics and the firm establishment of non-Russian political elites. The end of widespread terror required that the Communist Party rule through persuasion, consent, and by providing a degree of material wellbeing. Censorship and police coercion remained, though reduced, as the Soviet Union became a predominantly urban and industrial society. The imperial transformation affected all the peoples of the union, raising their standards of living, increasing social mobility, and turning a once backward peasant society into a land of literate city dwellers. In the “Thaw” after the frosty years of Stalinism, Moscow maintained peace and dominance over non-Russians by tolerating expressions of national pride (within limits) and accepting the long tenure of national communist elites in the republics. National politicians in several republics tested Moscow’s patience, as when Azerbaijani and Latvian communist leaders strengthened the teaching of the national languages of their republics in 1956, only to lose their positions soon after. In 1958 Khrushchev pushed back against non-Russian language enthusiasts with an educational reform that gave parents the right to choose in which language their children could study, thus effectively ending the requirement to learn the national language of the republics.7 In Ukraine, expressions of Ukrainian national consciousness were tolerated for a while, but when the Kremlin feared that nationalism was spreading too far too fast, it instituted a tough policy promoting Soviet culture and Russian language. National identity coexisted with an identification with the USSR as a whole. Even as late as 1991, more than three-quarters of the Soviet population supported the union in which they lived. Yet at the same time nationalism persisted on several levels. Besides all-union patriotism, Russians and non-Russians alike felt a bond with their own nationality. Open antagonisms between peoples were muted, except in sporting events and the hazing known as dedovshchina that took place frequently in the military. The 7

Jeremy Smith, Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),208–215.

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reduction of arbitrary police repression after Stalin opened limited social spaces for acceptable nationalist expression in the arts and literature but not in politics. An early expression of dissident nationalism erupted in 1956 when young Georgians protested the removal of the monument to their native son Stalin, only to be answered by gunfire. By the late 1960s and early 1970s nationalist intellectuals in Ukraine, south Caucasia, and the Baltic republics boldly pushed the limits set by the party. In 1965 tens of thousands of Armenians marched in Erevan to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide of 1915. As a result a towering monument to the tragedy was erected a few years later. After the Six Day War (1967), many Soviet Jews petitioned to emigrate from the USSR. Entrenched communist elites in many republics sought support from below by fostering local nationalisms and tolerating corruption. When in 1978 Moscow attempted to make Russian instead of Georgian the state language of the republic, massive street protests forced the government to back down. Russian nationalism was expressed by the popular “village prose” writers and permitted in some of the more conservative “thick journals” like Oktiabr. When he came to power in 1985 Gorbachev believed that the “national question” had been solved in the Soviet Union, but this belief proved overly optimistic. His radical reforms of governance and the economy led not only to economic distress and a weakened political structure but to an explosion of political claims from non-Russians – first to autonomy, then to sovereignty, and finally to independence of the national republics. Hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens faced the dilemma of how to reconcile their ethnonational affiliations and affections with their supranational loyalties to the Soviet Union. Many quickly discovered that it was impossible to maintain both and had to decide between the two. Some, like most Estonians, who had been forcibly integrated into the USSR after the war, simply rejected the Soviet Union and the Russian cultural hegemony that it entailed, and lived as much as possible within their own ethnic community through the 1980s. Georgians tended to stay within their republic and seldom migrated, while others, like the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who either lived in or emigrated to Russia and other republics, assimilated into Russo-Soviet culture. Though their nationality was emblazoned on their passports, they were effectively “Russian” in language, culture, and attitude. Between those two poles were others who tacked back and forth between identities or created hybrid identities, becoming situationally Soviet in some circumstances, ethnic in others. Nationality was so powerful a marker in late Soviet society that in many circumstances it was used instrumentally, e.g. for political or social 175

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advancement within a national republic or to emigrate from the Soviet Union (Jews, Germans, Armenians, Koreans, and others). For Russians in general, and Russian nationalists in particular, the USSR was viewed as essentially a Russian nation-state rather than an empire. As one historian put it, “The problem with the USSR, they insisted, was that it was not Russian enough.”8 In the years of Soviet power, a civil society had emerged in the USSR with no place to go. A deep, dull, persistent conflict developed between the stagnant state structure and the society created by the system. The Soviet Union faced a dilemma of empire: what happens if the civilizing mission succeeds? Who then needs the imperial hegemon as people become better educated, more mobile, and confident about governing themselves? With the launching of Gorbachev’s radical perestroika (rebuilding) program of reform, civic Soviet patriotism weakened as the political bonds that held the Soviet Union together slackened. Moreover, the non-Russian peoples, who made up about half the Soviet population and had long lived under the tutelage of the communist elite, had through the decades of the USSR become compact, conscious, coherent nations with their own cultural and political agendas. When the center committed suicide by weakening the state and the command economy, the peripheries turned inward, abandoning what felt like a sinking ship. Nationalism did not in and of itself bring down the Soviet Union, but it contributed to the erosion of the center’s power. The poorly conceived reform by Gorbachev weakened the Communist Party and the power of the state. Gorbachev’s commitment to glasnost’ jeopardized his regime, as an increasingly outspoken press allowed expression to dissidents and nationalists of all camps. Freedom of the press outstripped effective democratic or economic reform. As the economy faltered, faith in the socialist project, which had long eroded among educated people, spread more widely, and the subversive power of the new criticism undermined what was left of the authority and influence of the party apparatus. The will of the party elite, the nomenklatura, to resist the popular discontent, now legitimized by the policy of glasnost’, dissipated. Gorbachev was reluctant to use the police and military to enforce obedience to the central state, and when Soviet forces used violence against crowds, as in the Baltic republics, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, repression only encouraged opposition to the regime. All this combined with the ambition of the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, and national communist and oppositional nationalist leaders in other republics to 8

Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7.

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set out on independent national roads rather than preserve the moribund empire. Conceding ground to the republics, Gorbachev negotiated successive drafts of a “union treaty” that essentially turned the USSR into a confederation of fifteen republics with enhanced powers relative to a newly weakened center. In March 1991, 76.4 percent of the Soviet people voted in a referendum to preserve some form of union. Six republics – Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova – refused to participate in the voting. But, on the eve of the signing of the treaty in August 1991, conservative communists carried out a coup against Gorbachev. In a startling display of civic mobilization, masses of people turned out in Moscow to oppose the putsch. Several republics seized the opportunity of the vacuum of power in Moscow to declare themselves sovereign and independent states. The August coup shifted opinion dramatically. Gorbachev returned to Moscow only to find his power evaporating, the union treaty a dead letter, and Yeltsin the most powerful politician in the land. People believed the union was moribund and the future lay with their own republics. In December 1991, 90 percent of Ukrainians voted in a referendum for independence, reversing the vote nine months earlier when 70 percent of Ukrainian voters had supported a reformed Soviet Union. A week later Yeltsin and his counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus met without Gorbachev and unconstitutionally declared the Soviet Union dissolved. On 25 December, Gorbachev resigned as president of the country that he had hoped to save. Fifteen new, now independent, republics embarked on a search for national histories, traditions, myths, and past triumphs and tragedies on which to establish firmly their nation-states. As they nationalized, they largely eliminated from the national memory the imperial experiences that had been fundamental to their formation. Post-Soviet Russia and the other former Soviet republics are more like nation-states today than they ever were during the centuries of tsarist and Soviet imperial rule. In Muscovite and imperial Russia, collective identities associated with the state, dynasty, country, and even with something they understood as the Russian people, had formed among elites, and momentarily among the people in times of war and invasion. Particularly potent expressions of collectivity emerged during the Time of Troubles and again during the succession crises of the eighteenth century. Mobilized by a sense of collective identity and empowered by the breakdown of political structures, segments of the population – sometimes broad, sometimes narrow – took upon themselves not only the responsibility of defending state and 177

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country, but also the right to refashion the state itself. These assertive political movements proved evanescent, but they demonstrate that the idea of the people as the source of legitimacy for state authorities could mobilize populations into action long before theories about the sovereign rights of nations coalesced in the late eighteenth century. The vastness and diversity of the country, as well as the thinness of social communication, hindered a shared national identity from reaching beyond those in the higher ranks of society. The active opposition of the imperial state to the egalitarian principles of national ideology further impeded the development of a sense of Russianness. In the years of Soviet power, communist nationality policy fostered both Soviet state patriotism and ethnonationalisms among the constituent peoples of the union, including the Russians. The paradox of Lenin’s and Stalin’s policies was that Marxist internationalism and the promotion of ethnic, territorialized nationalities pulled in opposite directions. While before 1991, for many people, loyalties and affiliations with both the national and the Soviet were not only possible but desirable, when the center dissolved, the peripheries found their only refuge in their new nation-states.

Further Reading Brandenberger, David, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Brudny, Yitzhak M., Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Kivelson, Valerie A., and Ronald Grigor Suny, Russia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Maiorova, Olga, From the Shadow of Empire: Defining the Russian Nation through Cultural Mythology, 1855–1870 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Smith, Jeremy, Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Yekelchyk, Serhy, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian–Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

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9

The Japanese Empire sherzod muminov

Introduction Our country is a great family nation, and the imperial household is the head family of the subjects and the nucleus of national life. When we trace the marks of the facts of the founding of our country and the progress of our history, what we always find there is the spirit of harmony.

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers. It also shines light on the subsequent eight decades to this day that witnessed a no less radical refashioning of the national community after the devastation of total war and defeat at the hands of the Allied powers. The quotations also reinforce two myths that date back to the nation’s foundation. According to the first, Japan is a homogeneous, monoethnic family-nation ruled for millennia by an unbroken imperial line. The second 1

2

Text quoted from Wm. Theodore De Bary, Carol Gluck, Arthur E. Tiedemann et al. (eds.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. I I: 1600 to 2000, 2nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 971. Ibid., 968.

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myth emphasizes harmony as the paramount social code of the Japanese nation and society. Together, these myths have shaped an image of Japan as a homogeneous, harmonious community of like-minded individuals who willingly follow social norms and unite for common causes, enabling the society to function as a well-oiled mechanism with exemplary cohesion and little social friction. This harmonious society is seen as synonymous with the Japanese nation, which in turn overlaps with Japanese ethnicity in what sociologist Yoshio Sugimoto calls the “NEC [nation = ethnicity = culture] equation.”3 Homogeneity and harmony have meshed well with another myth about Japan traditionally being “closed” and self-contained to create a tradition best summarized by John Dower when he wrote, “Something about Japan invites people to view it hermetically.”4 Ironically, myths about uniqueness and seclusion evolved in tandem with the expansionist Japanese Empire, which this chapter uses as a lens to view the evolution of Japanese nationhood and nationalism. The myths reveal attempts in mid-nineteenth-century Japan to imagine a modern nation where there was none. They represent the insecurities as well as certainties of a community with ancient origins but an outdated present, that sailed off into the rough seas of international politics to “stand with the nations of the world.”5 While not a hermit kingdom, at the time of its more intimate encounter with the West in the mid-nineteenth century Japan was clearly an outsider in the international system. A combination of internal turmoil and external threat jolted it awake to the realities of imperialist politics. The Japanese polity had existed for centuries, but to survive in the brave new “modern world” it had to be remodeled into a nation in the Western sense of the word. This process of putting an ancient political entity on modern wheels is the focus of this chapter. The bold decisions taken by Japan’s leadership were in fact results of attempts to avoid colonization and subjugation, to preserve not only national independence but also national essence, “to create new institutions and practices that could simultaneously evoke both Japanese uniqueness and Western progress.”6 Rather than positing Japan in permanent opposition with the West, the Meiji leadership chose to transcend facile dichotomies; “the goal was to make Japan equal to, but still different from, 3 4

5

6

Yoshio Sugimoto, “Making Sense of Nihonjinron,” Thesis Eleven, 57 (May 1999), 81–96. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin, 2000), 29. Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ibid., 5.

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the great powers.”7A glance at contemporaneous four-character slogans is revealing: the leaders of modern Japan chose “civilization and enlightenment,” combined “Western technology and Japanese spirit,” and in a short period of time managed to build “a rich nation and a strong army.” The success of their reforms was sufficient to imbue the new nation with a degree of security, which grew into a sense of exceptionalism, and eventually a claim to regional leadership. But this success was never a foregone conclusion. Japan’s empire came into existence in defense, not offense; unlike its European antecedents it was not, initially, exploitative or mercantilist. But it quickly adapted to its surroundings, and acquired the methods and characteristics of a late nineteenth-century imperial power. The Japanese nation came to bear the marks of this adaptation. I attempt here neither to disentangle the nation from the empire, nor to counterpose the two. Instead, I view them as interlinked containers for national myths and identities that flowed from one container into the other in accordance with the demands of local, regional, and global forces. As in other nation-building projects, the Japanese Empire and nation evolved in conflict and cooperation between the local and the global, in turn giving shape to the national community they contained and preserved. It is thus crucial to analyze the evolution of Japanese nationhood not as an isolated process but within global contexts. Despite the enduring attraction of homogeneity, harmony, and insularity myths, this history reveals a rich diversity of views and interests on which the nation was built, and the competitive, rather than harmonious, nature of its evolution. It should be analyzed through Japanese attempts to reconcile the demands of the global imperial system with seemingly inimitable Japanese attributes, and the requirements of an expanding empire with the desire to preserve its Japanese core. While its confines and contours shifted constantly, the modern Japanese nation was forged in the second half of the nineteenth century, a restless period in world history when the expansion of European formal empires overseas continued apace fueled by the search for resources and markets. Laying the foundations of the young nation first in apprehension and later in imitation of European empires, Japan’s leaders quickly made the transition from defensive national consolidation to outward imperial expansion. This transition from defense to offense ushered in a period of dualism when Japan juggled two interrelated aims: achieving equality with the “great powers,” and becoming the leader of Asia. A complex set of relations with 7

Ibid., 8.

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both Euro-America and Asia – and not simply one of looking up to the West – shaped the Japanese Empire. The nation acquired its form and contours in interaction with its overseas empire as much as in its selfassigned mission to remake Asia in its image. The chapter breaks the history of modern Japanese nationhood into three phases. The first of these largely coincided with the Meiji era (1868–1912), when the foundations of the modern nation were laid, institutions established, and traditions invented. The second phase, overlapping slightly with the first, occupies the half-century of Japan’s imperial expansion (1895–1945). When it collapsed at the end of the Second World War, the empire stretched from Manchuria to New Guinea and from Singapore to southern Sakhalin, built on a false dawn of Asia liberated from Euro-American imperialism. The final phase covers the period since 1945 – an era of dominance for an exclusively ethnic nation, shaped by economic growth, Cold War obligations as a US ally, and the seemingly hidden but constantly present legacies of the empire.

Meiji Phase In 1868 a group of intrepid samurai restored the Japanese emperor to the pinnacle of power in an event known as the Meiji Restoration. So named after the emperor’s reign, this modern revolution put an end to the Edo period of military rule by shoguns, during which Japan had been a loose confederacy of more than 250 semi-autonomous feudal domains. The restoration followed more than a decade of civil strife caused by domestic stagnation and the shogunate’s perceived weakness in the face of the increasingly insistent Western powers, which in the 1850s pressed Japan into a series of unequal treaties, prizing open its ports to international trade. The samurai rebels undermined shogunal authority with the slogan “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians,” discrediting the shogun’s ability to fend off foreigners and preserve Japan’s independence. In one of history’s great about-turns, following their victory these rebellious samurai adopted Western-style “modernization” reforms. In following the 1868 “Charter Oath” – a statement of the new government’s progressive goals – the Meiji leadership created a modern bureaucracy, with essential ministries serving as chief drivers in modernizing the state and society. They abolished “evil customs of the past,” notably the system of social stratification that relied on the samurai warrior class. They sought knowledge “throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of 182

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imperial rule,” equipping a 108-strong delegation of notables and top bureaucrats to Western nations.8 For nineteen months, the mission, led by a former court official, Iwakura Tomomi, toured the West, studying industrial achievements and management methods. They stayed longest in the United States, taking stock of the post-Civil War nation’s centralization and consolidation, and were impressed by its “mass incorporation into the national economy and polity.”9 They would use the knowledge in incorporating Japan into a modern polity. The modern Japanese nation thus came into being with an acute awareness – and wariness – of Western imperialism. The Damoclean sword of colonization hung over it in the decades before and after the restoration, informing the harried nature of early Meiji reforms. These reforms served the dual goals of building a nation and constructing an empire. On the one hand, Meiji leaders – “oligarchs” – aimed to secure the nation against possible subjugation by rapidly consolidating national power. On the other, they imitated the colonialist behavior of Western empires to secure a place among the colonists and not the colonized. Building an empire seemed to offer a natural solution to both goals: “Mimesis of Western imperialism . . . went hand in hand with mimesis of Western civilization.”10 The modern Japanese Empire was thus a product of its age, the nineteenth century – “more an age of empire than, as many European historians continue to believe and to teach, an age of nations and nation-states.”11 Initially responding to the dangers of this age, Japan soon sought to acquire the advantageous attributes of Western empires. As a result, constructing the Japanese nation, “a relatively new kind of community,”12 was concomitant with empire-building. Emerging eventually from this symbiotic process was the Japanese imperial nation. As observed by Jürgen Osterhammel, “A nation-state is . . . not the state casing of a given nation; it is a project of state apparatuses and power elites, as 8

9

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Kume Kunitake, Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, ed. Chushichi Tsuzuki and R. Jules Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Akira Iriye, “Japan’s Drive to Great-Power Status,” in Marius B. Jansen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 721–782, at 723. Robert Eskildsen, “Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan,” American Historical Review, 107/2 (April 2002), 388–418, at 389. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 392. Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.

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well as of revolutionary or anticolonial counter-elites.”13 In this sense, the Japanese imperial nation was a project of the Meiji elite, which was both revolutionary and anticolonial in its outlook, and pursued three fundamental goals. First, like all successful revolutionaries, modern Japan’s founders strove to invest their project with legitimacy. This they did by restoring the youthful emperor to the pinnacle of power and using him as both the centerpiece and the figurehead for the system. The first chapter of Japan’s modern constitution, promulgated in 1889, proclaimed the emperor “sacred and inviolable” and invested him with supreme political authority. It created the so-called “emperor system,” where the emperor – whose divinity lent the government authority while keeping the emperor himself above, and outside, everyday politics – was source and symbol of state sovereignty. While Japan’s imperial institution had a long history, the Meiji Emperor was created as a modern symbol for a modern nation. Yet his position was different from that of European constitutional monarchs; Ito¯ Hirobumi, Japan’s first prime minister, who authored the constitution, insisted: “our system is not based on the European ideas . . . of joint rule of the king and the people.”14 Incorporating the imperial institution into the modern polity to serve their needs, and serving as mediators between the emperor and the people, the Meiji oligarchs secured domestic and international legitimacy with one stroke. Second, the Meiji statesmen aimed to unify the nation in opposition to the hostile world of colonizers. The anticolonial aspect of the early Meiji polity is rarely emphasized, thanks perhaps to Japan avoiding colonization through successful “modernization.” Yet the anticolonial, anti-Western premise of the Meiji state was unmistakable. The rallying call “Expel the Barbarians” did not lose importance after the restoration but formed the foundational narrative of the Meiji state – even the Western-style reforms that the oligarchy introduced were initially justified as steps to keeping the foreigners at bay. According to public intellectuals Hando¯ Kazutoshi and Hosaka Masayasu, the Meiji leaders’ explanation of “We are opening the country temporarily; once we have strengthened, we shall return to the policy of expelling the barbarians” became “the foundation of Japanese people’s mental make-up.”15 That being the case, such explanations were hardly immutable, and Meiji oligarchs 13 14

15

Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 405, emphasis in original. Quoted in Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), 394. Hando¯ Kazutoshi and Hosaka Masayasu, Nashonarizumu no shōtai (Tokyo: Bunshun bunko, 2017), 50.

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could “shift from xenophobia to xenophilia without a sense of having recanted or abandoned their earlier views” once the nation’s frontiers were secure.16 The desire to avoid the fate of China, humiliated by Western powers, informed the worldview of Meiji political and intellectual leaders, well captured in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s “leaving Asia” doctrine.17 Japan had to abandon backward Asia and ally itself with the West, if only to avoid being colonized by the latter. Finally, the Meiji oligarchy recognized the need to create an economically viable and centralized political system with the attributes of a modern nation. This required acquiring the norms, institutions, and practices of successful modern empires. And while many such norms and institutions were borrowed from the West, introduced under the guidance of able Western advisers, some were carried over from Japan’s own past. In the same way as the French “Revolution preserved aristocratic characteristics of French culture . . . [or] the Russian Revolution has preserved classical ballet,”18 the Meiji thinker and bureaucrat Nitobe Inazo¯ revived and reinvented bushido¯, “the way of the samurai,” to serve the new nation.19 Economic authority and expansion were indispensable to entering the global economy on Japan’s own terms and not as a colony or a resource base. Trade and cooperation offered a path toward renegotiating unequal treaties with Western powers. To this end, the Japanese government revamped its bureaucracy, transformed a loose federation of feudal domains into a centralized nation divided into prefectures, and created a modern conscript military. The dubious success of Japan’s first foreign expedition – in 1874 to Taiwan to punish locals for the murder of fifty-four shipwrecked Okinawans – nevertheless led to the Qing’s recognition of Japanese authority over Okinawa, which was incorporated in 1879. Northern frontiers were secured in 1875, when Japan signed the Treaty of St. Petersburg with Russia, formalizing its authority over the Kuril Islands in exchange for Russia’s over Sakhalin. Economic reforms of Matsukata Masayoshi – land, tax, and monetary reforms, as well as investment in industrial expansion – spurred the development of industrial conglomerates, while deflation resulting from these reforms made Japanese exports competitive. 16 17

18 19

Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World, 10. Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Datsu-a ron,” (“De-Asianization Theory”) in Ishida Takeshi (ed.), Kindai nihon shisō taikei, (The Structure of Japanese Ideology in Modernity) vol. I I (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo¯, 1975), 510–512. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977), 225. Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido¯ in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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Despite the nationalist and anticolonial rhetoric that fueled the revolt against the shogunate, once successful, the Meiji rulers approached modernization with the dispassionate efficiency of seasoned state-builders whose paramount goal was to safeguard Japan’s interests and who eschewed tradition where it hindered progress. The success of early reforms made them eager to transform Japan from an economically self-sufficient kingdom to an outward-looking modern empire with colonial possessions and influence over other nations and territories. In trying to escape the Sinocentric system, which had discredited itself in the nineteenth century, Japanese nationbuilders aspired to join the extension of the “European interstate system,” which toward the end of that century dominated the global order.20 Thus, by the 1880s the Meiji leaders behaved with greater confidence when dealing with the outside world. Their conviction that an empire was essential to the nation came not long after the nation’s inception. Within years of the restoration, the founders of Japan’s military, hitherto used primarily against domestic upheavals, “planned to change the army into a powerful offensive force, one that could fight China and eventually Russia on the Asian continent. The military build-up for accomplishing this objective began in 1882.”21 Yamagata Aritomo, the architect of the modern army, and his disciple Katsura Taro¯, who had studied military science in Germany, invested Japan’s military with an outward-looking character. Katsura “believed that there were two types of army: one defensive, the other offensive. All major powers had the latter, and Japan, he thought, should follow their lead.”22 Another Meiji oligarch, Inoue Kaoru, believed that “it behooved Japan to set up a Western-style empire on the edge of Asia, and to do it while it was still possible, before growth of Western hegemony ruled it out.”23 Wariness of this hegemony meant that even late in the century, Yamagata chose a vocabulary of defending the nation in explaining the state’s strategies to the domestic populace; “narrowly conceived questions of national defense came to encompass broad questions of culture, politics, and society.”24 This defensive posture showed that successful reforms were insufficient proof of Japan’s status; while it had outgrown the cloak of a weak power scrambling to avoid colonization, unequal treaties constantly reminded Japan of its 20 21

22 24

Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 399. Shin’ichi Kitaoka, “The Army as a Bureaucracy: Japanese Militarism Revisited,” Journal of Military History, special issue 57 (October 1993), 67–86, at 71. Ibid., 72. 23 Jansen, Making of Modern Japan, 427. Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World, 7; Kato¯ Yo¯ko, Senso¯ no nihon kingendaishi (War History in Modern and Contemporary Japan) (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 2002), 82–84.

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inferiority vis-à-vis the Western powers. More than simply leaving Asia behind, “Meiji oligarchy saw the ability to conquer and civilize others as a shortcut to treaty revision.”25 If “external recognition is a necessary condition”26 of the complete formation of the nation-state, then the Meiji state did not become a nation-state until it had become – or made significant steps toward becoming – an empire. This would not happen until the end of the nineteenth century, when all unequal treaties had been renegotiated, signaling Japan’s recognition by the international community, and by which time the nation had successfully acquired the secondary attributes of a European-style empire, signing an unequal treaty of its own with Korea in 1876 and attempting to sign one with the Ottoman Empire in 1905.27 Thus, empire-building went hand in hand with building a modern nation. Having secured Japan against foreign encroachment and stabilized its frontiers by laying claims to the “internal colonies” of Hokkaido and Okinawa in the 1870s, the Meiji reformers took little time in trying to establish a presence on the international scene. In global history terms, Japan could be ranked alongside the European “latecomers” – most notably Germany and Italy, which had been unified a few years earlier than Japan and similarly aimed to catch up with the century’s imperial moment. Ian Nish has observed that Japan had even “had longer experience as a colonizing power than Wilhelmine Germany.”28 Despite similarities, however, Japan’s empire evolved in a different environment. Unlike Germany and Italy, Japan’s claim to empire was based almost solely on its success of being the only Asian nation that “met a ‘standard of civilization’ that was approved in Europe.”29 Also, its growing influence in East Asia, the fierce competition for spheres of influence, and the fact that much of the world had already been divided up by the Western empires meant that Japan’s colonizing efforts had to be focused on its immediate vicinity. Still, it would require skillful diplomacy, powerful allies, and military might for Japan’s empire to wade its way into the status and position it desired.

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Sebastian Conrad, “The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56/1 (2014), 4–33, at 8. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 407. Selçuk Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900–1945,” American Historical Review, 109/4 (October 2004), 1140–1170, at 1147. Ian Nish, “Regaining Confidence: Japan after the Loss of Empire,” Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), 181–195, at 181. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (London: Penguin, 2008), 299.

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Imperial Expansion In a famous 1883 lecture on Britain’s imperial expansion, John Robert Seeley declared: “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”30 Japan’s experience of empire-building was different; it trod consciously where European empires may have done so absent-mindedly. During the Meiji period, Japan’s leaders believed its imperial expansion hinged on one issue – the so-called “Korea problem.” Ever since the 1870s, the Meiji leadership had viewed Korea as both a “dagger pointed at Japan’s heart” and a pathway to influence on the mainland. The 1876 Japan–Korea Treaty, which guaranteed Korea’s sovereignty, was also an unequal pact that opened the door to Japanese interests. Qing China, which had for centuries enjoyed a suzerain–vassal relationship with Joseon dynasty Korea, rightly worried about growing Japanese influence on the peninsula and through the 1885 Treaty of Tianjin attempted to limit this influence. But successful renegotiation of unequal treaties with Western powers in 1894 gave the Meiji leadership confidence to feel “the time had come to cut the Gordian knot of Korean ‘reform’ and eliminate the Chinese influence.”31 Japan had its chance when Korea’s court, unable to suppress a peasant uprising, requested Chinese military assistance in 1894. Meiji leaders took a back seat, seemingly respecting the Tianjin Convention, but when the Qing intervened, they sent troops themselves. A war ensued; Mutsu Munemitsu, Japan’s foreign minister at the time, remembered: following a series of uninterrupted victories by our forces, the Chinese sent two missions to Japan to sue for peace. Finally, the two empires signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, bringing about profound changes in our traditional diplomatic relationship and evoking world recognition of Japan as the preeminent power of the Far East.32

Mutsu was hardly exaggerating; Japan’s victory in its first modern war fundamentally altered the balance of power in East Asia. It also led to what Christopher L. Hill has termed the “nationalization of human life.”33 “In the war between Japan and the Qing,” writes the historian Kato¯ Yo¯ko, “ordinary Japanese came into contact with a foreign nation for the first time. This gave 30

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J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1883]), “Lecture I: Tendency in English History,” 8. Jansen, Making of Modern Japan, 431. Mutsu Munemitsu, Kenkenroku: A Diplomatic Record of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–95, ed. and trans. by Gordon M. Berger (Tokyo: Japan Foundation, 1982), 5. Hill, National History, 271.

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birth to ‘the consciousness of being Japanese.’ The emergence of a modern ‘nation’ was evident in the citizens’ responses to appeals for monetary contributions for the war, or in their voluntary participation in warrejoicing parties.”34 Moreover, the acquisition of Japan’s first external colony (Taiwan) and a large indemnity swelled the national pride; “imperialism encouraged the masses . . . to identify themselves with the imperial state and nation.”35 The victory also lifted Japan in the eyes of the world, proving “a singular achievement in [its] quest for recognition by the great powers of the West as a civilized state worthy of full membership in the comity of nations.”36 At the same time, the war taught Japan an important lesson; in April 1895, a week after the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed, Russia, Germany, and France, apprehensive of rival appetites to “dismember the Celestial Empire,” intervened, “advising” Japan to return to China one of the war trophies, the Liaodong peninsula. Japan had to comply with the demands of the Triple Intervention; this humiliating climbdown was perhaps its first major “lesson in the diplomacy of imperialism.”37 While Japan had triumphed over a powerful rival, it had not yet achieved the equality and status afforded to an imperial power. Japan’s newfound predominance in Korea set it on a collision course with Russia, which viewed Korea as key to its own influence in the region and insisted on its neutrality. A clash over Korea loomed, but it was more than a struggle for influence on the peninsula: at stake this time was Japan’s greater claim to influence in its neighborhood: “The solution of the Korean problem thus became a prerequisite for that of the Manchurian problem, insofar as Korea remained a major concern for Japan.”38 The ensuing Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was an unprecedented military conflict, witnessing history’s largest (as of that time) naval battle (at Tsushima) and land confrontation (at Mukden). The Japanese prevailed in both, but as important were their diplomatic triumphs; while Britain was supportive (the two had signed an alliance in 1902), securing American benevolence – and financial support – proved crucial.39 34 35 36 37

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Kato¯, Senso¯ no nihon kingendaishi, 22–23. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Vintage, 1989), 70. Gordon M. Berger’s “Introduction” to Mutsu, Kenkenroku, xi. Frank W. Iklé, “The Triple Intervention: Japan’s Lesson in the Diplomacy of Imperialism,” Monumenta Nipponica, 22/1–2 (1967), 122–130, at 127–128. Kim Ki-Jung, “The War and US–Korean Relations,” in David Wolff, Steven G. Marks, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, John W. Steinberg, and Yokote Shinji (eds.), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, vol. I I (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 467–489, at 475. Adam Gower, Jacob Schiff and the Art of Risk: American Financing of Japan’s War with Russia (1904–1905) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Unlike victory over China, hailed as an outcome of “a rapid adoption of the modern civilization of the West,” triumph over Russia could not be explained by successful Westernization alone. Russia itself was a “Western superpower”; the feat of defeating a great power at its own game needed a better explanation. The Japanese triumphalists touted the success as a product of Japan’s “adopting and assimilating the good parts of Western civilization while abandoning the bad.”40 And while views on the war were diverse, victory over Russia ushered in a period of self-congratulatory rhetoric in popular media which blossomed into early nationalist pride.41 Korea became Japan’s protectorate in 1905; its subsequent annexation in 1910 was seen as a fruit of this victory, establishing “the perceived legitimacy of Japan as a modern imperial nation.”42 More than just recognition by the West, the victory delivered the adoration of the East. Japan’s triumph against a European and Christian empire was greeted with joy in colonies and semicolonies across the world, especially among Muslims: “When Muslim newspapers celebrated Japan’s defeat of Russia in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War as the victory of the downtrodden Eastern peoples over the invincible West, a Turkish nationalist feminist, Halide Edip, like many other women, named her son Togo” (after the Japanese admiral).43 It was a historic turning point which grievously wounded the Romanov dynasty: “The global moment of the Russo-Japanese War influenced international history by shattering the established European discourse on racial hierarchies once and for all.”44 Importantly, victory over Russia gave a new lease of life to the idea of colonial empire. Traditionally, colonial expansion was justified by two main motivations. The first, as noted, originated from what Meiji leaders saw as an expansionist zero-sum game of international politics whereby Japan needed its own colonial empire. Japanese thinkers and bureaucrats approached the task of conceiving such an empire with meticulousness and unwavering belief in Japan’s cause. Remarkable in this respect were the efforts of Goto¯ Shimpei, the civil governor of Taiwan, and his one-time personal assistant, 40

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Suzuki Sadami, Nihon no bunka nashonarizumu (Japan’s Cultural Nationalism) (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005), 161–162. Naoko Shimazu, “Patriotic and Despondent: Japanese Society at War, 1904–5,” Russian Review, 67 (January 2008), 34–49. Alexis Dudden, “Japanese Colonial Control in International Terms,” Japanese Studies, 25/1 (May 2005), 1–20, at 1, emphasis in original. Esenbel, “Japan’s Global Claim to Asia,” 1140. Cemil Aydin, “The Global Moment of the Russo-Japanese War: The Awakening of the East/Equality with the West (1905–1912),” in Aydin,The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 71–92, at 75.

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Nitobe Inazo¯, “Japan’s first imperially-appointed professor of colonial studies,” who would later serve as Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations. Nitobe coined the Japanese term for “colony” (shokuminchi) and helped lay the foundations of Japan’s colonial ideology; he “believed that the Koreans awaited their Japanese colonizers to inscribe them in progressive history.”45 Modernization, in other words, became the guise under which colonial repression and forced assimilation became possible. Another justification for colonialism rested on a myth of overpopulation. Though Japan did not suffer from anything comparable to the great famines of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, there existed a persistent belief that as an overpopulated and infertile archipelago, Japan would fail to support its growing population. Part of the solution lay in emigration, as it also helped spread Japanese influence; the tendency, described by Seeley, “to regard their emigrants not as going out of the State but as carrying the State with them” resonated in Japan too.46 Emigration would later cause controversy in Japanese–American relations after the United States prohibited Japanese immigration in 1924, causing a wave of national indignation across Japan.47 Yet overpopulation could also be an excuse for imperial expansion. Hashimoto Kingoro¯, an army officer convicted as a war criminal after the Second World War, claimed in 1939 that there were three escape doors from overpopulation: “emigration, advance into world markets, and expansion of territory.” Since the first two had been shut by Japan’s rivals, “It is quite natural that Japan should rush upon the last remaining door.”48 The Russo-Japanese War made plausible a third justification. In contrast to the contempt for Asian backwardness in early Meiji years, the line between anti-Asian sentiment and pan-Asian solidarity proved easier to cross once Japan attained recognition in both the West and the East. Its mission civilisatrice was now rescuing Asia from its dark slumber and taking it toward the light of modernity: “While Meiji Japan lacked a missionary spirit akin to Christian evangelism, the political and social reformism of the Meiji liberal movement found an outlet for its energies and frustrations on the Asian continent and fired some Meiji activists with dreams of transforming 45 46 47

48

Dudden, “Japanese Colonial Control,” 14. Seeley, Expansion of England, “Lecture I I I: The Empire,” 41. Nancy Stalker, “Suicide, Boycotts and Embracing Tagore: The Japanese Popular Response to the 1924 US Immigration Exclusion Law,” Japanese Studies, 26/2 (September 2006), 153–170. Quoted in De Bary et al., Sources of Japanese Tradition, 990.

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‘corrupted’ and ‘decaying’ Asian civilizations through reform.”49 This ideology of pan-Asian solidarity did not immediately present itself as a justification for expansionism. As observed by Prasenjit Duara, “Pan-Asianism in Japan both fed and resisted the nascent imperialism of that nation. Increasingly after the Russo-Japanese War, however, the view that Japan was the only Asian nation capable of rescuing Asia and harmonizing East and West civilizations began to take hold.”50 As seen later in the chapter, pan-Asianism would come back in force as the rallying cry of Japan’s fight against the West during the Second World War. The triumphant decade of 1895–1905 thus established Japan on the firmament of global imperialism. As an ally of Britain and now a power in its own right, Japan was all too willing to play its part in what John Darwin has called “cooperative imperialism among the six great powers (Britain, Russia, Germany, France, the United States and Japan).”51 Cooperative might be an optimistic term, yet Japan’s recognition as an imperialist power was conditioned by its adoption of the terms of international law and a “new legal discourse of power.”52 Japan had earned its place in the sun not only by defeating two powers blocking its path to Asian leadership, but also by willingly incorporating itself into “the European system of states created essentially in the seventeenth century [and] expanded in the nineteenth into a global system.”53 The First World War further consolidated Japan’s status. The benefits of joining the imperial system were augmented by opportunities for filling the manufacturing and exporting voids created by the total war that demanded the full attention and resources of the world’s leading industries: “Just as the mid nineteenth century witnessed a metamorphosis from feudal realm to modern nation, the First World War marked Japan’s passage from a predominantly regional nineteenth-century empire to a major industrial world power.”54 Having played its part in expelling the Germans from the Pacific as Britain’s ally, its newly acquired spoils of war – German possessions in the south Pacific and, importantly, on China’s Shandong peninsula – further expanded Japan’s burgeoning empire. 49

50

51 53 54

Mark R. Peattie , “Introduction,” in Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1984), 3–52, at 9. Prasenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” Journal of World History, 12/1 (2001), 99–130, at 110. Darwin, After Tamerlane, 368. 52 Dudden, “Japanese Colonial Control,” 2. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 396. Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 38.

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At the same time, the First World War provided a watershed moment to which we can trace the roots of Japan’s subsequent revolt against the global order during the Second World War. The Paris Peace Conference, which Japan attended as one of the five great powers, dealt a second lesson in the diplomacy of imperialism. At the conference, the Japanese delegation proposed a racial non-discrimination clause for the Covenant of the League of Nations. Reasons for proposing this clause were hardly idealistic,55 but Japan’s mantle of the champion of Asia donned after the Russo-Japanese War did play a part. Often described as the “racial equality” clause, this provision “would have conferred official recognition of Japanese equality with the Western world.”56 The proposal gained a majority vote but was met with concerted opposition from the United States and the United Kingdom, and was ultimately rejected. This was a moment when the Japanese leadership “suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of global change.”57 It was a bittersweet moment, for Japan’s status as a global power was now beyond doubt, further cemented at the 1922–1923 Washington Conference which recognized it as the world’s third-largest naval power. Regardless, the rejection made Japan aware once again of its inferiority vis-à-vis the EuroAmerican powers, and ushered in a period of national indignation toward the West. This time, however, resentment toward the West made it easier for the empire to slowly recede from civilian to military control, setting Japan on the path toward another war. In the meantime, there were other challenges. The nationalist movements of 1919 in China and Korea, partly inspired by the “Wilsonian moment,” forced the empire to reconsider its ideology and vocabulary used to justify its imperial expansion.58 As with the internal colonies of Hokkaido and Okinawa, the empire had to work out the terms of its relationship with the external colonies, Taiwan and Korea. This required emphasizing common ancestry and expanding the contours and vocabulary of the imperial nation.59 Three terms help explain the Japanese understanding of nationalism and deserve brief mention. The first, kokutai, is variously translated “as national 55

56

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Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998). Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), 9. Ibid., 3. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). For the impact of Wilsonian thought in Japan, see Dickinson, War and National Reinvention, ch. 6. Eiji Oguma, A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images, trans. David Askew (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002).

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character, national essence, stance, state structure, national polity”;60 the best definition is perhaps: “[kokutai] embraces the ‘national structure,’ especially the imperial institution; the ‘national basis,’ as found in the divine origins of the country and the dynasty; and the ‘national character’ or essence, as embodied in those moral principles and virtues that were considered indispensable to social unity and order.”61 Encompassing the main tenets of national ideology, kokutai served to mark Japanese community apart from the new “Japanese” subjects incorporated into the empire at various levels of expansion. If kokutai contains the metaphysical essence of the Japanese nation, kokumin is more practical, best translated as “a civic or political sense of the nation.”62 In the early Meiji period, Fukuzawa Yukichi proclaimed that “in Japan there was a government but no nation (kokumin)”; but by the late 1880s kokumin was everywhere. Toward the end of the Meiji period, almost everything had a “national” attached to it: “national spirit, national thought, national doctrine, national essence, nationality.”63 As a “civic nationalism,” the idea of kokumin has expanded to become the dominant term that in contemporary Japanese means “a nation, a people.”64 It contrasts therefore with the final term, ko¯min, which evokes a notorious assimilationist policy of the Japanese Empire, ko¯minka. Often translated as “Japanization,” the policy aimed to turn imperial subjects – Koreans and Taiwanese – into “good Japanese.”65 Ko¯minka represented evolution from a narrow, Japanesecentered idea of a nation to a multinational, heterogeneous community that the empire necessitated. In the 1930s and 1940s the Japanese governors of Korea “suggested that Japan was not a racially homogeneous nation and that the conscription of Koreans [into the Japanese military] was based on the ‘unity of metropolitan Japan and Korea’ (Naisen ittai) and the ‘equality of all beneath the emperor’s benevolent gaze’ (isshi do¯jin).”66 Recent scholarship has also identified an “empire-wide, and global shift from a spatial politics 60

61 62

63

64

65

66

Joseph M. Kitagawa, “The Japanese ‘Kokutai’ (National Community) History and Myth,” History of Religions, 13/3 (February 1974), 209–226, at 209. De Bary et al., Sources of Japanese Tradition, 623. Kevin M. Doak, A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing the People (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 164. Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 27, 23. Definition from Kenkyu¯sha’s New School Japanese–English Dictionary (Tokyo: Kenkyūsha, 1968). Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 94. Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 48.

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based on a geography of civilization and monocultural nationalism to a spatial politics based on a geography (and ethics) of cultural pluralism.”67 Despite illusory “equality” and pluralism, however, the ultimate goal was hardly in doubt: “In Japanese colonies, racial and ethnic descriptors defined the goal of assimilation; in other words, the goal was to integrate colonial people into the ‘Yamato [Japanese] race.’”68 In practical terms, ko¯minka was an example of attempts by imperial states to “export their characteristic institutions to the periphery, thereby building a bridge between the two and creating a common culture that ensures that metropolitan institutions and ideas always have the upper hand.”69 Since Japan “treated its colonies not as distant overseas possessions but rather as parts of a hierarchical and differentiated, but economically and ideologically integrated imperial structure,”70 turning the subject populations into ko¯min was the ultimate goal of colonial policy. Despite the strife and humiliation it caused, the policy seems to have had some effect among colonized subjects. Many non-Japanese village youth in Taiwan and Korea volunteered to serve the imperial nation,71 and there were Koreans such as Chang Hyŏ k-chu (Cho¯ Kakuchu¯), who not only naturalized as a Japanese citizen following the war, but also identified “with his Japanese, rather than Korean, compatriots.”72 Despite their forced cooptation into the empire, some Koreans and Taiwanese still found reasons to cast their lot with the imperial nation in search of opportunities and social mobility. Still, these opportunities came at a heavy cost of forfeiting aspects of one’s culture – most notably one’s native name – in a quest to become a true ko¯min. Hidden behind slogans of Japanese leadership professing pan-Asian solidarity were typical colonialist goals. These three terms represent the concentric circles of the empire’s conceptual expansion that followed in the wake of a territorial one. If one can speak of Japanese “nationalities policy” using a contemporaneous concept of managing postimperial populations of the Soviet Union, then its goal was to assimilate the subject populations into ko¯min, from which they would evolve into kokumin, becoming fully fledged Japanese citizens. Yet this was a utopia 67

68

69

70 72

Kate McDonald, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 163. Sayaka Chatani, Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 6. Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 15. Conrad, “Dialectics of Remembrance,” 8. 71 Chatani, Nation-Empire. Samuel Perry, “Early Narratives of Japan’s Korean War,” in Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov (eds.), Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 55–71, at 63.

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as forcefully imposed as the Soviet experiment was on the former subjects of the Russian Empire. This brief appraisal of imperial vocabulary makes obvious that the terms of Japanese nationhood were too obscure for the nonJapanese subjects to comprehend, let alone internalize. In this, they contained the seed of the Japanese Empire’s ultimate failure to win the hearts and minds of the Asian peoples. One peculiar experiment in winning hearts and minds started, uncharacteristically, with an explosion. On 18 September 1931, officers of the Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in the Chinese northeast staged the “Manchurian Incident” by setting off an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway and blaming it on the Chinese. As early as the “Russo-Japanese War Yamagata [Aritomo had been] convinced that Manchuria itself was Japan’s ‘life line,’ the only possible area for expansion and an essential buffer against Russian revenge.”73 Officers of the Kwantung Army, notably Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, breathed life into this belief. Ishiwara believed in the inevitability of war with the Soviet Union and the United States, and viewed Manchuria as a platform from which to launch these wars; he used what he saw as a window of opportunity to expand Japanese influence to all of Manchuria. Less than six months after the daring act of the Manchurian Incident, the Kwantung Army established the puppet “Manchukuo Empire.” Unlike the British informal colonies maintained to guarantee passage, communications, or trade (e.g. the Suez Canal), the Japanese took indirect yet full control of political and other affairs in their informal colony of Manchukuo. The establishment of Manchukuo was a watershed moment that led Japan down the path to world war. More significantly than the First World War, the Manchurian Incident marked not only the end of cooperative imperialism, but also the rolling back of the progress made during the period of “Taisho¯ democracy.” Sounding the knell for democracy and party politics, it signified the transfer of power and control over the empire from civilian to military hands. The Second Sino-Japanese War, into which Japan expanded from Manchuria, set it on course toward “the virulent new imperialism . . . far more aggressive in style and far less modest in ambition than their European forerunners of the 1880s and ’90s.”74 Japan’s lifeline or not, Manchukuo was a unique historical experiment, a testing ground for new ideas, concepts, and projects: it “was not merely 73

74

Marius B. Jansen, “Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives,” in Myers and Peattie, Japanese Colonial Empire, 61–79, at 67. Darwin, After Tamerlane, 370.

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a continuation of Meiji Japan’s imperialism . . . Instead, it was ruled as a modern developmental state.”75 Among other things, Manchukuo was an experiment in pan-Asianism, where the early slogans of a congenial Asian family were tested, such as “The Harmony of Five Ethnicities” (Japanese, Manchu, Han Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian). The Manchurian Empire, with figurehead emperor Pu Yi on the throne, thus served as an ethnographic – as well as economic, political, cultural, architectural, cinematic, and propaganda – laboratory for the larger Japanese Empire.76 The empirebuilders’ emphasis on modernity over tradition and regional over racial identity was evident, among other things, in their architectural vision: “While Japanese imperialism included a racial component, it did not manifest as an attempt to recreate courtly Japan or China. Instead, Japanese focused more on energizing the Asian tradition so that the empire could move on to a new, presumably more evolved state.”77 In short, the Manchurian experiment “began as an unauthorized military scheme to secure resources for a future total war [and] evolved into an ambitious imperialist project to create the Manchurian state of Manchukuo, a domestic New Order, and a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”78 The rhetoric of a harmonious multiethnic Asian empire was a brainchild of Manchukuo’s founders: “the most systematic and sustained effort to formulate a redemptive pan-Asianism was undertaken by the young officers and intellectuals in the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo and north China.”79 Japanese nationalism during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War was the apogee of attempts in preceding decades to expand the frontiers of the imperial nation. As domestic society geared up for total war, these efforts took the form of rallying the subjects against the West, eradicating Western influences, and replacing them with a new, Japanese and Asian modernity. During the China War, nationalist slogans clashed with cosmopolitan visions: “Modernity’s inherently cosmopolitan perspective was difficult to reconcile with purely national or even cultural 75 76

77

78

79

Conrad, “Dialectics of Remembrance,” 7. Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Annika Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014). Bill Sewell, Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905–45 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), 93. Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 1; see also Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” 123.

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boundaries.”80 Yet total war challenged more than the inclusive visions of the bright new Asia that Japan promised to build with – and for – its Asian brethren. It sent shockwaves through domestic society. Japan’s leadership confronted not only the pernicious effect of the West – by keeping Hollywood influence at bay in domestic cinema. They had to reconcile divisions and frustrations rampant in the home community caused by the rise to prominence of some groups (e.g. munitions workers) while others fell into destitution. The imperial nation faced more than one foe; the war it waged was not simply racial, or civilizational – it was also moral.81 The fateful decision to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, following four years of quagmire on the Asian continent, was supposed to overcome these challenges. It was “the only moment in modern Japanese history when [Japan] sought to implement its own dream of world order.”82 In addition to rapid victories on the battlefield, a new vision for Asia – and the world – was to compel the Asian peoples to join the struggle on Japan’s side. Yet selling Japanese leadership to Asian nations that came late into the empire’s orbit proved more difficult. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the new order that Japan sought to build in war, was implemented as clumsily as it was named. From an attempt to achieve a breakthrough in the Sino-Japanese War, the Co-Prosperity Sphere evolved into a grand vision of a new Asian order. It provided the ultimate test of the attractiveness of Japan’s version of modernity, combining Japanese nationalism with a broad pan-Asian vision, and Tokyo’s revolt against the status quo (the “Versailles–Washington system”) with the most inclusive version of Japanese internationalism. Reconciling such contradictions would require a thoroughly planned and meticulously implemented set of policies. In reality, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was built on a competition between various Japanese agencies, on one hand, and between Japan and Asian nations, on the other.83 The contradictions at its core mirrored dilemmas of Japanese nationalism. There was little consensus among Japanese policymakers for what the Co-Prosperity Sphere should represent; it was hammered into a different shape each time leadership in the war changed hands. Starting as foreign 80 81

82

83

Sewell, Constructing Empire, 77. Benjamin Uchiyama, Japan’s Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), ch. 4, “The Movie Star.” Gordon M. Berger, “The Three-Dimensional Empire: Japanese Attitudes and the New Order in Asia, 1937–1945,” Japan Interpreter, 12 (Summer 1978), 355–383, at 355, emphasis in original. Jeremy Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

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minister Matsuoka Yo¯suke’s vision of Japan’s Asian bloc, the Sphere then became a guise for the military’s goals of extracting resources from Asian nations, finally serving as the centerpiece of foreign minister Shigemitsu Mamoru’s late attempt to win Asian hearts and minds amid Japan’s everdeteriorating war fortunes. The Greater East Asia Conference, which opened in Tokyo in November 1943, thus represented almost a complete about-face from the earlier assertions of confident Japanese domination to a new vision of “liberal internationalism” in which Japan promised independence to Asian nations that supported its new order. Shigemitsu devised the promise of independence to distinguish Japan’s actions in Asia from Euro-American colonialism; until then, there was little to mark Japanese out from Western colonialism, apart from hollow slogans such as “Asia for the Asians.” Leaders of some Asian nations recognized Japan’s early military successes against their colonial masters as an opportunity to shake off European colonialism. But they, especially the more independent ones such as Burma and the Philippines, did not passively follow Tokyo’s instructions.84 While they preferred the CoProsperity Sphere to Western colonialism – as a stepping stone to independence – they were soon disillusioned by the empty promises and domineering attitudes of the planners in Tokyo. For the latter, building a contested sphere where Japanese interests had to be tallied with those of the “colonies” proved a tall order. First, Japanese ideologues failed to express the promise of the Co-Prosperity Sphere in attractive terms. Vague slogans such as hakko¯ ichiu (“eight corners of the world under one roof”) – too abstract even for the Japanese – meant few Asians understood the basis of the new order: “Japan had an in-group ideology; its most basic concepts, such as the kokutai . . . and hakko¯ ichiu were impenetrable to those outside Japan’s cultural sphere.”85 There was another, more profound reason: “Even when the Co-Prosperity Sphere became national policy in July 1941, policymakers understood it merely in the service of national ends of self-existence and self-defense.”86 Even when attempting to transcend the nation and lay a claim on a regional, if not global, new order, Japan found it hard to break out of its narrowly national confines. In the end, the “Co-Prosperity Sphere was but a chimera; the euphoria of the first half-year of the Pacific War but a dream within a dream.”87 Until the empire’s collapse made the endeavor redundant, the contours of the imperial nation thus continued to be redrawn in numerous contests. Yet 84

Ibid.

85

Ibid., 96.

86

Ibid., 77

87

Dower, Embracing Defeat, 22.

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these contests did not cease with Japan’s defeat in the war. To the contrary, the competition for the nation’s future was rekindled with greater urgency during the post-1945 period of Allied occupation. What was different after the war was the seeming absence of empire; it is to this reorientation toward the narrow sense of the nation, the deceptively smooth and painless transition from empire to nation-state, that I now turn. But, as we see in the next section, empire did not disappear entirely from the postwar scene.

Postwar, Postimperial Nation Defeat and unconditional surrender at the hands of the Allied powers spelled the end of the Japanese Empire in August 1945. A realm that occupied almost all of East and Southeast Asia disappeared from the map almost overnight. The Japanese imperial nation shrank to the confines of naichi – home islands – from which it had first expanded fifty years prior. Millions of imperial subjects greeted the war’s end with relief, and those in the colonies with jubilation.88 Yet, as remarkable as the empire’s shrinking was the transformation in Japanese people’s thinking about it. As summarized by Ian Nish: To the Japanese the end of empire and the defeat in war were virtually synonymous and are still inseparable in their thinking. As Japanese opinion – and especially intellectual opinion – moved to the left in the postwar period, it attacked imperialism and militarism in the same breath. The targets of socialist criticism in postwar publications were gunkokushugi (militarism) and teikokushugi (imperialism).89

A critical view toward the past was made easier since “the loss of empire was understood by many as a form of immediate decolonization effected largely by external forces.”90 This stood in stark contrast to the reluctance with which European colonial empires let go of their own colonies. Also effected from the outside were the momentous transformations of the Allied Occupation (1945–1952) led by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, the swashbuckling US General Douglas MacArthur. From the ashes of empire a new nation was to be born, the attributes of which were deliberately sketched to preclude a return to the disagreeable past or a move toward an undesirable future. The new Japan was to be pacifistic (an antithesis to wartime militarism), democratic (in marked opposition to both 88

89

Sherzod Muminov, “Introduction: Overcoming Empire,” in Kushner and Muminov, Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia, 1–16. Nish, “Regaining Confidence,” 187. 90 Conrad, “Dialectics of Remembrance,” 10.

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Japanese militarism and Stalinist despotism), and capitalistic (to prevent communist takeover). The Japanese Empire sank into oblivion in this rewritten history, and a nation-state rose in its stead; this was a “nation-centered history, where as the primary subject of the study of the past, the nation is neatly separated from the colonies and seen as developing independently. The transnational processes inherent to empire are truncated, reinforcing assumptions about national subjectivity and ensuring that history remains in service to the nation.”91 The war might have “liberated” Japan’s colonies, but stripping the Japanese nation of its empire had to be carried out in people’s minds. Attempting to leave the empire behind, some intellectuals went so far as viewing the war as a purgatory, through which Japan was “spiritually liberated . . . from the chains of the Japanese Empire.”92 Indeed, August 1945, when the empire went up in the flames of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was trampled by Soviet tanks, provided a convenient breaking point to purge imperial attributes from the Japanese nation and to redraw national boundaries in accordance with the new realities. General MacArthur’s army of soldiers and bureaucrats operated on a narrow definition of a future Japan. Among other things – demilitarized, demobilized, demonopolized – Japan was to be deimperialized. Deimperialization meant redrawing the confines of postwar nationhood exclusively around the ethnic Japanese nation: “the Asian peoples who had suffered most from imperial Japan’s depredations – the Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, and Filipinos – had no serious role, no influential presence at all in the defeated land.”93 The multinational empire, in the eyes of its undertakers, was to be dismembered into multiple ethnic nation-states. After two years of uncertainty about their nationality, even Koreans and Taiwanese, once forcefully incorporated into the Japanese nation by ko¯minka policies, were declared “third-country nationals” by the 1947 Alien Registration Ordinance.94 The onset of the Cold War and the “reverse course” of US Occupation, which rolled back some of the democratic reforms against the rising tide of communism, meant that membership in the new nation was hardly a foregone conclusion for even Japanese 91

92 93

94

Andre Schmid, “Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern Japan: A Review Article,” Journal of Asian Studies, 59/4 (November 2000), 951–976, at 954. Yellen, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 212. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 27; see also Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). Eiji Takemae, The Allied Occupation of Japan, trans. Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (New York: Continuum, 2003), 448–450.

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citizens. More than 600,000 former servicemen captured by the Soviet army and illegally transported to Soviet camps in 1945, the majority of whom were repatriated in the late 1940s, faced suspicion in domestic society because of the communist indoctrination received in the Soviet Union. Their Japaneseness could be called into question because of their unwilling association with Soviet communism, despite – or because of – the fact that some returnees still wore their Imperial Japanese Army uniforms and thus reminded the postwar society of the fallen empire.95 Revulsion toward empire was also conspicuous in the decision to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation,” enshrined in Article 9 of the new constitution.96 The postwar governments translated this renunciation into policy; Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, for example, resisted US attempts to rebuild Japan’s armed forces in the early Cold War period, prioritizing economic recovery.97 Along with the enforced change of focus during the Occupation years, the forgetting of the empire’s atrocities was enabled by an emphasis on the victimhood of the Japanese people who had been “deceived and misled” into the war by a clique of militarist bad apples.98 Following the end of Occupation, during which criticism of the Allies – including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – was censored, the circle of victims expanded. Victimization of the nation helped divert the gaze from the empire: “Although some imperial structures continued to exist, many of these continuities were rendered invisible under the postwar memory regime of the victimized nation.”99 Within a couple of decades victim consciousness had taken a firm hold: “by the 1960s the imperial past was subsumed under what historians have termed the ‘victim consciousness’ of postwar Japan.”100 Even when pacifist internationalism became widespread in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War and student protests, victim narratives preserved their exclusively national focus: the victimhood emphasized was that of fellow

95

96

97

98

99

Sherzod Muminov, Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022). “The Constitution of Japan,” Website of the Prime Minister of Japan and his Cabinet, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e .html. Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era, 2nd edition (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1996), 20–41. The phrase “deceived and misled” is from “Potsdam Declaration: Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender,” 26 July 1945. Online at: www.ndl.go.jp/co nstitution/e/etc/c06.html. Conrad, “Dialectics of Remembrance,” 4. 100 Ibid., 17.

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Japanese. Both the abstract concept of the “war,” and its concrete manifestation in the Second World War, were seen as the victimizer; this made it possible to detach Japanese victimization of others from the broader victimhood of everyone at the hands of the cruel war. John Dower has observed rightly, if scathingly, that “the preoccupation with their own misery that led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others helps illuminate the ways in which victim consciousness colors the identities that all groups and peoples construct for themselves.”101 Such thinking was hardly the remit of only the rightists; the postwar ”progressive nationalism” of leftwing pacifist and grassroots movements that cut their teeth in the violent protests of 1960 against the renewal of the US–Japan security treaty was as strong in its opposition to the centrist “Yoshida Doctrine” as were the rightwingers. The 1960s were a period when the nation and nationalism ceased to be taboo terms in postwar Japan. An important backdrop for this was the sustained economic growth and improvement in the living standards of the population, which contributed to the people’s satisfaction with their nation. In 1964, twenty-four years after an earlier, abortive, plan, Japan welcomed the world to the first Olympic Games in Asia, advertising the nation’s impressive rise from ruins in less than two decades. Hosaka Masayasu has found that for the first time since defeat, the Games created space for some national pride: I have read all the editorials of the Asahi newspaper published in the fifty years after 1945. The first time the term “nationalism” appears is around 1963, the year preceding the Tokyo Olympics. The Games made it possible to use the term as a manifestation of “good nationalism” of the people coming together in support of the nation’s athletes.102

The new and increasingly confident nation-state that had joined the United Nations in 1956 was even more eager to leave the dark imperial past behind than it had been immediately after defeat. The future was bright, and there was little in the past that could arrest the gaze of optimistic Japanese. The 1960s were also a decade in which the pattern of relations changed in the most important pillar of Japanese foreign policy – the alliance with the United States. During the first decade of Japanese independence following the end of the Allied Occupation, the attitude of the Eisenhower administration toward their Japanese counterparts was often high-handed and domineering. This “enduring Occupation mind-set and a resulting dismissive or even 101

Dower, Embracing Defeat, 29.

102

Hando¯ and Hosaka, Nashonarizumu no sho¯tai, 28.

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imperious attitude in conducting relations with Japan left many Japanese feeling bullied and belittled . . . the inequalities of the US–Japan relationship were constantly highlighted, and Japanese from across the political spectrum felt increasingly oppressed by American policies and alienated from their own leaders.”103 Emerging from the postwar rubble as America’s “client state,” Japan followed Washington’s lead in foreign policy, often having to subordinate its interests to those of the alliance. Hando¯ and Hosaka have claimed that dissatisfaction with subordination to the United States has been a constant in postwar national sentiment, which is manifest even in the minds of leaders such as former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo¯, though on the surface they respect alliance obligations.104 Only after the violent student protests in 1960 against the renewal of the US–Japan security treaty – protests that spilled over into wider society and caused the resignation of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and cancellation of the state visit by President Eisenhower – did the new Kennedy administration reconsider the US attitude toward Japan. Once again, Cold War realities played a part in this sea change; the scale of the protests demonstrated to the US strategists Japan’s seeming vulnerability to leftist subversion. The Kennedy administration’s new blueprint for bilateral relations, inaugurated in 1961, favored dialogue over the unilateral decision-making of Eisenhower’s “old Japan hands.” In the new relationship, Japanese nationalism became a means of diverting the Japanese populace from the temptations of socialism or communism. Responding to signals from Washington encouraging Japan away from “communist-oriented neutralism,” Prime Minister “Ikeda [Hayato] firmly rejected neutralism and appealed to a reviving sense of Japanese nationalism to suggest that alignment with the United States might actually be a sign of Japanese strength.”105 Ikeda should be credited with carrying further the torch of his mentor, Yoshida Shigeru. As President Kennedy’s counterpart in the more equal and harmonious alliance, Ikeda skillfully diverted Japanese nationalism to the realm of economic performance. His “Income Doubling Plan” – the election promise with which he rose to the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party – “played a crucial role in healing the nation after the strife of 1960, as economic growth became the new focus of national identity and came to serve a unifying function similar to that of imperial expansion in the prewar 103

104 105

Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 41, 38. Hando¯ and Hosaka, Nashonarizumu no sho¯tai, 44. Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads, 70.

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era.”106 The submission to the USA was overcome by a new form of economic nationalism. The breathless pace of economic expansion and renewal favored such a rhetoric, and in the era of postwar reconstruction and development Japanese nationalism increasingly relied on the growing popularity of the “Made in Japan” brand. In an oft-cited episode, French President Charles de Gaulle allegedly derided Ikeda as “that transistor salesman.” “Two years later, the transistor salesman was running a country with a larger economy than France. In 1967, Japan also overtook Britain, and in the following year it surpassed West Germany to become the world’s largest capitalist economy after the US.”107 Such reversals became a constant feature in the domestic press, culminating during high-growth years in a specific kind of nationalism bordering on exceptionalism. Grouped under the rubric of Nihonjinron, literally “Theories of Japaneseness,” this exceptionalism advocated Japanese inherent superiority in organization, management, and government – echoing the myths about harmony and homogeneity. By the end of the century Nihonjinron became so popular that “over 1,000 [titles] have been brought out in this genre.”108 Among these were books in English, some of which sold more copies in Japanese translation than in the original, such as Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One.109 Though the foreigners’ recognition added to the triumphalism, Nihonjinron was at heart a very Japanese phenomenon: “no one makes more of a fetish of the supposed singularity of the national character and the national experience than the country’s own cultural essentialists and neonationalists.”110 Nihonjinron’s appeal hinged on the economic success that Japan achieved during the years of the so-called “economic miracle”; this impressive growth was touted – by the Japanese themselves as well as foreigners – as a product of uniquely Japanese qualities. Critics have pointed out that proponents of Nihonjinron emphasize an immutable form of identity – “unchanging Japaneseness frozen in time” – and its exclusive nature that idealizes “value orientations and lifestyles of dominant groups within Japanese society as the yardstick to measure the traits of Japanese culture as a whole.”111

106 107

108 109

110

Ibid., 107. David Pilling, Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (London: Penguin, 2014), 93. Sugimoto, “Making Sense of Nihonjinron,” 82. Ezra F. Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Dower, Embracing Defeat, 29. 111 Ibid., 83, 92.

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Though seemingly a product of the confident new era, Nihonjinron was in many ways a reincarnation of a much older Japanese nationalism. It was an outgrowth of the suppression of nationalism in the early postwar years: “the popularity of Nihonjinron in postwar Japan is a consequence of Japan’s inability to exploit the most important symbols which express national identity and nationalism. By these symbols, I refer to the imperial institution, the ‘national’ flag, the ‘national’ anthem, the ‘national’ emblem, and national monuments and rituals.”112 In the postwar rejection of Japan’s imperialism, these symbols had become – especially in the eyes of progressive groups such as teachers’ unions – controversial reminders of the aggressive war. It is perhaps not surprising that symbols which for decades had been instilled in the minds of imperial subjects by relentless propaganda, and the sentiments that these symbols evoked, resurfaced several decades later under different guises.

Conclusion Japanese experiences of empire and nation building both reinforce and challenge the dominant models of studying modern nationalism. Building the Japanese nation and empire produced contradictions that are still visible in the Japanese society of today. We have analyzed three such contradictions. First, the Meiji elite that established modern Japan in 1868 had to integrate the emperor into their conception of modern statehood, creating a political system with the attributes of a modern, European-style nation-state, but which retained a focus on imperial authority. The contradiction was that while sovereignty belonged only to the emperor, Meiji oligarchs had carefully shielded him from taking part in everyday politics. This emperor system functioned with the mediation of shrewd elderly statesmen (genro¯) such as Ito¯ Hirobumi or Yamagata Aritomo, but the crises of authority in the 1930s made evident its inherent flaws. The second contradiction resulted from the clash between the Japanese ethnic nation built on the idea of loyalty to the emperor and the need to create a more inclusive community with an attraction to multiple Asian peoples. This gave prominence to panAsianism. However, while its messages may have been attractive to some Asians, the Japanese propaganda ultimately failed in persuading Asia of the virtues of the wartime new order. Finally, a major contradiction emerged 112

Harumi Befu, “Symbols of Nationalism and Nihonjinron,” in Roger Goodman and Kirsten Refsing (eds.), Ideology and Practice in Modern Japan (London: Routledge, 2002), 26–46, at 27.

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from postwar deimperialization, when the seemingly congruent political nation-state and ethnically homogeneous Japanese nation became dominant concepts, while the emperor declared he was not a “living god” and acquired a symbolic role. This created a discrepancy whereby the multiethnic empire was forced into the national straitjacket, its legacies comfortably ignored by the Japanese elites, while the empire’s victims used these legacies in the construction of their own postwar identities. It is tempting to view the history of Japanese nationhood as a series of attempts, following centuries of relative self-sufficiency and seclusion, to aggressively carve out a place in the global economic, political, and legal systems. It is also easy to see this quest as forced on Japan by the external forces of imperialism and capitalism. By following their lead, Japan found, one could argue, an escape route from potential subjugation and colonization. Its impressive adoption of – and adaptation to – the rules and norms of nineteenth-century “great power” politics meant that Japan had earned its place among the “predators,” and not the hunted, of global politics. Such views would be too limiting. The evolution of modern Japanese nationhood was an organic process shaped by a plethora of internal and external forces, influences, and interactions. The many confrontations with the West, often favored by historians as dominant influences on Japan’s behavior globally and at home, were important in explaining the outwardoriented policies of the empire. But they cannot explain everything. True, the Japanese nation was shaped in conscious attempts to construct a colonial empire similar to successful Western empires. But interactions and exchanges with the colonies were as important as the products and resources imported from Korea or Taiwan. Exchange of ideas and people lent the Japanese Empire its transnational character. Interestingly, as analyzed by recent scholarship on the empire, the view of Japan from the colonies – and through the colonies – is as revealing of the formation of the modern Japanese nation as is the opposite gaze.113 Moreover, while the empire lent the national evolution much of its character, form, and vocabulary, it was hardly the only environment that shaped it. Historic experience of empire was essential to the forming of the Japanese nation, but the Cold War international system – and Japan’s place in it as a US ally – favored an ethnically defined, exclusivist nation-state founded on pacifist and democratic ideals and hence antithetical to the violent 113

Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011); Sewell, Constructing Empire; Yellen, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

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imperial past (though not always willing to take responsibility for it).114 It is hardly surprising that Japanese nationalism during the postwar period – and more recently under Prime Minister Abe – manifested itself mostly through the desire to regain independence from the USA and jettison once and for all the uncomfortable imperial baggage that continues to cause issues with close neighbors, and to build a “new,” “magnificent” nation – euphemisms for an independent, “normal” Japan.115 Yet these very efforts have kept awake the specter of Japan’s empire in the nations it once invaded or colonized. Finally, despite the persistence of Cold War legacies in East Asia – divided Korea being the most conspicuous – their imprints cannot last forever. Besides the endurance of “history problems” with its former victims, the Japanese nation faces new challenges, most importantly the demographic decline that is forecast to cause the so-called “50 million shock” by more than halving the current population of about 127 million to only 50 million by the next century.116 The failed attempt to build an expansionist empire thus hardly registers in contemporary Japanese collective consciousness partly because the present realities are so different: far from expanding, the goal is now to survive as a nation. Part of the solution seems to be in opening the nation and the economy to immigration. Under these pressures, Japanese society has been slowly changing – the nation = ethnicity = culture equation and the myth of a timeless, monoethnic nation are being constantly challenged by growing diversity in society. The experiences of those who have been invisible in the Japanese nation, in part dissolved in the common imperial identity, in part suppressed by the exclusivist nation-state – Okinawans, Ainu, Korean residents (Zainichi), migrant workers, mixedethnicity Japanese, and other underrepresented groups – will grow more visible in rewriting the nation into the future.

Further Reading Barclay, Paul D., Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s Savage Border, 1874–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Dickinson, Frederick R., War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999). 114

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Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Abe Shinzo¯, Atarashii kuni e: Utsukushii kuni e kanzenban (Tokyo: Bunshun shinsho, 2013). Yoichi Funabashi (ed.), Japan’s Population Implosion: The 50 Million Shock (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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The Japanese Empire Gluck, Carol, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Jansen, Marius B., The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000). Naoko Shimazu, Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Ravina, Mark, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Uchida, Jun, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).

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Since the founding of the United States in the late eighteenth century, Americans have rooted their national identity in their relationship with the wider world. America’s geopolitical position, its civilizing mission, its identity as the home of a chosen people, and its security requirements have shaped not only Americans’ external relations but also their very sense of themselves and who they are in a world of other peoples. American nationalism has of course had several other sources than the outside world.1 The virtue of republican self-government – what might be identified as “civic nationalism” – has been an obviously powerful font of America’s self-identity, particularly the ways in which Americans have seen themselves as different, even superior, to other countries.2 Gender, most notably a potent belief in the importance of masculinity, rugged individualism, and fatherhood, has been central to American nationalism from the very beginning (even if such ideas were idealized tropes rather than actual reality).3 Race has also been an especially strong driver of American national identity, not least because the United States became an independent country and forged its national identity at a time when race-based slavery and the 1

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For insightful overviews which explore this complex phenomenon in more detail and depth than is possible in this chapter, see Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (eds.), Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Susan-Mary Grant, “State-Building and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century USA,” in John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 395–413. See, for example, Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Thomas A. Foster, New Men: Manliness in Early America (New York: NYU Press, 2011).

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ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations provided much of the nation’s political, economic, and cultural foundations.4 Religious faith and culture, in particular Protestantism as well as highly potent strains of providentialism, have similarly provided the social norms to which people of other religions had to conform, be they the separation of church and state, public rhetoric derived from biblical passages, or the setting and celebration of major national holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas.5 For at least 150 years, between the founding of the United States and the first decades of the twentieth century, these sources of nationalism often intersected and mutually reinforced one another.6 American society was based on norms about republicanism, masculinity, whiteness, and Protestantism, and, despite the founding promises of equality under the law, white male Protestants enjoyed an almost-airtight seal on their monopoly of social power. Despite exceptional periods when racial minorities or women were able to advance their sociopolitical status – for example, during the Civil War and Reconstruction for black people or the 1920s for women – these deeply held identities were rarely in tension with each other until the middle decades of the twentieth century, when economic crisis, partial secularization, an increasingly assertive pluralism, and partial racial equality destabilized the traditional sources of US national identity.7 It was at this point, in the period from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, that a new basis of national identity emerged to 4

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Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012); Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). On the setting of Protestant norms, see George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 15–153. For examples of how other religious groups adapted to these Protestant norms, see John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); and J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Gary Gerstle, “The Contradictory Character of American Nationality: A Historical Perspective,” in Nancy Foner and Patrick Simon (eds.), Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity: Immigration and Belonging in North America and Western Europe (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), 33–58. On race, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). On religion and the crumbling of Protestantism’s long dominance, see Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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buttress the more traditional sources and adapt them to a modern age. That new basis was the idea that the United States was savior of the world from poverty, insecurity, and tyranny, and therefore that US military power had a redemptive purpose. This was when Americans started to consider their nation to be “the leader of the free world,” which in turn provided them with a new identity based on a new sense of national purpose. In other words, modern American nationalism had internationalism as one of its most significant sources. The idea that the United States had a special global mission was initially expressed mainly by elites, particularly presidents as well as their supporters in political and intellectual life. This focus on the presidency might seem anachronistic today, but for two reasons it was a natural development in earlier eras, especially when it came to national identity and nationalism. First, while the executive is a coequal branch of government, only the president is the head of state, and because of that role the office of the presidency, and the individual of the president, is invested with a symbolic power that far outstrips that of any other public official. But, second, the American head of state is more than just a symbol; the president is also an important policymaker, and as such is the only elected official to have vested within him or her the power of both symbol and substance. Nowhere is this truer than on matters of foreign policy and military defense. The US Constitution grants certain powers over foreign affairs to the legislative branch, but they pale in comparison with those granted to the presidency. That was the case in the late eighteenth century, but that structural imbalance has become only more pronounced over time, particularly since the Second World War. By the middle of the twentieth century, an “imperial presidency” had all but eclipsed Congress on foreign policy and war powers, an imbalance of power that still exists and shows no signs of abating.8 Indeed, despite the debacles of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, this trend has only accelerated over the past half-century. As head of state, the executive of government, and commander-in-chief, only the president holds stewardship over both national identity and national security. This has given presidents disproportionate authority in rechristening American national identity. The 8

For the first use of the term, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). For scholarly accounts of the imperial presidency’s eclipse of Congress, see Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power, 3rd edition (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013); Andrew L. Johns, “Declining the ‘Invitation to Struggle’: Congressional Complicity in the Rise of the Imperial Presidency,” Pacific Historical Review, 89 (Winter 2020), 97–130.

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result, triggered by an era of existential crisis through depression and war, was something of a paradox: nationalism founded on internationalism.

Standing Apart Even before the establishment of the United States as an independent country, the people who lived in England’s North American colonies considered themselves a chosen people. While it is true that migration across the Atlantic moved in both directions – in other words, many colonists chose to abandon the chosen land and return to the British Isles – and while it is true that those who stayed in the American colonies saw themselves as an integral part of England (and later Great Britain), they also considered themselves as a distinct people with a distinct mission. That came to include the thousands of immigrants who did not come from England, or even the British Isles, but who were incorporated into the settlement of the American colonies. From the settlement of New England as a “New Jerusalem” to the eve of the American Revolution and beyond, the people who came to be called Americans considered themselves in the vanguard of a special experiment that had divine favor. They stood apart from the rest of the world.9 This sense of standing apart while remaining within the wider world formed the bedrock of a new American national identity. The United States was founded in 1783 following eight years of revolutionary war against the colonial mother country, Great Britain, and then refounded in 1865 following four years of brutal, industrialized civil war. During this period, and indeed for another half-century after that, American nationalism frequently used the external world as a referent. But that wider world, at least beyond the North American continent, was little more than a symbol, a means by which Americans could situate who they were and what they stood for. There was a kind of circular logic to this sense of national identity: Americans considered themselves to be leaders of a unique experiment in republican self-government, and so their unusual status in the world legitimated the experiment they were undertaking. The purity of that experiment would best be preserved by not interfering in the sordid affairs of other countries, a convention of “non-entanglement” established by George Washington in

9

On the fitful development of this process, see Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Malcolm Gaskill, Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

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his farewell address of 1796 and reinforced by Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address of 1801.10 This principle of leading by example, from afar, was established just as the United States itself became a possibility. In 1776, the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the founding sacred text in the American civic religion, grounded their bid “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” in the need to pay “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” If they wanted to be respected as a sovereign people, in other words, Americans could not simply divorce themselves from the rest of the world. They instead had to explain why they deserved recognition by other sovereign powers, and then prove it with their actions. They had to be “treaty-worthy,” in the historian Eliga Gould’s telling, in order to demonstrate that the United States belonged in the family of civilized nations.11 But this did not mean that Americans needed to lead the civilized world into a better future. They would lead by example, not by active intervention. The notion that, as a chosen nation, the United States provided a shining example but not an active partner to other nations prevailed in the ensuing decades. Americans put themselves in the vanguard of spreading republican liberty throughout the hemisphere, and they loudly applauded the wave of anticolonial revolutions that swept across the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas between 1810 and 1828.12 Still, Americans did little to involve themselves in those revolutions, for the most part offering only rhetorical and, in the form of diplomatic recognition, legal support. And in one particular case, Haiti, the US government was actively hostile to an anticolonial independence revolution. The Haitian Revolution, which culminated in 1804 with Haiti’s independence from France, was explicitly an antislavery rebellion as well as a struggle for national independence. In the United States, nationwide racism and the South’s fears for the future of its own slave society led to the withholding of formal diplomatic recognition of Haitian sovereignty until 1862 and continual attempts to isolate Haiti economically.13 10

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Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 15–99. Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). On the South’s outsized influence over US foreign policy until the Civil War, see

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Even in the midst of America’s only truly existential crisis, the Civil War over southern secession, Unionist nationalism positioned itself globally in symbolic but not substantive terms. At the height of the conflict, Abraham Lincoln invested the struggle to preserve the Union with world-historical, almost cosmological, significance. “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history,” he declared in his 1862 State of the Union address, not long after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”14 Still, there was little sense in Lincoln’s rhetoric, or in US foreign policy, that the United States would play an active, interventionist role in the world. The objectives of saving the Union and saving the world might appear interrelated, but there was nothing to suggest that Americans were willing to commit, or even contemplate committing, to the rest of the world the kind of resources they had just committed to preserving the integrity of their country. America’s mission to the world was meant to be exemplary, an imperial imaginary that would lead humanity into a freer, more peaceful future. It was not intended to be an actual empire, and when the US government was given the opportunity to purchase Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) in 1870, Congress voted it down despite the strategic advantages of having a permanent naval base at the approaches to the Caribbean Sea. The purchase of Alaska in 1867 marked an exception, but it was derided at the time as folly and had not been pursued in the name of an ideological mission to redeem the world. The exception to imperial expansionism was found in North America, especially what is now the continental United States, where nationalism and expansionism combined in highly powerful and frequently combustible ways. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson oversaw the Louisiana Purchase of 530 million acres of territory from France. Jefferson dubbed this an “empire of liberty,” seeming to launch the United States on an ideological crusade, but the reality was more tempered than Jefferson’s rhetoric suggested. The empire of liberty was designed to be, eventually, an integral part of the original but ever-expanding republic. Aside from the most ambitious expansionists who looked south for further territorial gains in Central America and the Caribbean, American statesmen envisioned a single nation-state stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, not an overseas imperial collection of territories of unequal sovereign weight.

14

Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Abraham Lincoln, “Second Annual Message to Congress,” 1 December 1862, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/202180.

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The purchase of the Louisiana Territory was just the beginning of a process, not its culmination. As the historian Robert Lee has pointed out, the land itself was claimed not just by France, the recognized European sovereign power; it was also home to many Native American tribes as well as independent Euro-American and métis communities who did not perceive either France or the United States as the rightful claimant of their land.15 As Lee has shown, the actual transfer of ownership of these lands was highly complicated and long drawn-out. But in addition to the legal and financial complexities, the act of expansion also needed ideological justification and the settlement of these new lands needed ideological encouragement; both drew from, but also significantly added to, existing sources of American nationalism. Westward expansion was justified in the name of “manifest destiny,” a new name coined in 1845 for an old concept stretching back to the earliest English settlement in North America. It was Americans’ “right of our manifest destiny,” explained John L. O’Sullivan, the first to use the term, “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” In other words, as a chosen people Americans had a covenant with God: the right to expand across the continent but the responsibility to civilize and uplift it.16 For the time being, however, manifest destiny had limited relevance. Geographically and intellectually, it was bound by the borders of the continental United States. The basis for American nationalism was domestic, not foreign, and the wider world only came into view when used as an opposite model to highlight just how special the United States actually was. This meant, as both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson admonished the American people, steering clear of foreign commitments and “entangling” alliances. This did not mean that the United States was “isolationist” – the term did not come into common usage until well into the twentieth century; when it did, it was as a political insult rather than an empirical description. But, in the international thought of American elites from the early republic through to the end of the century, it did mean that Americans needed to be careful about foreign interventions so as not to weaken the purity of their republican experiment at home. “The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you,” Washington argued in 1796. “It is 15

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Robert Lee, “Accounting for Conquest: The Price of the Louisiana Purchase of Indian Country,” Journal of American History, 103 (March 2017), 921–942. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

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justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad.” It was this unity, not the stewardship of other nations abroad, that provided the “sacred ties” which made the sovereignty, indeed the very political existence, of the United States possible.17

To Make the World Safe It was not until the close of the nineteenth century that the American sense of mission began to turn its gaze outward. Until then, national identity was rooted almost entirely in building republican self-governance at home and expanding the boundaries and opportunities of the United States. If the country was exceptional, it was as exactly that: an exception that stood apart from the corruptions of the rest of the world. But from the 1890s, Americans began to see their role in the world differently. The United States was no longer just an exemplar, but a savior. This extension of ideological horizons occurred not simply at the top, among presidents and policymakers, but also further down the structures of society. A new generation of activists inculcated a new humanitarianism for the United States, a world mission that would extend charity to less fortunate countries. From floods in China to earthquakes in Japan to famine in India, humanitarian activists mobilized in unprecedented numbers to extend American relief around the world.18 Groups often led by women or with significant female involvement, such as the American Red Cross and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, promoted moral reform, international peace, and humanitarian relief together as a single program.19 Not surprisingly, Christian missionaries were especially active in creating what the historian Ian Tyrrell has aptly called “America’s moral empire.”20 17

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George Washington, “Farewell Address,” 19 September 1796, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/200675. Julia F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Stephen R. Porter, Benevolent Empire: US Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 13–49. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Irwin, Making the World Safe, passim. Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); see also Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, 175–197; Heather D. Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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Building on their work at home, in establishing residential schools to assimilate Native Americans, missionaries spread a gospel of human rights and Christian redemption, most notably in China and the Philippines. Their goal, universally accepted as the American missionary movement’s watchword, was nothing less than “evangelizing the world in this generation.”21 In the 1890s, this “progressive imperialism” saw powerful expression over a humanitarian crisis caused by warfare in Cuba – powerful enough to force a reluctant President William McKinley into war. At issue was Spain’s response to an anticolonial war waged by nationalist Cubans, which resumed in 1895 and created an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis on the island. McKinley was keen to avoid armed conflict, but public opinion, whipped up by a sensationalistic press, became intensely anti-Spanish, and in April 1898 McKinley had little choice but to ask Congress for a declaration of war. He framed it not as an intervention to support Cuba libre – the cause of selfgoverning independence for Cubans – but as a way to stop the “rarely paralleled” humanitarian crisis.22 The war quickly spread to other Spanish colonies, including the Philippines and Puerto Rico, but it remained underpinned by the same ideological impulses. America was in this sense only a limited savior, fighting for civilized standards but not national selfdetermination, yet the fact that it was intervening beyond its shores for the salvation of others at all was hugely significant. Editorial cartoonists in New York frequently portrayed Uncle Sam as a muscular hero rescuing a damsel in distress, Cuba. Not coincidentally, then, the war also shored up masculinity and whiteness as the traditional bases of American nationalism.23 Tellingly, when McKinley took the nation into war, he did not do so to protect the sovereignty of the United States itself. In his war address, he did 21

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Quoted in Dana L. Robert, Occupy until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 217; see also William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). William McKinley, “Message to Congress Requesting a Declaration of War with Spain,” 11 April 1898, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/nod e/304972. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 121–145; Paul T. McCartney, Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). However, racism also fueled anti-imperialism: see Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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not even mention national self-defense as a justification, even indirectly.24 Instead, America’s justification was partly humanitarian and partly in the interests of regional stability. The United States won the war handily, but the result was rather different than Cuban and Filipino nationalists had expected – not national self-determination but the continuation of imperial rule, this time by Americans rather than the Spanish. So determined was the McKinley administration not to grant independence to the Philippines that it launched a brutal war to suppress a nationalist insurgency led by America’s erstwhile ally, Emilio Aguinaldo.25 But, in American eyes, these wars were waged for the good of others, which in turn reinforced an emerging national identity of being disinterested in the world, concerned only for the welfare and basic freedoms of others. The United States next developed the Panama Canal, allegedly not just for its own benefit but for the good of all humankind, and appointed itself the role of regional “policeman” so as to keep a peaceful order in the western hemisphere. This “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, authored by McKinley’s successor Theodore Roosevelt at around the same time he engineered the acquisition and oversaw the building of the Panama Canal, essentially made the United States the sole guardian of regional order. Ostensibly, this was in the interests of the people of the region as a whole.26 Once again, the military interventions which resulted from the Roosevelt Corollary were stimulated by, and also in the process reinforced, traditional nationalistic norms about gender and race.27 Harking back to the ideology of manifest destiny, American statesmen saw it as their duty to protect civilization and spread civilized norms to supposedly less enlightened lands.28 In the same speech in which he outlined his eponymous corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, for instance, Roosevelt breached diplomatic protocols respecting the inviolability of state sovereignty to single out Moscow for its treatment of 24

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Although he did indicate he had a duty to protect US citizens living in Cuba, as well as US vessels anchored in Cuban waters. McKinley, “Message to Congress.” Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009). See, for example, Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Frank Ninkovich, “Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History, 10 (July 1986), 221–245; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170–200.

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Jews in Russia and Istanbul for its treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.29 However, while Americans were pledging their support for oppressed peoples abroad, they also gradually began to withdraw their support for sheltering those very same peoples. The period between the Civil War and the First World War saw a dramatic increase in immigration to the United States, mainly from Europe but also from East Asia. This period is known as the “new immigration” because the people arriving were “new” to Americans in almost every sense: region (Southern and Eastern Europe as well as China and Japan, instead of Germany and the British Isles); language (Italian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Yiddish, instead of English); religion (Catholicism and Judaism instead of Protestantism); and vocational skills (agricultural peasants and other unskilled laborers instead of artisans and educated professionals). After a century of no controls on immigration, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 marked the onset of nativist resistance to immigration. The Dillingham Commission, formed in 1907, investigated uncontrolled migration flows and recommended corrective measures that led to a series of further exclusionary measures culminating in the National Origins Act of 1924.30 The immigrants who had already settled in the United States were then subjected to intense pressures to “Americanize” and conform to the strictures of existing social norms such as whiteness and masculinity.31 At precisely the moment Americans began projecting their humanitarian mission outwards, they severely constrained who could join the mission itself. But what produced this backlash was, ironically, the spirit of humanitarian internationalism that was increasingly forming the basis of a new, harder-edged American nationalism.32 By the time war broke out in Europe in 1914, despite the contradictions raised by the new immigration, Americans had grown accustomed to the idea that they were selfless custodians of the international interest. This was 29

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Charlie Laderman, Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 15–89; Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Gerstle, American Crucible, 14–80; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

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a critical development, for without it, US intervention in the Great War is difficult to imagine. But it was also critical in reorienting America’s sense of itself, away from the notion that it was an isolated republic and toward the idea that it was an equal partner among leading nations in the project to civilize the rest of the world. In strictly realist terms, there was little reason for the United States to enter the First World War, and for three years it remained a neutral power. Germany’s resort to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 brought it into direct conflict with the United States, and in April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. Like McKinley in 1898, Wilson did not call for war as a matter of selfdefense or what would later come to be called “national security.”33 Instead, he portrayed the American national interest as the world’s interest. “We are glad,” Wilson told a special joint session of Congress, “to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience.” His next words launched a revolution in America’s relationship with the other nations, one which has continued in an almost-unbroken trajectory to the present: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Wilson posited the United States as one of several civilized nations that would ensure the safety of democracy, but he left no doubt that Americans would be leading the way. Nor did he leave any uncertainty as to whether Americans would be fighting for their own narrow interests: We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.34

After the war, at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson tried to be true to his word, at least when it came to reordering Europe. He insisted on putting the tenets of a program that has since come to be known as Wilsonianism – primarily national self-determination, democracy promotion, and international organization – at the heart of negotiations for the postwar 33

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Andrew Preston, “Monsters Everywhere: A Genealogy of National Security,” Diplomatic History, 38 (June 2014), 477–500. Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War against Germany, 2 April 1917, The American Presidency Project, www .presidency.ucsb.edu/node/207620.

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settlement. All were supposed to buttress a permanent international order of peace, stability, and prosperity, but none actually spoke directly to the American national interest as narrowly defined. For that very reason, but mainly because of the League of Nations, the US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and, with it, American participation in the proposed Wilsonianbased international order. Yet, while the terms of this order were controversial, they were also broadly popular. Enthusiastic crowds greeted Wilson on his national tour to promote passage of the Versailles Treaty. Perhaps more indicative was the continued involvement, at a very deep level, of US-based non-governmental organizations in the maintenance of international order and the promotion of world peace. After the war, for example, future president Herbert Hoover led extensive famine-relief efforts in Europe. Protestant missionaries continued their charitable work in Africa and Asia, but they sharply divided over the ultimate purpose of these missions, as many (perhaps most) were more interested in what would today be referred to as development – such as the building of schools and medical clinics in growing cities, or the improvement of agricultural techniques in remote rural villages – than actual proselytization.35 Prominent Americans even played a significant, if unofficial role in the activities of the League of Nations, which had, ironically, proved to be the very sticking point in Wilson’s standoff with the Republicancontrolled Senate. Overall, then, the idea that the United States had a leading role to play in maintaining international order and spreading liberal norms had gained broad acceptance at all levels of American society. Even if US international leadership was not universally accepted, it was now very much in the mainstream of American political culture. Those outside the mainstream, however – and they were not an insignificant presence – had a different perspective. Wilson was a white supremacist, by instinct as well as in politics, and he never intended his new world order to apply to European empires. In Paris, he made it clear that his aim was not the dismantling of extra-European empires, and he even successfully fended off a Japanese proposal to enshrine racial equality in the League of Nations charter. Nonetheless, the ideas behind Wilsonianism, especially national self-determination (or what Wilson called “autonomous development”), were perfectly suited to anticolonial nationalism, and the colonized peoples of Asia and Africa drew inspiration from what the historian Erez Manela calls “the Wilsonian moment.” When it became clear that Wilson did not side 35

Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, 176–182.

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with them, nationalists in India, Korea, Indochina, and elsewhere became radicals and revolutionaries.36 In the United States, African Americans, including thousands who had served in combat to make the world safe for democracy, were similarly disillusioned.37 They too formed a powerfully internationalist vision, not of a redemptive America but of anticolonial solidarity with Africans and Asians. Blacks in the United States equated European imperialism with Jim Crow racism in the American South, and they looked abroad to form alliances that would undermine both systems. Black internationalism, in other words, was the inverse of Wilsonian internationalism. The result was highly ironic. For African-American leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, the external world was not a place to be saved, but a place that would save them from their oppressors – their fellow Americans.38

Leader of the Free World By the time the Great Depression hit in 1929, the evolution of American nationalism had followed a familiar path. Other great powers before had also developed a strong sense of their exceptional virtue and special destiny, in particular by positioning their nation or religion at the helm of the civilized world. The notion that America had been specially chosen to lead the world to a better future was powerful, but it was hardly a unique, or even unusual, belief for a great power. It may explain the history of American nationalism, but similar beliefs can also be traced for the histories of British, French, Japanese, German, and Russian nationalism, among others.39 However, the world crisis which began with the Depression and continued into the early years of the Cold War had a major impact on Americans’ sense of themselves, not just regarding their own society but also in terms of their 36

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Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Gerald Horne, “Race from Power: US Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of White Supremacy,” in Brenda Gayle Plummer (ed.), Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 49–52; Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 131–132. Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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sense of America’s role in the world and place in world history. The Depression caused not just a crisis of confidence in the sustainability of industrial capitalism but, so inextricably linked were capitalism and Americanism, an existential angst about the future of the United States itself. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became president at the very worst moment of the economic crisis in 1933, responded by creating a new welfare-regulatory state known as the New Deal. The various programs of the New Deal were designed to provide relief from economic suffering, means of recovery so that the economy could be stabilized and righted, and reform so as to prevent future crashes from happening in the first place. But above all, the New Deal was meant to restore confidence in the system itself – not just the economic system, but that of the whole nation.40 The Depression was a global crisis, and the New Deal lay at the heart of various national responses that were disparate yet also interlinked with one another.41 At the start of this process, the era of the First World War, the United States was among the leading civilized nations of the world. By the end of it, at the end of the Second World War and just as the Cold War was escalating, the United States saw itself as the civilized nation of the world, preeminent in creating, maintaining, and enforcing a new world order in the face of opposition from international communism. Its survival through economic crisis and world war strengthened the United States and its sense of ideological mission. Americans were well aware of this situation, and they embraced it enthusiastically; after 1945, so did Europeans to a great extent.42 Americans were more or less self-sufficient economically and their country was more or less impregnable to attack from the outside. Under other circumstances, these prevailing conditions of assured economic and physical security might have led the United States into an era of splendid isolation. But instead of withdrawing from the world, it embraced world leadership, and by the onset of the Cold War it had become the world’s self-appointed lone 40

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David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Anthony J. Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945– 1952,” Journal of Peace Research, 23 (September 1986), 263–277. Britain had recognized this shift somewhat earlier and invited the United States in as a full partner before being eclipsed by American power during the Second World War. See David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937–1941: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); B. J. C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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savior.43 US national identity still contained a significant international dimension, but it was one that was now deeply internationalist in the sense that it became difficult if not impossible to separate America from the world. What emerged was a nationalist ideology of “militant liberalism” from which the United States would act as global guardian and redeemer.44 According to this new, heavily ideological geostrategic vision, the world was increasingly interconnected and interdependent; the fate of all could now depend on the fate of one. The United States had become the most powerful single nation in the world, and thus had a duty to lead this interdependent world into a new future. The regulatory state at home was now projected outward, and the United States became the guarantor and manager of a liberal international order – “a New Deal for the world,” as the historian Elizabeth Borgwardt has described it.45 Though it was not yet labeled as such, this new ideology of liberal internationalism began to refashion US nationalism. Americans still saw themselves as exceptional, a people who had a special destiny to redeem the world around them. But what fueled this nationalist internationalism was a sense not just of duty, but of danger as well. McKinley and Wilson had taken the United States into foreign wars without invoking self-defense because there had not been a threat, even an indirect threat, to US territorial sovereignty or domestic society. That seemed to have changed beginning in the 1930s. The era of mass, totalitarian ideologies and industrial warfare, epitomized first by Nazi Germany and then by Soviet-led international communism, seemed to pose existential threats to the United States in terms of the safety of its territorial sovereignty and the survival of its values. Those values were Western values, and as Americans began to perceive themselves as under attack, they also began to see themselves as the guardians of Western civilization. This new role brought abrupt shifts to the American sense of self and Americans’ understanding of their role in the world. These shifts can be traced in a new nationalist vocabulary that arose in the decades following the onset of the Great Depression. Looking outward, Americans saw themselves in a position of global leadership. But external threats, which seemed so alien 43

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This paragraph is drawn from the brilliant analysis in John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). Ernst B. Haas, Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress: The Rise and Decline of Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 136–138. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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to Americans but also seemed powerful enough to overwhelm them, forced Americans to look inward too, and to articulate new ways of perceiving their own identity. But given that the principal adversary, Nazi Germany, was threatening precisely because of its hostility to pluralism and liberalism, this new nationalism would have to be inclusive, at least in how it was conceived and articulated. No longer could American self-identity be exclusive on the grounds of race or religion. (Gender and sexuality were another matter, and heteronormativity became even more entrenched.46) Instead, a bundle of new catchphrases, all supposedly timeless but in reality invented in the late 1930s and 1940s, captured the essence of this new nationalism, tethered to a much bigger New Deal state, and allowed Americans to understand their purpose in a new world order. In this heady period, a fulcrum for both world politics and national identities, emerged an American nationalism for a global age. The first of these invented traditions is possibly the most important: “national security.” Before the 1930s, American leaders almost never used the phrase to describe their position in the world, or the self-defense of their country; it only came into frequent use after 1937 and did not become the standard term to describe US defense and foreign policy until the early Cold War, exemplified most famously by the passage of the National Security Act in 1947. Before then, Americans conceived of self-defense in very traditional terms, simply as the protection of territorial sovereignty. But with the rise of totalitarian ideologies heading mass movements, which were soon at the helm of powerful industrial states with large militaries, some Americans no longer saw themselves as an isolated outpost in world affairs. Nor did they simply see their survival as a nation based solely on the protection of territorial sovereignty. Instead, they envisioned an increasingly interconnected world in which threats to a nation’s safety, even its very existence, were as much ideological as physical.47 In a major speech at the University of Virginia in the summer of 1940, as Germany was conquering Europe and Japan attempting to subjugate China, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned Americans they had become “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.” Every previous generation of Americans had reveled in their status as a democratic exception in an undemocratic world, but Roosevelt warned this was no longer possible in the modern age. “Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans 46

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Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Preston, “Monsters Everywhere,” passim.

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today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom – the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”48 Roosevelt had to resort to such strong warnings because he spoke at a moment of deep uncertainty in the United States. The country was more or less immune to external attack, a condition which historians have termed “free security.”49 But the international system of the interwar period had produced a new type of threat that wedded hostile ideologies to new military technologies and changed the traditional calculus of threat perception. And yet, this shift was not apparent to all Americans – hence Roosevelt’s strong language. Most Americans at this time were not “isolationists”; they were fully aware of world affairs and not opposed to their country getting involved beyond its own borders. They were, however, mostly opposed to becoming involved in the wars then raging in Europe and East Asia. Thus, in order to persuade these Americans that they not only should get involved, but must, for their own self-preservation, Roosevelt stretched the traditional grounds for self-defense. In place of more conventional phrases like “self-defense” and “the national interest,” Roosevelt began using a new phrase, “national security,” which blended the ideological and the territorial into a new doctrine of self-preservation. “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are founded,” he explained in his 1939 State of the Union address. “To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”50 Or, as he put it in his famous “arsenal of democracy” radio address of December 1940, “This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security . . . Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.”51 Between 1937, when Japan invaded China, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that finally brought the United States into

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Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at University of Virginia,” 10 June 1940, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/209705. The concept was introduced by C. Vann Woodward , “The Age of Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review, 66 (October 1960), 1–19. For a more recent analysis, see Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall, America’s Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” 4 January 1939, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/209128. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” 29 December 1940, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/209416.

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the war, Roosevelt used the term “national security” more than all other presidents before him combined.52 Roosevelt stressed the need to protect American values as much as American territory; indeed, in his mind the two were inseparably linked, because the United States could not be itself if it was, as he had said in Virginia, “a lone island” of freedom in a world of tyranny. But these values had been only sporadically codified. What exactly were Americans needing to protect if not just the United States itself? This would need addressing. Religion had been at the very heart of American national identity since the first stages of English transplantation in the seventeenth century, so it is not surprising that Roosevelt placed it at the center of his new worldview. He stressed that what mattered to Americans was a basic religious liberty, founded on the freedom of individual conscience, that allowed scope for citizens of all faiths to live together so long as they respected each other’s right to religious freedom. Thus was born the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” a system of religious tolerance which allegedly stretched back to the founding of the republic. Religious freedom was central to democratic politics, and therefore to the maintenance of peace. As Roosevelt explained in his 1939 State of the Union speech, “Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two – democracy and international good faith.” Thus it did not matter, as it once did in American society, whether one was a Methodist or a Presbyterian, a Protestant or a Catholic, a Christian or a Jew: all that mattered in a modern liberal democracy was whether one respected others’ right to be religious. In the late 1930s, American intellectuals sympathetic to Roosevelt’s stance, and to his predicament as an interventionist leader of a country with strongly anti-interventionist proclivities, began to discover a useable history of American religious pluralism which quickly came to be known as the Judeo-Christian tradition.53 By 1955, when Will Herberg penned his bestselling book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, the notion that the United States had always been a bastion of religious liberty had become an article of faith.54

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Preston, “Monsters Everywhere,” 490. Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988); Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, especially 327–341, 419–422. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). Generations of scholars have since accepted Herberg’s

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Americans’ newly emerging self-identity had a more aspirational side, as well, as captured in two slogans popularized in the first half of the twentieth century and given common currency in the 1930s and 1940s: “the American Dream” and “the American Way of Life.” Both captured the blend of political and economic freedoms that together formed the core of what it meant to be a citizen of the United States. The American Dream was more materialistic: it bestowed the right to upward socioeconomic mobility, especially the right to get rich. This basic freedom of opportunity had its roots in the Gilded Age, when romantic ideals of rags-to-riches success stories became not just popular entertainment but a unique feature of American citizenship. In the era of the world wars, and despite the turbulence of regularly fluctuating economic booms and busts, the American Dream gained widespread acceptance as the basis for America itself.55 The American Way of Life had a similar faith in upward mobility, but it placed equal emphasis on the political liberties which made economic prosperity possible. The American Way thus overlapped intimately with other political and economic tropes, such as the JudeoChristian tradition, in that they all enshrined freedom at the heart of Americanness and saw various freedoms as mutually reinforcing.56 “National security” identified the totalistic nature of a new kind of threat, while the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” the “American Dream,” and the “American Way of Life” all codified exactly what it was Americans were meant to be fighting for in a world at war. Roosevelt expressed all this in the Four Freedoms – from want and fear, of speech and religion – he declared in January 1941, and then in the Atlantic Charter he cosigned with Winston Churchill later that year, in August. These ideas fashioned an identity for Americans both at home and in the world: who Americans were, what they stood for, how they lived, what made them unique, and what they had to protect against illiberal enemies of total ideological opposition. Here was born a new nationalism forged from a new international context. Two other ideas, both of them ideologically powerful and impressively enduring, took all these ideas about threat and chosenness and forged from them a global role for the United States. They were in most ways derivative of the manifest destiny impulse articulated a century before: power brings

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formulation, but for an effective historical critique, see Sehat, Myth of American Religious Freedom, passim. Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Thomas Borstelmann, Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 37–42. Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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both opportunity and responsibility. The future of civilization depended on Americans fulfilling their end of the bargain and wielding their power for the good of the world as well as themselves. In February 1941, only a month after Roosevelt proclaimed the Four Freedoms and ten months before the United States would enter the war, the publishing baron Henry Luce unveiled the first of these visions: “the American Century.” Luce was an ardent interventionist, and he despaired at Americans’ failure to grasp the mantle of international leadership simply because their own shores remained far from the danger. He therefore embraced Roosevelt’s refashioning of self-defense as the more capacious national security, but he also worried that this mindset was still too defensive. The American Century instead called for the United States to remake the world, preferably in its own image: liberal, democratic, and capitalist.57 The American Century would provide much of the ideological fuel that powered American globalism, and with it US foreign policy, through the Second World War to the end of the Cold War and beyond.58 The organizing principle that tied all of the above together – the normative elements, the ideological fuel, the burdens of global leadership, the faith in military and economic power – into a powerfully enduring form of internationalist American nationalism was the idea that the United States was “leader of the free world.” According to this new American worldview, defeating Germany and Japan in the Second World War and containing the spread of communism during the Cold War placed the United States at the leading edge of modern history. By the middle of the twentieth century, then, Americans had placed themselves at the pinnacle of the civilized world, with a duty to hold back the onset of barbarism and instead, over time, to replace barbarism with the civilization of liberal democratic capitalism. This role not only gave direction to US foreign policy, in the form of the strategy of containment, it also gave purpose to the very notion of what it meant to be American in the modern world. The term “leader of the free world” was virtually unknown before the Cold War. It first appeared during the First World War, albeit very rarely, and did not come into common usage until 1947.59 Not coincidentally, this 57

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Melvyn P. Leffler, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: US Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See the two special fora on Luce and the American Century, which begin with a reprint of Luce’s original article, in Diplomatic History, 23 (April 1999), 157–370, 23 (July 1999), 391– 537. For the spiritual aspects to Luce’s concept, see Mark Thomas Edwards, Faith and Foreign Affairs in the American Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019). According to a search on Google Ngram: https://books.google.com/ngrams.

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was right at the time that the United States declared a cold war against the Soviet Union, through measures such as the Truman Doctrine (March 1947), the Marshall Plan (June), George Kennan’s “X” article in Foreign Affairs (July), and the passage of the National Security Act (July). Within a few years, the very basis of American identity was the combination of power and ideals that was the only thing keeping the entire world from succumbing to tyranny. “As the leader of the free world, our responsibility in the struggle to keep free and to help others achieve their freedom is of sobering magnitude,” New Hampshire Congressman Charles E. Merrow put it in 1953. “In view of these facts, the United States as the leader of the free world must formulate policies calculated to increase rapidly the power of the United States and the strength of the free world.”60 This notion, once heretical in American diplomatic thought, had by the time of Merrow’s speech become commonplace. But the accepted wisdom was more than simply a foreign-policy doctrine; it was a potent source of a new kind of American nationalism. All the hallmarks of traditional nationalism are found in the role of “leader of the free world”: a sense of chosenness, even messianism; power in the service of ideals, which are in the service of a greater good, not just that of the nation; and a self-appointed role as the guardian of civilization and savior of the world. Merrow was right in one sense. It was unquestionably the case that, by 1953, the United States had amassed a staggering amount of power – perhaps more than any other polity going back to ancient Rome. To Americans, this was as it should be: US power was a redemptive force for progress and justice in the world, and American identity was now defined by the projection of this power. But the concentration of such overwhelming power raised new questions about what kind of nation the United States had become. The United States had been born in anticolonial revolution, and American statesmen, including Franklin Roosevelt, grounded their foreign policies as a continued resistance to foreign empires. Yet the fact that the United States was now the most powerful state in the world, and that it had established a dominant system of liberal norms that needed periodic enforcement against its external enemies, raised the prospect of Americans becoming imperialists themselves. Even if their objective was not the formal control of territory, as it had been for Europe’s overseas empires, after the Second World War Americans aimed to control the mechanics of the world order 60

Chester E. Merrow, “United States Leadership in a Divided World,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 289 (September 1953), 2, 6.

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itself – everything from the composition of foreign governments and economic systems to, as Daniel Immerwahr has imaginatively illustrated, the global standardization of screw threads.61 Yet a nationalism based upon a mission to save the world foundered when that mission was called into question, both at home and abroad. The disastrous war in Vietnam and the even more disastrous war in Iraq this century, combined with global economic shocks in the 1970s and 2008, have undermined the internationalist terms of American identity, and in turn led to unusually intense social conflict over what it actually means to be an American.

Further Reading Benton-Cohen, Katherine, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Borstelmann, Thomas, Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Canaday, Margot, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Hoganson, Kristin L., Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). Kazin, Michael, and Joseph A. McCartin (eds.), Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Leffler, Melvyn P., Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: US Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Patel, Kiran Klaus, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Preston, Andrew, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). Schultz, Kevin M., Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Thompson, John A., A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). Wall, Wendy L., Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 61

Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

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11

The Indian Subcontinent: From Raj to Partition swarupa gupta

In 1877, the historian Rajanikanta Gupta lamented: Since the fateful day when the unlucky Sirajuddaula was defeated by the enemies’ conspiracy, the British Company’s rule was established [1757]. Since then, there was no event that really challenged alien rule. Then, in 1857, there was a violent cataclysm: the Mutiny-Rebellion. Never was the foundation of colonial authority shaken to such an extent, nor had the British faced such great trouble. They witnessed at every moment, the manifestation of a violent power. [Everywhere] there was a wild conflagration.1

Gupta’s conviction indicates that Indian nationhood had earlier beginnings than has generally been supposed. The “Mutiny-Rebellion” of 1857, long regarded as a key transformative event, being hailed as the “first war of Indian independence” having “national” elements, was situated within a longer genealogy. This underscored the evolutionary process through which Indian nationhood developed. It also highlighted the multivalence of the revolt. It at once symbolized “power,” Indian agency, and collective identity: cutting across caste, class, and communal divisions. By connecting the revolt with the imperial glory of Mughal Delhi, Gupta mediated the many meanings of 1857, and linked it with a long patriotic past that evoked the idea of India despite endless fragmentation. His remarks hold the key to understanding how the many stories of Indian nationhood converged at complex levels. This chapter explores specific themes, nuances, and perspectives of Indian nationhood within genealogized, indigenous, and transnational frames, moving beyond perennialist, modernist, political, and internalist models. It crafts a subtle analytic technique to shed new light on the intensely contested 1

Rajanikanta Gupta, Shipahi Juddher Itihas, Part I I, 2nd edition (Calcutta, 1885 [1877]), 105–106.

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nature of Indian nationalism(s) during 1857–1947. Highlighting the difference between nationhood (the ontology of being and becoming a nation) and nationalism (the political ideology of the modern nation-state), I link genealogies with modern nationalist functionalities. This approach prioritizes cultural nationhood and its ontologies (unfolding across a longue durée) which fed into and shaped variant forms of nationalist identities and imaginings during the period of the “freedom struggle.” It has the explanatory power to link the nation, nationality, nation-state, and nationalism. Taking this as the central argument, the chapter tracks intersections between culture and politics.2 This interpretative line does not construct a simplistic grand story of Indian nationalism/nationhood by glossing over temporal, regional, communal, ideational, and historicist differences. Rather, it uncovers contextual unities in a complex mosaic of identities, despite, and alongside, contestations of ideology, caste, clan, community, and region. Introducing the conceptual category of samaj (social collectivity), I explore hitherto unexplored intersections between sociocultural ideas-in-practice, and political events, movements, and institutions including the Indian National Congress, Extremism, “international” swadeshi, Gandhian satyagraha, and the Partition of India. By underscoring indigenous genealogies, this study offers fresh alternatives to ideas about the relationship between nation and modernity. Drawing on Western models which underscore premodern cultural foundations, challenging the idea that the nation is a product of modernity,3 this chapter also moves beyond them by highlighting historicist differences emanating from (non-Western) indigeneities. Situating Indian nationhood at a triadic temporal juncture of modernity’s pasts, its (colonial) present, and its postcolonial futures, the chapter suggests that the many stories of Indian nationhood did not end in 1947. In the afterlife of empire, colonial policies and the legacies of Partition continue to influence Indian politics and everyday life. It is necessary to transnationalize Indian nationhood in past (colonial) and present (postcolonial) contexts by simultaneously devising indigenous modes of challenging seamless globalization/abstract universalism and underscoring historicism. This would outline a fresh paradigm for recalibrating contemporary postcolonial identities within and beyond India. 2

3

Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); Christopher Alan Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, c. 1867–1905 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Anthony D. Smith, The Cultural Foundations of Nations (Oxford: Wiley, 2008).

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The analytic move is part of a wider aim of understanding, not just defining or dating, the nation.4 The familiar question “when was the nation?” is jettisoned to pave the way for describing, and not dating or defining, the nation through cultural-political ontologies. The following sections delve into less-glimpsed aspects of Indian nationhood, tracing shared theoretical ground and connections between otherwise segmented/different phases, ideologies, and features of Indian nationhood, which is not simply a history of the anticolonial nationalist movement. The central argument outlined above qualifies stereotypical typologies inbuilt into “the idea of nationalism” such as “Western voluntaristic” and “Eastern organic,”5 and dichotomies of “two types,” civic and ethnic, situated within the Western/Eastern oppositional framework.6 Bridging the conceptual gulf, John Plamenatz remarked that nationalism is primarily a cultural phenomenon, though it often takes a political form. How were such cultural-political connections reflected in the many forms of Indian nationhood? Prioritizing the element of process, this chapter locates the culture–politics connection in analytic frames which differentiate as well as compare and connect (1) Indian cultural nationhood and (2) political nationalism.

The Revolt of 1857 and the Establishment of the Raj Nationalist writers in India have long viewed the cataclysm of 1857 as the “first Indian war of independence.” Starting as a mutiny of the British East India Company sepoys, the movement embraced large sections of civil populations.7 S. B. Chaudhuri claimed that the Mutiny-Rebellion was not only a “war of independence,” but also a revolt of the people. This ran counter to ideas which highlighted its “non-national” character. Rather than seeing the revolt as an important milestone in mapping Indian nationhood and linking it with later political nationalisms of a different brand, eminent scholars such as 4 5

6

7

William Connor, “When Is a Nation?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 13/1 (2010), 92–103. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1944). Kohn’s classification has been mentioned in Anthony D. Smith, “Nationalism and the Historians,” in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation (London: Verso, 2012), 182. John Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Eugene Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), 23–36; Clifford Geertz, The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963); Elie Kedourie (ed.), Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857–1859 (Calcutta: World Press, 1957); Sashi Bhusan Chaudhuri, Theories of the Indian Mutiny (Calcutta: World Press, 1965), 33, 144.

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R. C. Majumdar argued that political nationalism in India came much later, emerging as a movement spearheaded by the urbanized, Western-educated elite. Reflecting on the question as to whether the revolt could be called “a war of Indian independence,” Jawaharlal Nehru expressed the conviction that nationalism of a modern type was yet to come.8 Qualifying both these viewpoints, it is more realistic to consider the revolt as containing culturalnationalist and political strands which were selectively drawn on in later fullfledged nationalist ideologies and movements. The revolt opened up a space for understanding the relationship between nationhood, resistance, and identity. Links between resistance movements opposing alien authority, on the one hand, and nationhood and identity, on the other, have been sought by historians and nationalist leaders across the world. Often, such linkages are written back into the narrative of resistance, which in retrospect, becomes “national,” having an inspirational value for later movements. The MutinyRebellion/revolt of 1857 was no exception. Despite its limitations, the revolt has been written into the history of Indian nationalism in a variety of ways. The theoretical stance can be related especially to Afro-Asian contexts of nationalism, where the “roots of the modern-educated elite and modern-style politics are shallowest,” creating an incentive to argue a historical connection between modern political activities and traditional resistance movements. One can even “assert the existence of a permanent underlying ‘ur-nationalism’ which manifested its hostility to the European presence in a distinct series of historical forms.”9 This approach awakens us to senses of a continuing story of nationhood, which, I argue, did not begin either in 1857 or later in elite political movements. There were earlier communities of sentiment10 and emotional and ethnic belonging which flowed into what has been termed the “mentality of the mutiny.” Different from journeys of core ethnies en route to political nationalism,11 sociocultural connections were present even in precolonial bundles of nestling communities. They merged with anti-imperialist sentiment and ideational trajectories in 1857 through a “collective mentality” – which linked pre-1857, 1857–1858, and post-1858 phases in the evolving history of Indian nationhood. The collective “mentality of the mutiny” reflected a remarkable unity between India’s infamously opposed communal “others”: the Hindus and 8 9

10 11

Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet, 1947), 267–268. Eric Stokes, “Traditional Resistance Movements and Afro-Asian Nationalism: The Context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion in India,” Past and Present, 48 (1970), 100. See Ray, Felt Community, ch. 2. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

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Muslims. This communal harmony intertwined with other kinds of unities despite social and cultural schisms in the subcontinent. While the many voices of the Mutiny-Rebellion have been seen as internally opposed, nationalists continue to underscore large-scale unities, glossing over differences in patterns of combat, resistance, and conceptualizations of identity.12 The conflagration in north India and subtler fires in other regions were at odds with the “loyalties” of specific regions (such as Bengal and Punjab) and people. However, more nuanced explorations shatter stereotypes of regional “loyalties.” Anticolonial sentiment took many forms. Even while negating violence and atrocities against the British, and not engaging in overt combat, “loyalist” people and places came together in potentially resistancialist stances of their own at specific referential points. For instance, in Bengal, a “loyalist” province that stayed away from the revolt, 1857 brought new momentum and meaning to nationalist feelings born of discontent with colonialism.13 The Hindoo Patriot clearly voiced this discontent when it highlighted grievances inseparable from foreign rule. Staunch “loyalists” such as Durgadas Bandyopadhyay and historians such as Rajanikanta Gupta had ambivalent attitudes toward the Raj.14 Such a situation makes us question the validity of oppositional labels such as “loyalist” and “traitor.”15 Veiled criticisms and dilemmas within loyalism made it clear that there was a general feeling of discontent, which was actually a harbinger of progress and a spur to quests for an empowered identity. As a Calcutta publication, referring to ideas about nationhood in the wake of 1857, put it: Whatever of moral and material progress India has been able to achieve under the British rule has been owing to discontent, itself the result of advanced thought and cultivated feeling. A nation, like an individual . . . acquires a sense of its duties only in experiencing adversity. Moments of sorrow . . . are the most precious moments of individual as well as national life.16

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For “subaltern” voices of “tribal” leaders, see Gautam Bhadra, “Four Rebels of 1857,” in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, vol. I V (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 129–175. Swarupa Gupta, “1857 and Ideas about Nationhood in Bengal: Nuances and Themes,” Economic and Political Weekly, 42/19 (12–18 May 2007), 1762–1769. Durgadas Bandyopadhyay, “Bidrohe Bangaliba Amar Jibancharit,” Janmabhoomi (1889– 1891), 171; Gupta, Shipahi Judhher Itihas. Edward I. Brodkin, “The Struggle for Succession: Rebels and Loyalists in the Indian Mutiny of 1857,” Modern Asian Studies, 6/3 (1972), 277. Brahmo Public Opinion, 1/7 (2 May 2 1878), 55.

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The year 1857 was such a moment of adversity. It led to a heightened social awareness and became a link in a chain of social transformation emanating from the category of samaj. Etymologically meaning “to move together in a united manner,” samaj variously referred to an aggregation or collectivity of individuals, or a union of castes or peoples of a specific region. Such communities had been formed as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Sena king of Bengal, Ballalsen, founded the Bikrampur Samaj in the twelfth century. Though founded by kings, these samajs were rooted more in social and cultural realities of everyday life rather than kingly or political control. As Kaliprasanna Das pointed out: “The expression of Hindu collective life is not the state but the samaj. The key to its unity is not law, but dharma [religion and righteous way of living]; and the norms, customs, manners and practices approved by the chiefs of the samaj are an integral part of that dharma.”17 Samaj could accommodate people of diverse religions, castes, communities, and regions, provided they adhered to “approved” notions of conduct. Both in pre-Raj and in precolonial India, samaj was neither revolutionary nor anti-establishmentarian. It did not challenge the existing social/political order. Rather, it was part of it. It was a term that never really fell out of practice. Reoriented in nineteenth-century India, it countered the colonial allegation that India had no history and had never been a nation. Indian writers were convinced that samaj could forge a complex whole from diverse fragments and approximate the idea of an Indian nation.18 It was a key ideational site which conditioned interactions between the British and Indian communities, as well as among the Indians themselves. Connections between “ancient” and “medieval” samajs and “modern” ones were forged within frames of continuity through change.19 Such links indicate that language itself was a source of continuity. Bengali crystalized as a distinct language during the tenth century A D.20 A diachronic (historical) more than a structural-linguistic synchronic approach21 is needed to track origins, evolution, and continuities in a specific language. In Bengal, language formed a primary ideational site for exploring why and how samaj

17 18 19

20

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Kaliprasanna Das, Barnasram Dharma O Hindu Jiban (Calcutta: The Book, 1935), 127. Nandamohan Chattopadhyay, Adhunatana Samaj (Calcutta, 1877). Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, Rachana Sambhar, ed. Pramathanath Bisi (Calcutta: Mitra and Ghosh, 1957). Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, The History and Development of the Bengali Language (repr. Delhi: Rupa, 2002). See Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1933).

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became a key term in emerging vocabularies of identity.22 Bengali and other Indian languages, acquiring specific forms in consonance with medieval sociopolitical contexts, referred to “ancient” samajs too. The sense of movement and flow despite ruptures ensured that the etymological semantics of samaj did not disappear. Significantly, language and samaj shared common ground in two main ways. First, language is made up of interrelated units in a systematic way.23 Samaj, integrated into the linguistic corpus, conjoined fragments to forge unities. Second, the gemeinschaftlich marker of language was indispensable as samaj was conceived as a “natural” society, though it had associational features. Seeing culture, society, and language as interdependent, and forming a conceptual triad, other elements of a dual continuity emerge. The symbolic and communicative aspects of language influenced ways in which samaj was given new meanings; and how it facilitated connective communication through locations in key slots in medieval and modern texts, ecumenical discourses, and everyday conversation. This is reflected in intersections between the development of languages and samajs in various parts of India.24 Against this backdrop of continuity, “progress” – social, cultural, and political – was especially highlighted. The Revolt of 1857 was situated in a grid of samajik progress and fitted into nationalist narratives.25 By the turn of the century, the cumulative effect of the Black Acts (1849), the Vernacular Press Act (1879), and the Ilbert Bill Controversy (1883) had led to strong anticolonial attitudes. In this social-cultural-political milieu, the revolt was seen as a catalytic event, bringing social transformation. The period 1856–1861 was considered by intellectuals such as Shibnath Shastri as a mahendrakhhon (momentous phase of many opportunities/changes) which infused new life and energy into the samaj.26 In this way, 1857 opened up a space for the reconfiguration of the nation, people, and land. It accelerated a search for identity that enmeshed with efforts of collective uplift through self-help and the forging of transregional unities. This reflected sociocultural connections and the forging of translocal solidarities, integral to ideas about progress. The orientation was different from that of the rebels of north and central India, for it did not look back to a shattered past even while seeking to establish a new order. It recreated the past in the image of the present and the future. The notion of a nation was produced through 22 23

24

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Dineshchandra Sen, Brihat Banga, vol. I (repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2006), 52. William Alston, “Language,” in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. I I – I V (London: Macmillan, 1972), 384–385. Satish Chandra, Madhyakaleen Bharat Rajniti, Samaj Aur Sanskriti: 8th–17th Century, new edition (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2020). Gupta, “1857 and Ideas about Nationhood in Bengal.” Shibnath Shastri, Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj (Calcutta, 1904), 202.

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a complex interaction between reorientations of past samajik unities and the circumstances of the modern (colonial) period. This analytic line moves beyond ideas about the revolt as “feudal,” “retrogressive,” “local,” and “non-national.” The revolt cannot simplistically be called the first Indian war of independence. But it contained elements of nationhood and nationality, which were selectively drawn on by much later political nationalisms. It formed part of the continuing story of Indian nationalism even in postcolonial times. It is important to see which strands were legitimated, memorialized, and woven into nationalist ideologies at specific times, and which were elided. In 2007, new ways of commemoration through popular participation and scholarly interventions sought to rewrite the event into Indian history in different ways. A widely circulated Indian periodical claimed that, instead of being a mere nostalgic trip to the past, the celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the revolt “should be an occasion for reflecting on the present in the light of the lessons of that momentous event.”27 The periodical distinguished between “the popular emotional associations surrounding 1857,”28 which acclaimed it as the first full-blown anti-imperialist resistance, on the one hand, and various academic/scholarly representations, on the other. However, academic and commonsense perceptions were not hermetically sealed off from one another. Moreover, various groups in India and beyond (Indian diasporas in the West) laid a claim to 1857 in different ways that sought to strengthen their own historical identities. Yet, cutting across such variations of regional/group/national/transnational representations of the revolt, there were common features which shaped new nationalist imaginaries. For instance, the mass-based nature of 1857 inhering in its fight for dharma (religion and also righteous life) had new incarnations in extremist politics in the post-1905 swadeshi period. Extremists invoked religious icons and symbols to awaken and include the masses in the struggle for “swaraj” (self-rule). Swaraj is hard to translate into English, but it shared connotative ground with the Irish Gaelic sinn féin (assertion of Irish national sovereignty and self-determination). Though comparable, there were subtle differences between sinn féin and swaraj. Crystalizing as a distinct ideology in the Irish Republican Party founded in 1905 by A. Griffith,29 sinn féin was more of 27

28 29

“Echoes of 1857,” introduction to a special issue of Economic and Political Weekly, 42/19 (12–18 May 2007), 1651. Ibid. See Francis P. Jones, History of the Sinn Féin Movement and the Irish Rebellion (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1917); Mícheál Mac Donncha, Sinn Féin: A Century of Struggle (Dublin: Republican Publishers, 2005).

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a political and exclusivist idea than swaraj and “swadeshi” were. This point will be clarified later in the chapter with further reflections on whether independence groups within the British Empire inspired each other. For the moment, let us dwell on transnational inspirational currents that 1857 generated. The events of 1857 supposedly sparked off the “revolutionary current” in Indian nationalism which was drawn on later – in rebellion in the army, the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, and the formation of the Indian National Army. This is one way of telling the Indian nationalist story by seeking its selective genealogies in 1857. There was another “transnational” way of looking at it. It was considered as a “forerunner in the annals of anti-imperialist uprisings in other parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa.”30 The problem with this viewpoint is that, for all that latter-day scholars might wish to compare and investigate connections between resistance movements in various parts of the colonized world, the 1857 revolt was situated in an Indo-centric frame. The transnational stance falls into the snare of chauvinistic nationalism because 1857 apparently gave the first/single signal from which other anticolonial movements got their impetus and took off. Shifting from such internalist viewpoints, a point of departure would be to explore ideas about the revolt developing in “exteriorized” contexts. These included the reactions of Indians staying in Britain at the time, as well as those of Britons at home. Such interiority–exteriority intersections are indispensable if we wish to uncover the complexities shaping new “ideologies of the Raj”31 at the juncture when political power passed from the English East India Company to the British Crown.

Ideologies and Identities: British Policy and Indigenous Cultural Nationhood The period following 1857 witnessed momentous transformations in the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Exigencies of imperial rule and colonial sociological exercises32 led to reinventions of the indigenous which fueled new notions of nationhood. The events of 1857 changed the British imagination of India and Indians. In the years that immediately 30 31

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“Echoes of 1857,” 1651. Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48. Herbert Hope Risley, The People of India (London: W. Thacker, 1908); William Wilson Hunter, A Brief History of the Indian People (London: Trubner, 1882).

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followed, for the British, the “friends” became “foes” and the “foes” became “friends.”33 British policy toward India was now governed by the “creation” and “ordering” of difference.34 The ideologies of the Raj included policies of “divide and rule,” with Indian Muslims receiving imperial favor. From the 1880s, colonial sociology differentiated, ranked, and enumerated Indian people.35 What is interesting is that despite administrative moves to splinter communal solidarity and harden divisions of caste, religious sect, and tribe,36 discourses on Indian nationhood formulated new interpretive strategies for erasing the fact of subjugation and forging unities. They drew on the conceptual category of samaj which lay at the heart of indigenous cultural nationhood. In this conceptual site, Hindus, Muslims, and “lower orders” could come together and “defeat” imperial power in a completely different way. The firm conviction that the independence of the samaj was greater than all other forms of independence meant that it was not necessary to engage in overt combat with the Raj. The argument rested on a rather original way of looking at things. Indian history had witnessed many battles between kings. They were not people’s wars, and so the people, who were integral elements of samaj, had never been defeated. The fundamental nature of the commonalty remained unaltered.37 The model of nationhood that was put forward was indigenous in that it prioritized a history of culture and attachment that had precolonial roots.38 Medieval samajs of the fourteenth century provided foundations for rethinking unities in the modern period. In 1320, Danujamardan Deb, a Kayastha king of Bengal, founded the Baklanagar Samaj. Reacting to tremendous political and social turmoil in the wake of Muslim invasions of Bengal, Deb sought to forge unities in two interconnected ways. First, he established a kingdom in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. He called it “Chandradvip Rajya.” But unities in Bengal, and indeed in India, were never forged primarily through political control. They unfolded through an interweaving of the political and the social. This was reflected in the second way in which Deb tried to (re)create solidarities. 33 35

36

37 38

Cf. Brodkin, “The Struggle for Succession.” 34 Metcalf, Ideologies, especially chs. 3–4. Jervoise Athelstane Baines, “On Census-Taking and Its Limitations,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 63/1 (1900), 47–71; see also William Wilson Hunter, The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931); William Wilson Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1897). Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Susan Bayly, Class, Caste and Politics in India since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); N. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (New Delhi: Permanent Black: 2002). Akshoykumar Moitreya, Gourer Katha (1883; repr. Calcutta: Sahitya Lok 1984), 31. Satishchandra Raychaudhuri, Bangiya Samaj (Barahanagar, 1899).

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People invested the power of social control in his hands, and he founded a samaj in Bakla (his previous capital). Individuals of diverse castes, communities, and sects became its members. Normative codes of conduct followed by them were emulated in other parts of Bengal. The Baklanagar Samaj was a microcosm of what the late colonial writer Satishchandra Raychaudhuri called “Bangiya” or a pan-Bengali samaj.39 The logic of unifying inclusions was adherence to codes of conduct enshrined in dharma (a key element of samaj). This was extended to other Indians too. Irrespective of caste, community, class, and region, if people followed (albeit variantly) codes of conduct enshrined in dharma, they would (and did) belong to a pan-Indian (Bharatbarshiya) Samaj. The transition from region to nation, implied in this reasoning, prioritized indigenous cultural pasts predating Western colonial modernity. The process has some consonance with Susan Reynolds’s idea of specific patterns of action common to all kinds of groups, and their constitution into communities in medieval Europe.40 The progression from local groups to kingdoms (a significant contribution to medieval politics) occurred through a particular grounding of the meaning of law. It implied a myriad of collective activities pursued by all groups – large, small, local, regional, central, and national (which were communities) – and specialized knowledge in creating this law-learned community. The particularities of constructions of larger communities were different in Europe and India. While in Europe the conceptual crux was the meaning of law and its transition, in India it was the notion of a harmonious society and the values and norms enshrined in it. The analytic line taken here suggests that currently received historiographical concepts (such as nation) should correspond to the “fluid and diverse past realities to which they are intended to refer.”41 By highlighting how modern unities were traced back to the fourteenth century and even earlier, I show how the paradigm of samaj transcends Western models which see the nation as an artifact of modernity.42 This analytic stance seems to share common ground with the seminal idea of “nations before nationalism,” propounded by John Armstrong.43 The idea 39 40

41 42

43

Ibid., 75–78. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; 2nd edition, 1997). Piotr Gorecki, “A View from a Distance,” Law and History Review, 21/2 (2003), 367–376. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Cf. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986). John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 3.

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was based on “myth-complexes” and was later developed by Anthony Smith as the theory of ethnosymbolism.44 Ethnic ties such as kinship, language, a common ancestry, and shared religious practices – forming the basis of group identification – situated the nation in a longue durée and saw it as “ancient” and “natural.” Indian nationalist discourses during the colonial period, woven around samaj, cannot be neatly fitted into the primordialist framework. According to the primordialist view, nations cannot be regarded as either “ancient” or “modern,” for they stand outside historical time. Coeval with humanity, they are seen as natural, having “essences” and certain organic qualities.45 Samaj as the conceptual pivot of cultural nationhood was the historical society from whence the nation emerged. It was also linked to questions of political power in past and present (colonial) contexts. Ideas about nationhood, crystalizing in the nineteenth century, drew as much from historical, cultural, and gemeinschaftlich46 markers as from associational connections during the modern colonial period. These developed through the emergence of print technologies and a non-Habermasian civil society.47 In the period following 1867 (the year which saw the first organized expression of cultural nationalism in the Hindu Mela), new notions of nationhood woven around culture and society emerged. These need to be critically located at the triadic intersection of “cultural primordialism,”48 “participants’ primordialism,”49 and modernism. This approach resonates to the idea that primordialism should be seen as an ingredient in nationalism rather than as an explanation of nationalism.50 Armstrong’s prioritization of “group identification” over institutional structures such as the state is a conceptual strand that can be related to discourses on cultural nationhood emanating from samaj. But there is a difference too. While samajik nationhood privileged culture over polity (rashtra), the two were never completely segregated. The “public” and 44 45

46 47

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Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Anthony Smith has critiqued this “crude” and “partial” characterization of primordialism in The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 5. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1879). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 2, 6, 19; Sudipta Kaviraj, “In Search of Civil Society,” in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds.), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 287–323. For details about Clifford Geertz’s model of “cultural primordialism,” see John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds.), Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, vol. I (London: Routledge, 2000), xxvii. Steven Grosby, “The Verdict of History: The Inexpungable Tie of Primordialism: A Response to Eller and Coughlan,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17/1 (1994), 164–171. John Coakley, “‘Primordialism’ in Nationalism Studies: Theory or Ideology?,” Nations and Nationalism, 24/2 (2018), 327–347.

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“private” domains were interpenetrative and hybrid.51 The conceptualization of the nation as a cultural entity rooted in the evolution of samaj and its contextual intersections with rashtra shared parallelisms with ideas about other precolonial ecumenical units such as the Muslim qaum (an Arabic word for nation, this protean term also refers to a people, nation, tribe, race, family, sect, caste, and/or solidarities which had/did not have physical borders, territory, and government).52 Connotations of qaum as people, nation, tribe, family, and caste, however, did not mean elisions of the political. The idea that the social worlds of Asian countries were embedded in distinct intellectual traditions which did not pay pronounced attention to politics53 needs to be qualified. Colonial sociologies and cartographic representations of erstwhile Muslim-ruled India led to redefinitions of qaum, mulk (country or territory occupied by a nation; also a particular geographical region of indefinite boundary; usually serving some special purpose or distinguished by its people or culture or geography) and zamin (land or an area of ground) as secular, political sites of empowerment.54 Samaj and qaum had their own indigenous ways of engaging with polity. Such interfaces were fitted into “modern” political nationalism in South Asia. This marks a difference from theoretical centralizations of nationality with its patriotic connotations. Nationality and patriotism predated political nationalism.55 Connections between nationality and nationalism are fluid, shifting, and often ruptured. In contradistinction, nationhood both predated and connected with “modern” political nationalism even while maintaining its conceptual distinctiveness.

Congress, Swadeshi, and Extremism The genealogical model of cultural nationhood makes it clear that nationalism (as a modern political ideology) cannot be the main ideological or descriptive index for writing historical narratives. Eminent scholars continue to believe that from the nineteenth century onwards Indian history was the 51

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The view runs counter to Chatterjee’s segregation of private (cultural) and public (political) spheres. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 112. Cf. Ray, Felt Community; Bayly, Origins of Nationality, 103; Gupta, Notions of Nationhood, 12–13. John T. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (London: Sampson, Low and Marston, 1884). Kaviraj and Khilnani, Civil Society, 5. Faisal Devji, “India in the Muslim Imagination: Cartography and Landscape in 19th Century Urdu Literature,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 10 (2014), 1–17. Ray, Felt Community, 15; Bayly, Origins of Nationality, vii.

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handmaid of British history. Despite the fact that such a view has been challenged by nationalist, Marxist, and subaltern schools, Thomas and Barbara Metcalf place political history and the doings of the elite at the center of their narrative, because they “have been the driving force of historical change.”56 Contra this, my explanation of an evolving process of indigenous cultural nationhood offers a different analytic entry point. Cultural continuities did not necessarily elide or gloss over the newness of modern identities. From the 1880s it was clear that new meanings had been infused into old terms such as “caste,” “Hindu,” “Muslim,” and even “India” itself. These new meanings were grafted onto the central category of samaj. From the late nineteenth century, samaj was deployed to provide an imaginative unity to the Indian past. That unity seemed threatened especially when colonial sociology hardened divisions along caste, communal, sectarian, and territorial lines. But the transition from “fuzzy” to “enumerated” identity in creating “the imaginary institution of India”57 was less complete and sudden than has been supposed. For instance, though caste divisions hardened in the wake of colonial sociologies, caste itself retained a fluid mobility within wider, more unifying conceptualizations of samaj. Caste samajs of precolonial times58 were seen as being elastic and incorporative in that they included people from other castes and regions, and even non-Hindus.59 Histories of such inclusive caste samajs were aligned in the 1880s to social mobility. A “low” caste individual could rise in the hierarchy (or be included in the wider samaj) if he adhered to dharma, was “educated,” and/or had acquired wealth by taking up a profession.60 Enumeration and taxonomies with their divisive, scientific arithmetic had limited impact on conceptualizations of samajik unities around this time. Against this backdrop, I explore how the associational politics of the Indian National Congress, conceptions of swadeshi, and the Extremist Movement operated in spirals of continuity through change: contextually aligning (1) modernity and tradition, and (2) the sacred and the secular. Such interfaces between apparent opposites qualify what Benedict Anderson has called the 56

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Barbara Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xv–xvi. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds.), Subaltern Studies V I I (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). Nagendranath Basu, Dakshinrarhiya Kayastha Samaj (Calcutta, 1933), 99–102. Raychaudhuri, Bangiya Samaj, 306. S. N. Mukherjee, “Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta,” in S. N. Mukherjee and Edmund Leach (eds.), Elites in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Pitambar Sarkar, Jati Vikas (Calcutta, 1910), 39.

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great paradox of nationalism: nation-states, a product of very recent centuries, must always claim to be very old.61 Such an assumption overlooks nuanced ways of looking at connections and differences between nationstates (political and modern) and nations, which are supposedly located in remote, relic-ridden, archaic pasts: lost in ahistorical fixity. The formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was a milestone in the development of political nationalism in India. According to Stanley Wolpert: The Indian National Congress emerged as the premier institution of political change in British India by mobilising its anglicised elite. It led Nationalists [who] . . . helped transmute the world’s mightiest Imperial arsenal into its largest democratic nation-state . . . The story of the Indian National Congress is . . . thus the history of modern India since the close of the nineteenth century.62

By locating the birth of the Indian “nation-state” in the Congress, Wolpert offers a political and modernist model of nationalism, delinked from cultural nationhood. But the connection was very real. It shows that Indian modernity was not born from the associational politics of the Congress alone. The creation of a “nation-state” in India must be seen through an ontological prism underscoring the plurality of nations in India, their “different nationalisms,”63 their roots in the past, and their own modernities. The crucial point is: how were such plural and different identities, conceptions of time, and modernity mediated successfully to produce the notions of a nation in India? Congress politics – whether elite or mass-based – can only partially explain the dynamics of such mediation. Cultural nationhood revisits the relationship between modernity and nationalism in a new positive way, moving away from paradigms which predict the demise of the nationstate and provide alternatives to it.64 Modernity in India was an evolving process, which could not be related to events such as Aurangzeb’s death (1707), or Clive’s victory at Plassey (1757), or to organizations such as the Congress. Neither can it be seen as emanating from the Western colonial 61 62

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Anderson, Imagined Communities. Stanley Wolpert, “The INC in Nationalist Perspective,” in Richard Sisson and Stanley Wolpert (eds.), Congress and Indian Nationalism: The Pre-Independence Phase (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21. Emphasis mine. Semanti Ghosh, Different Nationalisms (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017); Neilesh Bose, Culture and Power in South Asian Islam (London: Taylor and Francis, 2015); Prathama Banerjee, Politics of Time: Primitives and History-Writing in a Colonial Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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presence. Modernity in India was ridden with contradictions and can be understood or mediated by crafting a framework of indigenous modernities drawing on tradition. This also involves a theoretical shift, which jettisons methodological nationalism: considered as wholly negative, yet all-pervasive. It is associated with, and criticized for, its explanatory reductionism in which the rise and main features of the nation-state are used to explicate the rise and main features of modernity itself.65 Further, Congress ideologies and programs cannot be understood without reference to conceptual consonance and dissonance between ideas about freedom, liberty, independence, and political nationalism. Indigenous lineages were linked to the political idea of freedom, expressed as swaraj.66 But this political term was not seen in terms of politics alone. It was an extension and evocation of the older idea of freedom in India, seen as a category of the spiritual, emphasizing identity with the universal. The nature of the freedom movement pioneered by the Congress can be fully understood only by exploring how indigenous origins were refracted (in the site of samaj) through a critical internalization and rearticulation of Western concepts of freedom in India’s own terms. This developed through a discourse on multifaceted freedoms: personal, religious, social, and political.67 It would be interesting here to return to the point about consonance between swaraj (self-rule) and sinn féin. The Irish republican political party, Sinn Féin, signified national self-determination and development secured through citizenship by the individual. It was supported by all movements within Ireland. In accordance with nationalist tradition, Sinn Féin did not look outside Ireland for the accomplishment of its aims. In nuanced contra, swaraj, inextricably linked with swadeshi, had more encompassing, even transnational implications. Moreover, in the Indian context, swaraj did not always necessarily mean political self-government. It had a long genealogy and three principal significations emanating from specific temporal and sociopolitical contexts. First, for the Maratha leader, Shivaji, it was Hindavi Swaraj (a term coined in 1645). It resulted not just in “state formation but in the creation of a patria”68 based on ideological and emotive attachment 65

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Daniel Chernilo, ‘The Critique of Methodological Nationalism,” Thesis Eleven, 106 (2011), 98–117. Bhogaraju Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress (Madras: Working Committee of the Congress, 1935), 829. Swarupa Gupta, “The Idea of Freedom in Bengali Nationalist Discourse,” Studies in History, 29/1 (2013), 21–40. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia, 22–23.

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enmeshed with its political agenda. Further, it was based on a reemphasis of “the importance of social energy and new social integration achieved by the bhakti devotional saints and teachers of fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Maharashtra. Their influence encompassed a social transformation, without which Maratha Swarajya or ‘self-rule’ would have been impossible.”69 In the “modern colonial” period, such genealogies had new functionalities. Tilak drew on Shivaji’s Hindavi Swaraj. To him, the idea of swaraj was old, having roots in Vedanta philosophy. He directly linked samaj with swaraj. There had always been an unease about the relationship between the individuals and samaj. Debates raged as to which was higher: the individual or the samaj. Yoking this to age-old patterns of interdependent relationships of the individual to the samaj, Tilak mentioned two important things: first, for the individual, it meant the exercise of law, but second, this individual freedom was impossible without complete (purna) swaraj. This would usher in swarajya as self-rule, and also as “good government.”70 Moving beyond “home rule,” or dominion status, Tilak talked about swaraj as a fully developed political theory, construed as an ultimate spiritual emancipation of the independence of the community, which he called samashti (akin to samaj). Gandhi also redefined swaraj. In his book Hind Swaraj, he defined it in oppositional (un-British) terms. For him, swadeshi (a metonym of swaraj) was self-reliance in economics and other matters, and a rejection of Western civilization.71 Mediating these subtly different, yet interconnected definitions of swaraj, we can say that it meant much more than mere political self-rule or government. It rethought and organized relationships between individuals and collectivities of the nation (implicated in samaj), and had cultural, spiritual, territorial, and emotive content. Swaraj, explained thus, was the conceptual base for studying the dynamics of Extremist politics. It was also more. Linked with “international swadeshi,” it inspired, and was inspired by, independence movements in the British Empire. This opens up a space for studying connected nationalist activities in frames of historic flashback. Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the United Irishmen, tried to secure assistance from the government of revolutionary France. Ireland had been in the 69 70

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Ibid., 23. M. Venkaiah Naidu, “Swarajya to Surajya,” Indian Express (Mumbai), 23 July 2018, https:// indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/bal-gangadhar-tilak-chandra-shekhar-azad-bi rth-anniversary-freedom-fighters-nationalism-india-5270288/. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: J. T. Desai, Navajivan Publishing House, 1909).

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grip of imperialism for an even longer period of time than India. The Irish and Indian national movements were linked by a history of rebellion against British rule.72 The linkage comes to life because Wolf Tone’s French connection was reported in the popular Bengali periodical Desh. Extremism, on the heels of the partition of Bengal in 1905, marked a shift from moderate ideologies. It was regarded as “the history of an idea, at once religious and political.”73 It aimed to draw the masses into the fold of the nationalist movement by invoking Hindu religious symbols, icons, and festivals.74 This maneuver mirrored an intersection between the sacred and the secular. The use of (Hindu) religion did not mean a conscious elision of the Muslim element. I nuance and question the claim that Extremism hardened communal divisions. As Sumit Sarkar has pointed out: There were many heart-warming scenes of unity . . . the movement threw up a considerable number of Muslim Swadeshi leaders [who were drawn into the Extremist Movement], every bit as patriotic and sincere as their Hindu counterparts . . . – among them [were] Abdul Ksem, Guznavi, Rasul, Liakat Husain, Abdul Gafur and Ismail Husain Shiraji.75

Such participation showed that the Extremist goal of swaraj76 was not emblematic of a narrow, exclusionary religious nationalism. I concur with the view that “Indian nationalism” (of the Extremist brand) cannot be regarded as a synonym of “Hindu nationalism.” As Sarkar mentions, “the enormous overlap in personnel, assumptions, and symbols between mainstream Indian nationalism and Hindu communalism is too obvious to need much elaboration.”77 South Asia evidenced the growth of religious-nationalist movements, containing culturally cosmopolitan confluences of Hindu and Muslim. For plenty of nations and ethnicities in the subcontinent, religion played an important role in nationalism against the British. The denial of participation in the political institutions of the colony led Indians to develop an alternative set of institutions of a jointly political and religious nature. Indian religions were transformed in opposition to the state, and religion became more important in the emergent public sphere. It played an influential role in the 72

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Michael Silvestri, “‘The Sinn Féin of India’: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal,” Journal of British Studies, 39/4 (2000), 454–486. Amales Tripathi, The Extremist Challenge (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1967). Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Kesari, 8 September 1896. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2011), 66. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Speeches and Writings (Madras: Ganesh and Company, 1918). Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva,” in David Ludden (ed.), Making India Hindu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 272.

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transformation of the public spheres in British India and in the postcolonial countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Many of the leading political parties and social movements mobilized people around religious issues. Extremism drew on indigenous ideas about freedom such as atmashakti (self-help). These, in turn, were closely related to the idea of samajik unity rooted in dharma. Reinterpreted in the late colonial period, dharma was contrasted with the essence of Europe – rights. Diametrically contrasting dharma to rights, the Extremist leader Bipin Chandra Pal expressed the binaries inbuilt into civilizational difference: collectivism versus individualism and synthesis versus antithesis. Dharma was the soul of order while rights were the parent of revolution.78In a colonial climate of subjugation, such civilizational differentiation was a natural move to forge an empowered indigenous identity. However, parallels may be drawn between Indian ideas about duties implicated in dharma and European views. For Giuseppe Mazzini, the primary duties of a “man” were to “humanity” of which the “country” or nation was a part (nations composed humanity).79 To him, Italians were “men” before they were “citizens” or “fathers.” Interestingly, however, he considered the “one and indivisible country” or nation to be similar to a family. This country had to have a “single government.”80 It was not an “aggregation” but an “association.” Though loosely comparable to the “Duties of Man,” Indian ideas about duties were subtly different. Individuals had equally important sets of duties, radiating in concentric perimeters from the familial core. An individual had duties toward his family, clan, caste, community, region, and, finally, to the nation. Moreover, the notion of samaj with its ideological basis in dharma was not just a gesellschaftlich “association.” Its gemeinschaftlich features were projected onto “outer” associational worlds. Such intersections between “private” and “public” arenas articulated the relationship between culture and politics, and between “rights” and “duties” rather differently. Duty may be seen as a translation of some of the connotations of dharma. But its semantic spectrum was wide.81 Originating from the Sanskrit root “dhr” – to hold/maintain – it signified not only duties, but also a moral order, law, customs, and even sectarian faith. It is difficult to find 78 79

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Bipin Chandra Pal, Soul of India (Calcutta: Choudhury and Choudhury, 1911), 67–68. Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (1844–58) (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1915), ch. 5. Ibid. Pandurang Vaman Kane, History of Dharmas´¯astra (Poona: Bhandarkar Institute Press, 1930).

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a single-word synonym of dharma in Western languages.82 In indigenous discourses, dharma as righteous way of life, “proper conduct,” and sets of duties was prioritized.83 In these semantic senses, it formed the ideological basis of samaj and justified the logic of inclusion. Pal’s views, qualified by the above analysis, reflected a nuanced contrast between ideas about freedom and its metonyms in India and the West. Such ideas are evocative of larger visions of what India meant. Very recent debates on “legacies of a republic” include the view that because Pal called India “Bharatbarsha,” he was referring to the kingdom of the legendary ruler Bharata and suggesting that it was impossible to imagine India as a centralized bureaucratic dominion.84 Though the modern Indian political nation-state had not come into existence at the time, Pal glimpsed “the soul of India” amidst its endless diversities. Crucially, he emphasized that the spirit of freedom and democracy in India was already evident, having its beginning in early nineteenth-century Brahmo ideology.85 The idea of India approximated through connections between cultural nationhood and different kinds of freedom formed the foundation for swadeshi – an indigenous search for swadesh (own country). While swadeshi has been considered as “national,” it had transnational dimensions too. It involved the search for a transnational India through a grid of connected histories in Asia and beyond. “International swadeshi” comprised the deterritorialized politics of affinity generated by swadeshi over and against the imagined community of the nation. Swadeshi agitators found filiations on an emerging map of freedom across the world.86 This was not something wholly new. In the early nineteenth century, Rammohun Roy and the Derozians had connected ideas about the Indian nation and its longings for freedom with world revolutionary movements celebrating liberalism and people’s rights. And later, Indian travelers to Southeast Asia created networks of religious transnationalism around the Indian Ocean.87

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Paul Horsch, “From Creation Myth to World Law: The Early History of Dharma,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 32/5–6 (2004), 423–448. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Dharmatattva (Calcutta, 1888), reprinted in Bankim Rachanabali, vol. I I (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2006), 597–712. See, for example, S. Bose’s view in The Telegraph (Calcutta), 28 January 2019. Bipin Chandra Pal, The Brahmo Samaj and the Battle for Swaraj in India (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1926), 35–36. Dilip M. Menon, ‘The Many Spaces and Times of Swadeshi,” Economic and Political Weekly, 47/2 (20 October 2012), 44–52. Swarupa Gupta, “Religious Transnationalism on the Indian Ocean,” invited lecture at the SOAS South Asia Institute, 2 May 2018.

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Gandhi and Satyagraha A turn toward mass-based political action evident in Extremism gathered momentum in the years that followed. With the advent of M. K. Gandhi and his philosophies of nonviolence and satyagraha, the Indian national movement embarked upon a course that was to eventually bring independence. There has been a tendency to see Gandhi in isolation from earlier contexts, ideologies, and movements. I wish to argue, in line with my conceptual model of continuity through change, that certain features of Gandhian nationalism had earlier beginnings. David Hardiman has recently argued that the nonviolent struggle for Indian freedom began as early as 1905. Aurobindo Ghose formulated “The Doctrine of Passive Resistance.”88 It discussed nonviolent strategies for removing British rule. Tilak also thought that “suffering” was a means to attain freedom.89 These were very important interventions and precedents, and they “set the agenda for the next forty years of nationalist struggle in India.” The Gandhian Congress adopted many of the elements of Ghose’s program set out in 1907.90 Nonviolence also resonated to longer genealogies of non-combative samajik independence and resistance to alien authority. Satyagraha (holding on to truth) complemented Gandhian nonviolence in 1919 (Rowlatt), and in Kheda, Champaran, and Ahmedabad, as well as in the Khilafat, non-cooperation, and civil disobedience movements. The logic of nonviolence was simple: means determine ends. Violence, if unleashed, was like a genie let out from a bottle, and it could not be put back. It also avoided alienating potential allies and built the foundations of democracy.91 The Gandhian concept of sarvodaya or welfare for all was linked to ideas about social correlation and uplift embodied in samaj. Sarvodaya stood for a stateless society. It echoed earlier, continuing convictions: the expression of Indian collective life is not the state but the samaj.92 For Gandhi, the idea of a civic nation (praja) was different from what it meant in the West. India could not “become” a civic nation if it drew on Western-derived civilization, which took note neither of morality nor of religion.93 In a strikingly novel 88

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Aurobindo Ghose, Doctrine of Passive Resistance (Calcutta: Arya Publishing House, 1948), 22–34. Tilak, Speeches and Writings. David Hardiman, The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905–19 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 31. Ibid., 11. 92 Das, Barnasram Dharma, 127. Anthony Parel (ed.), M. K. Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xv, 36.

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way of defining anticolonial nationalism, Gandhi predicted that the end of “flawed” Western civilization would also mean the political/administrative end of British rule in India.

Independence and Partition That British rule in India would end was evident from the early 1940s. But India’s “tryst with destiny” culminating in independence was fraught with a paradox hardly ever witnessed in human history. The nation swung between extremes of triumph and tragedy at the time of the final transfer of power that marked “Britain’s ‘escape from empire.’”94 The creation of West and East Pakistan, “different” from “Hindu-majority” India, not only dispelled Gandhi’s dreams of communal unity, but ran a sword through the heart of national territory. An administrative act sought to conjure political boundaries creating “warring fragments” of a “long-united provincial [and national] terrain.” Partition, to scholars such as Gyanendra Pandey, was a moment of rupture, marking the end of one regime and the inauguration of two new ones.95 He asks what this rupture and the newly founded nation-states tell us about procedures of nationhood, history, and society. I would like to turn the question around. How do indigenous cultural nationhood, history, and society based on samajik unities explain the destructive imploding of India following independence and Partition? Driving a wedge between nationhood and nation-state, Pandey views the political outcome of decolonization in India by conceptually and temporally isolating the nation-state instead of consciously linking nationhood with political processes. The distinctive ontology of Indian nationhood rooted in historical and cultural indigenisms was suddenly sidelined and replaced by a new, never-before-seen emphasis on the political. It transformed the relationship between human beings and their history, which is rooted in “selective amnesia and memory.” The memories of brutality never faded. Partition did not result only in tremendous human loss, suffering, and material displacement: it changed mentalities. It transformed Hindu–Muslim relations in everyday, quotidian spheres. Urvashi Butalia’s heart-wrenching accounts of personal pain, trauma, and 94

95

See R. Sisson and S. Wolpert (eds.), Congress and Indian Nationalism: The PreIndependence Phase (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018 [1988]), 42, citing R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1983). Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.

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experiences of “marginal” people96 resonate with vernacular accounts such as those by Yasmin Khan.97 What was intended as an unavoidable division due to complex political considerations became the precursor of future schisms of people, homelands, and territory. This was evident in the Bangladesh war of independence, resulting from economic and political disparities, and linguistic differences between West and East Pakistan.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted connections between historical pasts and the (colonial) present in mapping a nuanced history of the nation in India and its plural forms. The focus on evolving cultures of nationhood and their changing interfaces with political modernities opens interpretative pathways, which do not lead to perennialist and primordialist terrains. Historical antecedents of Indian nationhood offer foundations for tracing the evolving life of the nation, born long before Western modernity turned its back on “silent and evasive pasts.” In a period stereotypically characterized as witnessing political nationalism, I have yoked cultural nationhood to various political movements, events, and ideologies, which were not completely segmented. Cultural origins and evolutions show that the story of Indian nationhood continues today in forms which forge its postcolonial futures and creative destinies. The prioritizing of historicisms shaping Indian nationhood has more wide-ranging possibilities, helping to create new comparative frameworks for understanding Asian nationalisms,98 vis-à-vis, and not versus, European/Western ones.

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Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2017). Yasmin Khan, Vibhajan Bharat Aur Pakistan Ka Uday (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010). Michael Leifer (ed.), Asian Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2000).

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Further Reading Brown, Judith M., Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Chandra, Bipan, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1984). Elgenius, Gabriela, Symbols of Nations and Nationalism: Celebrating Nationhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Habib, S. Irfan (ed.), Indian Nationalism (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017). Jaffrelot, Christophe, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London: Hurst, 1996). Skey, Michael, and Marco Antonsich (eds.), Everyday Nationhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Smith, Anthony D., Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Oxford: Wiley, 1995). Tønnesson, Stein, and Hans Antlov (eds.), Asian Forms of the Nation (London: Routledge, 2013).

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12

Middle Eastern and North African Nationalisms jonathan d. wyrtzen

Introduction The current countries in the Middle East and North Africa were all formed, or transformed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by processes of partitioning and territorialization propelled by European colonial expansion and local responses to those interventions. As the region’s political topography was remapped before and after the First World War, collective identities were activated, reimagined, and mobilized within and across these newly delineated units. From Northern Africa to the Iranian plateau, an array of nationalisms emerged over the course of this transformation, pairing notions of peoplehood and political sovereignty in new frameworks of identity. For the Middle East and North Africa, the related questions “what is a nation?” and “when is the nation?” are best answered by focusing on a third question: how has the nation (and nationalism) worked in the region over the past two centuries? With this approach, nationalism and national identity are taken not as preexisting categories or fixed outcomes but as relationally constituted, defined and redefined through social interactions over time. Enduring forms of communal solidarity – what Ibn Khaldun refers to as ‘asabiya and what Geertz labels “primordial sentiments,” be they tribal, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or regional – have long been present within Middle Eastern and North African societies.1 Starting in the nineteenth century, however, structural transformations increased the political 1

These “assumed ‘givens,’” of course, are themselves products of complex, long-term social, cultural, political, and economic processes. Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 [1967]), 91–122; Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments in the New States,” in Clifford Geertz (ed.), Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963), 105–157.

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salience of the “nation” as a category of collective identification; the process of imagining the nation involved selectively drawing on, fashioning, and reinventing these “primordial sentiments.” Colonization and decolonization catalyzed state-based and society-based identification processes that activated social boundaries in ways that made the nation a central, but contested, category of collective identity across the Middle East and North Africa. Nationalism is thus simultaneously a powerful unifying identity as well as a highly contentious site of struggle – over how the nation is imagined and who is included and excluded – in each of the region’s countries. In this respect, nationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa exhibit persistent tensions between ethnic and civic forms of identification. Nationalism has primarily been oriented across the region by paired ethnolinguistic (Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, Persian, Hebrew) and ethnoreligious (Sunni or Shi’i Muslim, Jewish) majoritarian identities. These nationalisms also partially signal civic frameworks of collective identity aimed at incorporating ethnic and religious minorities – Kurds in Turkey or Iraq, Imazighen (Berbers) in North Africa, Jews in Morocco, Copts in Egypt, Christians in Jordan or Syria, Arab Muslim or Christian Palestinians in Israel – ambivalently including and excluding them with respect to the core imagined national community. From Morocco to Iran, national identities based on ascriptive characteristics, but whose boundaries are debated, have emerged as primary categories of identification in Middle Eastern and North African societies. All of these nationalisms formed in the context of empire, at the center or from a peripheral position relative to a local or European state power. Prior to the nineteenth century, the region was patterned by empire-state centers, provincial units, and relatively autonomous hinterland spaces (deserts, mountains, marshes) linked by economic, cultural, and religious ties. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these empireperiphery spaces were progressively divided into ostensibly homologous (proto-)national political units, particularly in the wake of the First World War. In the 1920s, European colonial aspirations clashed with new local political imaginaries unleashed by the unmaking of the Ottoman order, leading to a decade of violent conflict during which new political boundaries were forged. Up through the mid-twentieth century, empire, colonial state formation, and anticolonial mobilization directly and indirectly influenced the development of nationalisms in newly created countries (Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq), in those with longer political 258

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histories of central state control (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Iran), and in cases with less direct colonial intervention (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States). Powerful notions of transnational solidarity – like pan-Islam and panArabism – and local forms of patriotism and national imagining have tended to be mutually reaffirming, rather than contradictory, expressions of antiimperial and anticolonial sentiment throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Pan-ethnic solidarity movements have also been mobilized across national borders, and farther afield in terms of global diasporas, by large stateless ethnic groups like the Kurds and Berbers. Zionism, from its origins in the late nineteenth century, was mobilized as a transnational nationalist settlement movement, and contentious and competing nationalisms – like the cases of Israel and Palestine, and Morocco and Western Sahara – have long had powerful transnational resonances and connections with the Arab world, Muslim world, African countries, the United States, and elsewhere. These factors remain important in the twenty-first century as nationalism continues to be a resilient category of imagined community shaping societybased protest and resistance as well as state responses to oppositional politics as the region goes through another period of upheaval and transformation.

Nation in Empire Empire, colonialism, and nationalism have been tightly bound together in the Middle East and North Africa. In terms of periodization, there are two primary phases of interaction between nationalism and empire: before and after the First World War. Prior to the Great War, nationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa developed within the context of both European and local – Ottoman, Qajar (Iran), Sharifian (Morocco) – empire frameworks; after the Great War, none of the region’s local empires remained in place, and national identity was largely imagined in opposition to European empires. The region’s nationalisms were thus almost all defined by and through anticolonial mobilization and resistance (with a few exceptions in the Arabian peninsula). This is obviously true for the countries directly colonized by the French (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria), the British (Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen), and Italian (Libya) empires, but it is also true for two countries (Turkey and Iran) that, though not formally incorporated, were impacted by European imperial power. In addition, in the case of Turkey, the republic’s internal colonialization in eastern Anatolia provoked and profoundly shaped Kurdish resistance and national identity formation. 259

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There are several distinctions relevant to when, how, and what kinds of nationalism developed in various units in the region over the course of the long nineteenth century. The first of these concerns the precolonial state structures distributed across the region. From west to east, these included the Sharifian Alawite sultanate (Morocco), the Ottoman Empire, and the Qajar Empire (Iran). Within the Ottoman Empire, several North African provinces (Algiers, Tunis, and Egypt) were functionally autonomous and themselves constituted important state centers. Beyond (perhaps much more salient) kinship, religious, economic, or local network ties, political identity was primarily oriented to these empire-state frameworks. Whether in cities, villages, or peripheral areas like the Zagros, the Atlas, or the Najd, most groups in the region would reference – either in allegiance or in opposition – an imagined political community centered in an imperial capital like Istanbul, Tehran, or Fes. In the course of the nineteenth century, two factors, European colonial intervention and regional state-based reform initiatives (tanzimat), powerfully reshaped this political system and the types of political community imagined within it. Direct European colonial encroachment first impacted North Africa, starting with France’s occupation of Algiers in 1830 and the brutal four-decade conquest of the coasts and hinterland. In the 1870s, after oscillating between direct and indirect, civilian versus military, rule, the French locked into a settler colonial mode in Algeria, administratively assimilating three departments into metropolitan France but drawing a sharp legal, economic, cultural, and political boundary between “French” and “native” (the latter defined by Muslim legal status after the great majority of Algerian Jews were unilaterally made French citizens with the 1870 Crémieux Decree). Elsewhere in North Africa, the Husaynid beylik in Tunisia was made a French protectorate in 1881, and the Khedivate in Egypt was brought under British rule in 1882. Both of these North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire had been functionally autonomous prior to being incorporated into European empires, and the French and British kept the local dynasties in place as nominally sovereign. The different ways these three countries were colonized by European empires in the nineteenth century directly influenced the contexts in which national identity developed as an imagined community. Algeria was defined as a territorial political unit through decades of colonial conquest and subsequent direct settler colonial rule that obliterated the local political infrastructure and reinforced classificatory logics firmly setting apart French and “native” Muslim (Arab and Berber) categories; the latter were deprived of 260

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citizenship rights and subject to a repressive Code de l’Indigénat. In Tunisia and Egypt, French and British colonial rule preserved the existing dynastic states, nominally recognizing their sovereignty and presuming their territorial integrity. Precolonial and colonial state formation – as well as episodes of anticolonial resistance like ‘Abd al-Qadir’s campaign in the 1830s–1840s, the 1871 Muqrani Revolt, and the 1879–1882 ‘Urabi Revolt – naturalized notions of collective political identity bound by the scope of these units. Other polities in the region – the Moroccan Alawite sultanate, the Ottoman Empire, and the Qajar Empire – remained independent through the nineteenth century but were increasingly penetrated by European economic power. The Ottomans also sustained substantial territorial losses to Russian, French, and British expansion and, from the Greek Revolt in the 1820s forward, faced the increasing internal pressure of separatist nationalisms in the Balkans, most of which enjoyed the patronage of the Hapsburg or the Romanov Empire. As they lost territories, the Ottomans also received an influx of displaced Muslim communities that resettled in other parts of the empire. The entwinement of their geopolitical struggles in the Balkans, Black Sea region, and Caucasus with forms of ethnic-sectarian (Christian-based) separatist nationalism made the question of political community and how it was framed a pressing issue. Facing European imperial competition and encroachment, the Ottoman Empire implemented major military, administrative, and legal reforms – collectively referred to as tanzimat, or reorganization – aimed at bolstering central state authority and tying together the diverse array of its population under the umbrella of an Ottoman civic imperial identity (Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Iran also implemented tanzimat reforms to varying degrees). At the same time, social groups across the empire were also articulating and mobilizing around more particularistic notions of collective identity. Around the turn of the century, a segment of military and administrative elites, particularly those with origins on the front lines of ethnonationalist struggles in the Balkans, organized the Committee for Union and Progress to push for constitutional reforms, which were largely achieved in the 1908 revolution. These Young Turks, while thinking through the framework of Ottomanism, did begin to emphasize a Turkish ethnolinguistic component of imperial identity. Other groups in the empire, including non-Turkish Muslim – Arab and Kurdish – and certain non-Muslim – Armenian – groups also began to think about the nation, though the political dimensions of this identity were rarely if ever oriented toward national self-determination and independence.

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Starting earlier in the mid-nineteenth century, figures such as Rifa’a alTahtawi in Egypt and Butrus al-Bustani in Lebanon led an Arabic cultural and linguistic renaissance (Al-Nahda), which flourished in urban centers like Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus. The increasing use of the Arabic printing press and publication of dictionaries, encyclopedias, novels, newspapers, and journals, the expansion of Arabic theater, and the increase of Arabic educational and associational life in clubs, sports, and literary societies reinforced notions of Egyptian and Syrian identity, as well as a nascent Arabic public sphere that extended from Cairo to Damascus to the Hejaz and across North Africa to Tunis, Tlemcen, and Fes. In a similar but more limited way, Kurdish elites, particularly in Istanbul, began producing and printing works in Kurdish, including journals and newspapers, and developing Kurdish associations that linked elites across the empire with a shared cultural nationalism. As a prominent non-Muslim community, Armenians had long had a strong collective identity, but their political imagination remained largely circumscribed by an Ottoman framework. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, in the wake of which Russia occupied the Ottomans’ three easternmost Anatolian provinces, nationalists in Russian Armenia began to actively try to mobilize separatist aspirations within Ottoman Armenian communities. Up until the First World War, these two main factors – European colonial encroachment and state and society responses – impacted how collective identity was perceived in North Africa and the Middle East. In areas colonized by the French or British in North Africa, colonial rule politicized certain aspects, by delineating a territorial unit through military conquest and colonial state formation, by reifying ethnic or sectarian identities through administrative practice, or by eliminating or preserving a local dynasty. In the Middle East, various communities were well aware of nationalism, because of the proximity of the Balkan separatist nationalisms and connections to Europe, but national identity was primarily articulated as a cultural and linguistic bond that unified across religious lines. It had little to no political dimension, at least in terms of separatist aspirations for Arabs or Kurds. The Ottoman Empire (like the Moroccan sultanate and Qajar Empire) still remained the most viable framework for imagining political identity. For emerging nationalists, the goal was to achieve recognition within the empire, not outside it.

The Long Great War and Nation Formation The outbreak of the First World War transformed this status quo, opening up drastically new possibilities for reimagining political identity. In the Middle 262

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East and North Africa, the Great War continued beyond western Europe’s 1914–1918 timeframe, with a long period of conflict extending into the late 1920s, during which the region’s political order was unmade and remade. The war in this theater started in 1911 with France’s military move into the Moroccan interior and occupation of Fes in the spring (which almost triggered a Franco-German war) and Italy’s unilateral attack on Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica that fall. In 1912, the Italo-Ottoman war escalated, with Italian naval attacks in the Red Sea, bombardment of Beirut, and a push toward Istanbul through the Dardanelles. When Montenegro also declared war that September, the Ottomans hastily sued for peace with Italy to face the Balkan League’s offensive, leading to two more years of successive Balkan Wars. After a brief respite in the spring of 1914, simmering Balkan tensions set off a Europe-wide war in July, which drew in the Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. Aligned with the Central Powers, the Ottomans fought a multifront war – against Russia in the Caucasus and against the British in Mesopotamia, southern Syria, and the Dardanelles – but ultimately succumbed to the British on the southern front. Though seeing less action as fighting fronts, North Africa was the site of clandestine German attempts to foment revolt, North African colonial soldiers fought across Europe and in parts of the Middle East, and northwest Iran was continually traversed and occupied by opposing Russian, British, and Ottoman forces. When the Ottomans signed the Mudros Armistice in October 1918, the region’s political topography had been fundamentally transformed. The former empire centers – the Alawite sultanate in Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, and the Qajar Empire – no longer constituted viable sovereign entities: France, with Spain, had declared a co-protectorate over Morocco in 1912; the defeated Ottoman Empire awaited its fate at the Paris Peace Conference; and Iran – occupied by Russia, the Ottomans, and the British through much of the war – was in turmoil. The war’s unmaking of the region’s political order encouraged two types of actors to reimagine it. European empires – Britain, Russia (until the 1917 revolution), France, Italy, and Spain – saw an opportunity for expansion and negotiated wartime and postwar agreements to divide the spoils. At the same time, myriad local actors envisioned new national polities – Arab, Lebanese, Jewish, Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish, or Iranian – in tandem, in several cases, with promises of European backing. Nationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa emerged in or were profoundly influenced by this dual context of overlapping and competing colonial and local political aspirations. The region’s fraught “Wilsonian 263

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moment,” to use Erez Manela’s term for the postwar period of heightened global expectations around self-determination,2 can be periodized into three phases. The first started in the last months of the 1914–1918 conflict and continued through 1920. During this open phase, a wide realm of possibility was thinkable by both colonial and local actors. For the victorious Allied powers, the region between Morocco and Iran provided a canvas on which to sketch imperial expansionist aspirations: France would add Cilicia, Mosul, Syria, and Lebanon to its North African holdings; Italy would add a zone of influence in southern Anatolia to its claims in Libya; Greece would expand into Thrace and western Anatolia; and Britain would consolidate an east of Suez swath of control encompassing Palestine, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula. Communities in the region also mobilized around political futures they had begun to imagine as it became clear the Ottoman Empire would lose the war, and after the war, delegations to the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) presented numerous cases for national self-determination. Arab nationalist aspirations, articulated by small Arab societies before the war and then taken up by the Hashemite-led Arab Revolt in 1916, were presented by one of the revolt’s heroes, Faysal al-Husayni, who had set up an Arab kingdom from Damascus. Chaim Weizmann presented the Zionist national aspirations in Palestine, Sherif Pasha for Kurdistan, and Avetis Aharonian for Armenia. Other nationalist representatives were blocked or ignored in Paris: the British interned Egypt’s wafd (delegation) led by Sa’d Zaghlul on Malta and the 1919 King–Crane Commission report on local aspirations in greater Syria was buried until 1922. Others – the Tripolitanian Republic, the Sanusi proto-state in Cyrenaica, a Sulaimaniya-based Kurdish kingdom, the Najd-based Saudi sultanate, and others – simply declared or continued independence or autonomous self-rule. During a second phase, from the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres to the mid-1920s, this wide array of imagined futures narrowed down to a smaller set of potentially viable colonial and local projects. On the colonial side – Greek, Italian, French, and British aspirations in Anatolia and the Straits zone were eliminated by the success of Mustafa Kemal’s forces, which consolidated territorial control and established a Turkish Republic. On the local side, Arab dreams for a unified greater Syria were quashed by Franco-British partitioning of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan into separate mandates; the Hashemite kingdom of the Hejaz was eliminated by the 2

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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expanding Saudi sultanate; and the Tripolitanian Republic fractured in the face of Italian conquest. In the third phase, the remaining viable postwar political projects clashed in large-scale military conflicts: the Rif Republic was defeated by a combined Franco-Spanish force; the Sanusis were defeated in Cyrenaica by Italy’s total colonial war; Kurdish revolts were crushed by the Turkish Republic and the Iraqi state; the Great Syrian Revolt’s bid for independence was defeated by the French; and the Saudi state quelled the Ikhwan’s internal resistance. By the early 1930s, after this long period of warfare, the region’s post-Ottoman map had been redefined into nationstate-sized political units. One set of postwar units included independent countries – Turkey, Iran, and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia – that either repelled or avoided direct European colonial control. The Turkish Republic was forged through an anticolonial, religiously oriented resistance, unifying Kurds and Turks to defend Anatolia, which, after 1923, shifted to a Turkish ethnocentric secular nationalism that subsumed the Muslim element and emphasized an internal colonization seeking to assimilate the Kurdish element. From the 1920s, Reza Shah Pahlavi helped consolidate central state power in Iran by emphasizing ethnonational Iranian identity: this was built on the reinvention of tradition (tracing twenty-five centuries of Persian rule), the celebration of Persian culture (including the Shahname), and by ethnic othering and linguistic purification, denigrating Arabs and removing Arabic words from Persian. In Arabia, Ibn Saud forged a state bound together by a patrimonial system of rule combined with a Wahhabi religious ideology binding tribes, urban classes, and the different regional communities incorporated by the nascent Saudi state. The larger set of countries, including most of the Arab-majority parts of the region, had been divided into colonial units, forged and consolidated through violent conquest before or during the Great War. European empires implemented varying forms of colonial rule, and these political structures had a direct impact on the way nationalist movements coopted, protested, or resisted colonial rule. In Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and in several Gulf principalities, the French and British created treaty arrangements with a local ruler (sultan, bey, khedive, amir), establishing protectorates that formally preserved the sovereignty of the local dynasties, but effectively transferring diplomatic, military, much of the administrative, and fiscal responsibilities to a colonial government. In Transjordan and Iraq, the British installed external Hashemite rulers as monarchs, but similarly remained militarily and administratively involved in the mandate state. In 265

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Palestine, the British, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration and League of Nations’ mandate terms, tried to balance support for the creation of a Jewish national home with not infringing on the rights of the local population, serving as a reactive and inconsistent umpire in a struggle between a well-organized Jewish national movement facilitating increased migration and settlement and a nascent Palestinian national movement defensively mobilizing against that threat. In Algeria, the French had established a settler colonial regime with a civilian government that reinforced a hard bifurcation between “French” and “native.” Through the interwar period, nationalist ideologies were articulated as various political futures became thinkable and unthinkable and as a set of independent and colonial states were consolidated across the Middle East and North Africa. In some cases, nationalist aspirations were consummated, or at least partially consummated (as in the case of British nominal sponsoring of self-determination in Egypt and Iraq), and in others they were frustrated or denied completely. In the cases of the independent states in the region, particularly in Turkey and Iran, nationalism was used as the legitimating discourse of the reconstituted modernizing state. In areas brought under British, French, and Italian colonial rule, anticolonial nationalism emerged as the dominant framework for collective political identity, for mobilization, and eventually for non-violent and violent resistance against the colonial state.

Religion, Culture, History, and the Boundaries of the Nation From the interwar period through the Second World War to decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, the region’s nationalisms were shaped by identification processes within and beyond the boundaries of the political map forged during the Long Great War. Across the Middle East and North Africa, the politics of collective identity was shaped by struggles in which the nation was invoked and debated by state and society-based actors. In these interactions, a repository of cultural and historical building blocks was drawn on to define, redefine, invoke, invent, deny, and challenge configurations of imagined national identity. A set of entwined cultural and historical strands were drawn together in this process as core features of a nation’s identity. Typically, these strands were in tension, pushing both exclusionary and inclusionary boundary mechanisms in defining the nation. 266

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The two most common and powerful elements of solidarity mobilized by nationalism in the region are religion and language. For centuries, Islam had been a powerful cultural framework binding the majority of social groups locally and across the region through a range of beliefs, practices, and institutions. Defensive military mobilization was ubiquitously framed – against the French in Algeria or Morocco, in Mustafa Kemal’s rallying in the Turkish war for independence, in the Great Syrian Revolt, in Kurdish revolts against the Turkish Republic, in the Saudi-Wahhabi expansion in Arabia – through the discourse of jihad. While the Islamic roots of this framing are clear, jihad as anticolonial resistance also melded senses of national identity that could encompass both Muslim and non-Muslim communities. In this sense, Islam and nationalism were connected together as a form of civil religion. Language and culture are other fundamental building blocks for national identity. The nineteenth-century Arabic nahda, or renaissance, cultivated an Arab cultural nationalism that spanned much of the Arab-majority countries in the region. In the interwar period, these transnational cultural-linguistic ties – sustained through a disseminated print culture and later also through radio – made Arab identity an important shared identity. This was paralleled, to a degree, by the pan-Turanism taken up by Ziya Gökalp and others to celebrate Turkish civilizational bonds across Central Asia and by the panIranist ideology developed by Mahmoud Afshar and other Iranian intellectuals in the 1920s in response to pan-Arabism and pan-Turanism. As with other pan-ethnic ideologies, these transnational ideologies, rather than undercutting nationalism in the region, tended to reinforce and strengthen nation-building in independent states and anticolonial nationalist movements. Religious and linguistic solidarities are often in tension, however, strained by diverging ethnic and civic modes of defining and mobilizing national identity. Virtually all of the nationalisms in the region are oriented around a preexisting core religious majority (Sunni Muslim, Shi’i Muslim, Jewish) tied to a cultural-linguistic identity, the latter of which potentially enlarges the boundaries of the national community. Arab nationalism originated in a nineteenth-century cultural movement, evolved into a political program during the First World War, then influenced anticolonial nationalisms in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt. In the Middle East, Arab cultural and linguistic heritage has been celebrated as a supra-sectarian common denominator unifying Arab Sunnis, Shi’is, Druze, Copts, Orthodox, Maronites, Chaldeans, and other groups, and this identity was one level of 267

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imagined community mobilized in the Great Syrian (1925–1927) and Palestinian revolts (1936–1939); celebrated in the Ba’athist ideology articulated in the late 1930s by the Syrian activists Michel Aflaq, Zaki al-Arsuzi, and Salah al-Din Bitar; and emphasized in the educational ideology implemented by Sati al-Husri in mandate Iraq. Arab ethnonational identity creates the potential for a civic inclusionism – using a common denominator underneath sectarian variation – but this remains in tension with religious identity, given the massive demographic preponderance of the Arab Muslim population vis-à-vis Arabs of other religions. In North Africa, Arabism also became a pronounced feature of interwar anticolonial nationalism, but Maghribi nationalisms always emphasized an Arab-Islamic synthesis of national identity owing to the fact that these countries were much more homogeneously Muslim, only having a small Jewish minority. History was also invoked to define the nation and legitimate claims to popular sovereignty. In North Africa, Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian nationalists emphasized Arab-Islamic political, cultural, and historical national unity and continuity to counter French historiographical erasures establishing direct links to Roman rule and ethnographic claims reifying an Arab–Berber divide. History was also used in struggles among rival nationalist visions. Phoenicianism was used to defend a separate Lebanese ethnic identity against Arab nationalist claims that it was part of Syria. Zionists elided 2,000 years of history to establish a direct connection with Jewish polities in antiquity, advocating the return of a “people without a land” to “a land without a people,” whereas the Palestinians defended their continuous presence and consciousness as a Palestinian nation in the land. In several cases, nationalist discourses invoked millennia-old origins and notions of peoplehood predating religious divides. In Egypt, Pharaonism was used iconographically and as a historical reference by some nationalists in the interwar period, articulating a notion of the Egyptian nation that far predated Islam or Christianity and which formed a deeper bond between Muslims and Copts. Pahlavi Iranian nationalism attempted to bolster a pre-Islamic identity, referencing millennia of Persian imperial history and culture, as the Ba’athists would do later in Iraq in fusing Arab nationalism to origins stretching back to the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. The newly minted Hashemite monarchs installed in Iraq and Jordan built notions of historical continuity by emphasizing their own descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Across the region, nationalisms actively engaged in inventing tradition in nationalist iconography, pageantry, and symbols, including the national flags and anthems created in the 1910s and 1920s. 268

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As with nationalisms elsewhere, gender has been central to the biological, cultural, and symbolic reproduction of the nation and national boundaries in the Middle East and North Africa, with women playing central roles as objects of and active participants in ideological, symbolic, and physical national struggles.3 For male nationalists, women’s rights and educational status served as indexes of the failure of colonial rule, legitimating the need for national liberation, and measuring the modernizing projects of postindependence nation-states. These gendered metrics have also been central to debates over the religious or secular markings of national identity, particularly with the selective application of Islamic law to questions of civil and personal status law. Women have also been used, as in the rest of the world, as central symbols in language, in images, and in sculpture representing the nation, particularly in Egypt, which has long been referred to as “mother of the world” (Um al-dunya). From Morocco to Iran, women themselves were also active in organizing, petitioning, marching, demonstrating, and eventually fighting in armed struggles for national liberation. Postindependence struggles over national identity have continued to revolve around gendered legal frameworks, dress and headgear, and educational and economic opportunities. During periods of national anticolonial resistance and postindependence nation-building, the boundaries of the national community have been a source of debate and conflict. Internal “others” – be they ethnolinguistic or ethnoreligious communities distinct from the dominant core identities – put these boundaries into sharp relief, highlighting the inclusionary and exclusionary tendencies of the region’s nationalisms. Turkish nationalism has reified a Turkish-speaking Sunni core (a religious identity that has been both submerged and reactivated) and attempted to assimilate or eliminate internal non-Turkish-speaking or non-Sunni groups including the Kurds, Armenians, Alevis, and numerous other minorities. In Egypt, there has been a longrunning tension among the Arab, Muslim, and pre-Muslim Pharaonic dimensions of Egypt’s identity, with the Coptic and Jewish minority groups tenuously incorporated in definitions of the nation and at times objects of sectarian violence. Similarly, in Morocco, the Istiqlal party’s dominant Arabo-Islamic definition of the nation, linked to the Alawite dynasty and person of King Mohammed V, ambivalently incorporated the country’s sizable Jewish minority while denying any ethnolinguistic 3

Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds.), Woman – Nation – State (London: Macmillan, 1989), 7

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recognition to Berbers, who were to be assimilated into the Arabic high culture. In Algeria, Jews had been naturalized as French and were therefore not recognized in the Arabo-Islamic Algerian core national identity, while Berbers, whom the French had institutionally differentiated, were to be subsumed in it. In Iraq, Assyrians and then Jews were successively targeted by violence, despite attempts to project an inclusive Iraqi nationalism; Kurds were only ambivalently incorporated, and at times subject to genocidal statebased violence; and Arab Sunnis and Shi’is were tenuously unified. Lebanon’s political system, since the French mandate, is based on an explicit sectarian recognition and hierarchical incorporation of Maronite, Sunni, Druze, and Shi’i social groups, while in Syria, the Sunni majority and minority ethnic and sectarian groups singled out by French divide-and-rule policies were unified by Arab nationalism, though these minority identities remained politically salient. In the late twentieth century, as the region experienced a religious revival and rise in religiously motivated politics, the nation, by and large, remained the primary imagined political community: the struggle was over political control and how religion (Sunni or Shi’i Islam, Judaism, Maronite or Orthodox Christianity) should be expressed within that national entity. In the 1970s and 1980s, Islamist political mobilization in the Middle East and North Africa targeted oppositional politics against the incumbent postindependence regimes, which were critiqued as corrupt and often as un-Islamic. The Muslim Brotherhood’s multiple branches – in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine – mobilized for political goals, not across, but within those countries. In Iran, Khomeini’s movement in the 1970s critiqued the Shah and the Iranian state as corrupt and aligned with imperial interests, and following the revolution, installed an anti-Western and anti-imperial Islamic Republic that expressed a specific Shi’i-centric definition of Iranian national identity. In Algeria, a broad front of Islamist parties challenged the FLN-based regime, leading to a civil war in which both sides claimed to be the true heirs of the Algerian Revolution. In Israel, the religious Zionist movement rose to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s, spearheading settlement in the Occupied Territories and bringing a more explicitly religious definition of Israeli identity to the fore as they helped bring the right-wing Likud party, under Menachem Begin, to power. It is important to emphasize that national struggles over the political role of religion were transnationally linked, with religious revival, mobilization, or revolution (in the case of Iran) in one area greatly influencing neighboring countries. 270

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Transnational Dimensions of Nationalism Nationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa have long been profoundly connected to transnational dynamics. This includes cross-border, regional, and global links. The area’s political architecture was long structured by empire, which connected local and regional scales to metropolitan cores (in Istanbul, Fes, Tehran, or Cairo, or in Paris, London, or Rome) and other parts of that empire (North African colonial soldiers fighting for France successively in mandate Syria in the 1920s, in Provence and the Vosges with Free French liberation forces in 1944, and in Indochina against the Viet-Minh in the early 1950s). Societies were also connected transnationally through language, culture, religion, and commerce, ties that were strengthened through personal and institutional connections expressed in scholarly networks, Sufi brotherhoods, pilgrimage routes, print media distribution, and trading networks. Ethnic and religious solidarities extending across national borders have persisted for both state-based and state-seeking nationalisms. As much of the region came under European control, pan-Arab and panIslamic expressions of solidarity were frequently mobilized in anticolonial European mobilization. In the 1920s and 1930s, broad pan-Islamic support – in the form of petitions, fundraising, and articles – was mobilized on behalf of struggles like the Rif War, the Great Syrian Revolt, or the Palestinian Revolt, or causes like the 1930 Berber crisis, when Shakib Arslan, a Lebanese Druze based in Geneva, mobilized a campaign against a purported French plan to Christianize Morocco’s Berbers that gained resonance from Fes to Surabaya. After the Second World War, pan-Arabist sentiment strengthened between the newly independent Arab Middle Eastern countries and the North African countries still under French rule. From the early 1950s, the Egyptian-based Sawt al-‘arab (Voice of the Arabs) broadcast shortwave radio to a transnational Arab listening public from Fes to Baghdad, who tuned in to hear the iconic singing voice of Umm Kulthum and the rousing anti-imperial speeches of Gamal Abd-al-Nasir. Transnational pan-Arabism occasionally translated into an institutional expression – including the short-lived United Arab Republic (which unified Egypt and Syria between 1958 and 1961 and formed a tentative confederation with parts of Yemen) and the Cairo-based Arab League (which now encompasses twenty-two member states) – but more palpably reinforced individual nationalisms, particularly in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which all vied for the mantle of leadership in the Arab world. In North Africa, despite strong proclamations of Maghrib unity during the anticolonial struggle, the vision of an Arab Maghrib Union has been

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stymied by competition among Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian nationstates. While pan-Arabism, pan-Turkism, and pan-Iranianism have variously been connected to states, the other powerful transnational identity expressed in the region is that of stateless ethnic groups spread across multiple countries, the largest of which are the Kurds (25–35 million) and Imazighen, or Berbers (30–40 million). The Kurds are the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, most of whom live at the confluence of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, though around 4 million live in Istanbul and perhaps 2 million in Europe. For centuries, the Kurdish homelands in the Zagros mountains were the shatter zone between the Ottoman, Safavid, and Romanov empires, with a patchwork of semi- to completely autonomous Kurdish emirates positioned as buffer states in the marches between these regional powers. In the late nineteenth century Kurdish elites, particularly in Istanbul, articulated cultural nationalist ideas in a newly founded Kurdish press, in clubs, and in associations. Kurdish separatist aspirations were expressed in the aftermath of the First World War, but, though the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres provided for an independent Northern Kurdistan, Kurdistan had no great power patron and was subsequently partitioned among the four states. Throughout the 1920s–1930s, Kurdish groups mobilized within and across these emerging borders in large-scale military revolts in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, but were not able to achieve long-term autonomy. Instead, throughout the twentieth century, the Kurds have faced brutal crackdowns and forced displacement in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The Kurdish imagined community both transcends and is constrained by the borders of Northern (Turkish), Southern (Iraqi), Eastern (Iranian), and Western (Syrian) Kurdistan. Kurdish identity and mobilization has been focused within and across borders in the mobilization of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) against the Turkish state, the Kurdish Regional Government’s creation of a semi-autonomous nation-state within Iraq, and the Syrian Kurds’ recent creation of autonomous cantons. These different Kurdistans are also transnationally connected culturally, politically, and economically to diaspora Kurdish populations in Europe. In North Africa, the Imazighen (Berber) population is in a similar structural position to the Kurds, constituting a large non-Arabic-speaking Sunni ethnic group spread across several Arab-dominated states. The largest populations are in Morocco and Algeria; Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt have a few Berberspeaking communities; and the Tuareg are spread across several Sahel countries to the south of the Sahara. It has only been since the late twentieth century that a cultural elite has begun to articulate a transnational Berber 272

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identity. During the colonial period, the French reified the Arab–Berber division, conducting ethnographic studies and partially instituting separate Berber legal and educational institutions in parts of Algeria and Morocco. To counter this divide-and-rule strategy, North African anticolonial nationalists subsumed Berber identity markers within an assimilationist Arabo-Islamic core definition of the national community. All the North African states implemented Arabization strategies after independence and cracked down, with varying degrees of harshness, on Berber linguistic and cultural expression. It was in the diaspora, particularly in Paris, that Kabyle cultural elites developed Berber Studies. This cultural nationalism became political in 1980 when the Algerian state banned a conference headlined by Mouloud Mammeri in Tizi-Ouzou, setting off protests first in Kabylia, then elsewhere in Algeria, that became known as the Berber Spring. From that point forward in Algeria, and from the early 1990s forward in a parallel movement in Morocco, Berber activists mobilized the Berber Cultural Movement, pressing for linguistic and cultural recognition from the Algerian and Moroccan states. The national and transnational contexts interact, as Berber activists press for reforms in their own country but also network through the internet and through institutions like the World Amazigh Congress, created in 1995. Since 2011, both Morocco and Algeria have recognized Tamazight as a national language and Berbers in Libya and Tunisia have gained recognition. None of the Berber movements, however, have actively agitated for separatism. Across North Africa, even in places like the Rif and Kabylia which have strong regional identities, the point is to achieve political, cultural, and economic goals within the framework of Morocco or Algeria, not apart from it. Like the Kurds, the Berber diaspora in Europe is also transnationally connected socially, economically, culturally, and politically (to a degree) to North African communities. Some of these European Berber communities have much more separatist agendas, but it remains to be seen whether their pushes for autonomy or separatism in Kabylia or the Rif gain mobilizational traction among their target populations. (See Figure 12.1.)

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Figure 12.1 Complex transnational identities on display on 10 March 2019 in the former colonial metropole, Paris, with French Algerian demonstrators waving Algerian and Amazigh flags at the Place de la République while protesting Algerian President Bouteflika standing for a fifth term. (Photo by Kiran Ridley via Getty Images, www .gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/french-algerian-demonstrators-holding-thehistorical-news-photo/1134902678?adppopup=true.)

Contested Nationalisms A pair of deeply contested cases pitting state-seeking versus state-based nationalisms – Palestine versus Israel and Western Saharan versus Morocco – have profound transnational significance in the Middle East and North Africa and beyond. Though sometimes portrayed as a primordial enmity, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is a century-old struggle between rival nationalist claims to a territorial unit defined in the wake of the First World War. In the late nineteenth century, European Jews mobilized a nationalist movement, Zionism, focused on creating what Theodor Herzl outlined as a “Jewish state” in Ottoman Palestine. Though it drew on biblical references and Jewish religious messianic expectation of a return to Zion, political Zionism – both in its Labor and in its Revisionist expressions – was predominantly a secular ethnonationalist project seeking to create a Jewish polity in Palestine that could serve as a refuge from rampant European anti-Semitism (which became even more salient in the 1940s as a result of

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the Shoah). Zionism emphasized the history of ancient Israel and of Jewish rule and revolt during antiquity to establish territorial claims and to name and rename places. Cultural, economic, and ecological civilizing mission rhetoric was also used to legitimate the national project: Zionism would take a degraded backwater and “make the desert bloom.” Zionism emphasized an ethnic core Jewish national identity, pairing it with a unique linguistic assimilationist project: resurrected modern Hebrew would be the language of the in-gathered Jewish nation. Since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Israeli national identity expresses three primary tensions. The first is between the secular and the religious, between which an uneasy coexistence was established at the state’s founding when the orthodox religious community was granted privileges in oversight of civil and family law. The second is the hierarchy among Jewish Israelis, with Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin) historically privileged over Mizrahi (those who immigrated from the Muslim world) and Ethiopian Jews. The third tension is between the ethnic and civic dimensions of national identity: non-Jews – Palestinian Arabs – within the pre-1967 Israeli borders are ostensibly equal citizens of the Jewish state but functionally are never fully included in that national identity, while Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have no citizenship basis and are treated exceptionally under occupying rule. On the other side, Palestinian nationalism was catalyzed by the nascent Zionist political project in the early twentieth century. Palestinian imagined communities – tied by locality, regional networks, Arab religious identities, and a territorial sense of the Holy Land – began to coalesce during and just after the First World War, particularly after the mandate was created. In the 1920s, the threat of the rival Jewish national project – concretely experienced in the loss of land and increase of Jewish migration during this period – accelerated the definition of Palestinian national identity. A network of Muslim–Christian associations, formed at the end of the war in 1918, combined to establish the Palestine Arab Congress, which met successively through the 1920s to influence British policy. British modes of rule, however, which emphasized communal (sectarian) representation, countered these attempts to forge a unified ethnolinguistic identity. Palestinian nationalism was reinforced through a series of mass protests and resistance through the interwar period, particularly the 1936–1939 Palestinian Revolt, but its defining moment was the 1948 war, when 700,000 Palestinians (half the population) fled or were forced out of their homes in an event called Al-Nakba (the catastrophe). From this point forward, Palestinian nationalism has largely been defined by exile, dispossession, resistance, and occupation, after the 1967 275

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war brought Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli control. The rise of Hamas since the 1980s has deepened tensions over Palestinian identity, as its religious nationalism has emphasized the Muslim solidarity of the nation over the Muslim–Christian solidarity of shared Palestinian and Arab identity. The conflict between Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms has significant transnational effects. The Palestinian cause has, since the interwar period, evoked pan-Islamic support, including the raising of funds and protests in support of the 1936–1939 Great Revolt. Upon Britain’s abrupt withdrawal from the mandate in May 1948, Israel fought neighboring Arab states which attacked to support Palestinian claims (though afterwards Transjordan and Egypt, respectively, absorbed the West Bank and Gaza), and these states fought in three more Arab–Israeli wars, ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian cause. Since the founding of the state of Israel, Palestinian nationalism and the denial of Palestinian statehood has resonated deeply with panArab and pan-Islamic notions of solidarity, generating support across the region and the Muslim world. Zionism, likewise, has from its beginning had deep transnational connections and effects. From its founding in 1897, the transnational World Zionist Organization worked to mobilize financial, diplomatic, and other forms of support for the Jewish national home from Jewish and non-Jewish groups worldwide. Israeli nationalism also evokes powerful transnational support from sectors of the United States’ population, particularly American evangelicals with a religious affinity to Zionism, and from other Christian populations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. A similar case of contested nationalisms is expressed in the conflict between Morocco and Western Sahara. Moroccan nationalism was forged in the anticolonial struggle against the French and Spanish and unified around the Alawite monarchy, Islam, the Arabic language, and the liberation and unification of Moroccan territory (previously partitioned into international, Spanish, and French zones). In 1975, seeking to buttress domestic support, King Hassan II championed the irredentist claims of the Istiqlal party regarding historic greater Morocco, by staging the Green March, a mass demonstration in which more than 300,000 Moroccans walked into Spanish Sahara. The Saharan nationalist resistance movement, the Polisario Front, formed in 1973 to wage an anti-Spanish insurgency, mobilized against the Moroccan and Mauritanian invasion and occupation, fighting both powers until Mauritania withdrew and Morocco agreed to a ceasefire in the late 1980s. Parallel to the Palestinian case, Saharan nationalism has largely been articulated and developed in exile, particularly from the Tindouf refugee camp in Algeria, where a large portion of Saharans sought refuge. From the Saharan nationalist 276

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perspective, Morocco’s anticolonial nationalism is viewed as a neoimperial example of settler colonialism at their expense. The Morocco–Saharan conflict also has a complicated transnational dimension, being integrally connected to hostile bilateral relations between Morocco and Algeria (which serves as the patron for the Polisario Saharan liberation organization); causing tensions with other African countries, which have variously castigated and supported Morocco or the Saharans; and frequently being a sticking point in negotiations between Morocco and the European Union.

Conclusion: The Endurance of Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa in the Twenty-First Century Over the past two centuries, nationalism has come to the fore as the primary political identifier within Middle Eastern and North African societies, but it functions idiosyncratically in this region, compared with others, owing to two important factors. One is the strength of the long-term twinned historical processes of Islamization and Arabization that have profoundly influenced and linked the region. The other is how European colonial powers partitioned the previous Muslim imperial polities – the (Moroccan) Alawite, Qajar, and particularly the former Ottoman Empire’s lands after the First World War – into smaller units. National identity is firmly embedded in these postcolonial political containers, but local nationalisms remain interlinked by cultural, linguistic, and historical regional and subregional ties, particularly among the majority-Arabic-speaking countries in the region. While the Turkish and Iranian post-empire national cores consolidated in the twentieth century are linguistically set apart, the Arab states are both unified and distinguished by language, with the Modern Standard Arabic used in media, academia, and politics juxtaposed with regional-cum-national colloquial versions of the language used in everyday contexts. The strength of this “both/and” of the national and transnational cultural, linguistic, and religious ties within the Middle East and North Africa distinguishes it from regions with some overlapping features such as the post-Soviet republics in Central Asia or the various nation-states that emerged from the European drawing of boundaries in Southeast Asia. It is clear, though, that local nationalism trumps transnational ties in the Middle East and North Africa on almost all counts for both state and non-state actors. Since gaining independence in the mid-twentieth century, states have used nationalism instrumentally to legitimize the political status quo, often by claiming the mantle of earlier or 277

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current anti-imperial resistance. Throughout the region, banal nationalism is reinforced through the ubiquity of national symbols on currency, clothing, and signage, through pictures of the head of state, and through the visibility of the flag. National identity is also socialized through education, mass military conscription, ritualization of national holidays, and leisure activities like cheering for national soccer teams (particularly against rival neighboring countries). In addition, nationalism has been invoked and stoked in multiple interstate violent conflicts over the past decades, including the Iran–Iraq War, the Arab–Israeli Wars, the Morocco–Algerian Sand War, and the Lebanese Civil War. Nationalism has also been used against the state by opposition movements including Islamists and ethnic minorities like Kurds and Berbers to challenge the incumbent regimes in the region. In the twenty-first century, the nation continues to be a resilient category of imagined community across the Middle East and North Africa, as the region has experienced further conflict, starting with the United States’ 2003 occupation and destabilization of Iraq and continuing through the post2011 period of mobilization and protest, which in some cases has led to revolution or civil war. Throughout the past two decades, the dominant discourse – both for the incumbent states and for groups mobilizing in protest against these regimes – has, with few exceptions, been oriented by nationalism. The universal Arabic slogan of the resistance – “Al-sha’ab yurid isqat al-nizam!” (The people want the fall of the regime!) – and its many variations invoke “the people.” The reference is a national people – Tunisians, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Moroccans, Algerians – though this call also resonates across a transnational pan-Arab imagined community. Protest and resistance through demonstrations, marches, and on social media are everywhere clothed in the flag and other national symbols, which the state authorities also wield to defend their counterclaims. Other notions of collective identity and postnational politics have emerged or reemerged in the region at the start of this century, including Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s invocation of the Islamic ummah and the caliphate, some Palestinians’ shift to the goal of a binational one-state solution, the Kurds’ attempt at democratic confederalism in Rojava, and subnational localism in Libya and Yemen. But it clearly appears that the nation and nationalism will endure for the foreseeable future as the primary containers for collective political identity in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Further Reading Ansari, Ali, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Baron, Beth, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Findley, Carter, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Gershoni, Israel, and James Jankowski (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Khalidi, Rashid, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). McDougall, James, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Maddy-Weitmann, Bruce, The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Wien, Peter, Arab Nationalism: The Politics of History and Culture in the Modern Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2017). Zerubavel, Yael, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).

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In the early twenty-first century, nations across Africa celebrated their fiftieth birthdays. The symbols employed to mark the occasion and the memories evoked bore witness to the joys as well as the trials and tribulations of a fiftyyear history. For many, fifty years of independent nationhood was an occasion for celebration.1 But at the same time, the history of nationalism and nationhood is not purely a celebratory story. The politics of the early twentyfirst century, in African countries as elsewhere in the world, served as a reminder that modern nationalism also has a dark side, and that violence and dispossession can follow when dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are drawn along national lines. The enduring importance of nationhood and nationalism in contemporary Africa, both as a form of collective belonging and as a language of politics, would surely have surprised an earlier generation of scholars. In his 1992 book The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, the writer Basil Davidson reflected on the three decades which had then passed since Africa became a continent of nation-states. Nationalism had, Davidson observed, produced nation-states which were “alien models” that had “failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens.”2 The consequence was a retreat to “tribalism.” Davidson’s view was one widely shared by his contemporaries. Yet fast forward twenty-five years, and those researchers who once predicted that nations would have little purchase in postcolonial Africa have been forced to revisit their earlier predictions and start to investigate instead why most of these nations have proved so durable.3 1

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Carola Lentz, “Ghana@50: Celebrating the Nation, Debating the Nation,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 53/211, (2013), 519–546. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London: James Currey, 1992), 12. M. Crawford Young, “Revisiting Nationalism and Ethnicity in Africa,” James S. Coleman Memorial Lecture Series, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/28h0r4sr.

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How are we to account for the power of nationhood and nationalism in modern Africa, and what methodologies might help us in doing so? Let us first consider briefly how this question has been approached. The earliest accounts of nationhood and nationalism in sub-Saharan Africa were, as has often been noted, written by nationalists themselves, as well as by sympathetic journalists and by political scientists, in the years immediately before and after independence was won by the majority of African countries around 1960. This was followed by a wave of groundbreaking historical scholarship which explored the growth of mass nationalist movements and the political organization of those movements, and the social and economic changes underpinning them. A great deal of this research stemmed from new centers of historical research in newly independent countries, such as the history department of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.4 But historians tended to concentrate on the period up to independence, and for their part political scientists writing about the more recent past increasingly paid less attention to nationalism as a phenomenon, focusing instead on the ways in which subnational groups seemed to be threatening the long-term survival of nation-states.5 A focus on the birth of a nation-state is unsurprising. Writing about nationalism used to be framed by a working assumption that the processes of modernization which human societies were undergoing involved the transition to a world in which political authority ought legitimately to lie with “the people,” ruling themselves in a democratically constituted nationstate. Scholars focusing on Africa wrote back against perceptions that African nation-states were somehow less legitimate than were their counterparts in other parts of the world, and instead demonstrated that the continent was going through the same historical processes as other world regions. That pressure has now abated. Wideranging critiques of modernization theory in all its guises make us less inclined to see the path to nationhood as 4

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For example, Isaria N. Kimambo and Arnold J. Temu (eds.), A History of Tanzania (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1969). As Kimambo emphasized in reflecting on that period, while not nationalist histories, they were national histories which were shaped by the nationbuilding politics of the 1960s. See Oswald Masebo, “New Thematic Directions in History at the University of Dar es Salaam,” Tanzania Zamani, 9/2 (2017), 1–67. Recent historical surveys have also often focused on the period before independence, e.g. Jean Allman, “Between the Present and History: African Nationalism and Decolonization,” in John Parker and Richard Reid (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); John M. Lonsdale, “Anti-Colonial Nationalism and Patriotism in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Miles Larmer and Baz Lecocq, “Historicising Nationalism in Africa,” Nations and Nationalism, 24/4 (2018), 906–907.

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one part of a wider transition from “traditional” to “modern” society. Historians now typically stress the “imagined” quality of nationhood, leaving open the possibility that any particular nation could be imagined in different ways in the future. Historians writing in this vein often cite Benedict Anderson, but the underlying approach is far removed from Anderson’s own framework in which the process of becoming a nation is inextricably tied to wider processes of transition toward capitalist modernity.6 If nations are conceived as products of constant construction and reconstruction, it becomes possible for historians of Africa, as for historians of other parts of the world, to write more confidently about nations and why they matter in Africa, both in the past and in the present. It allows us to approach nationhood and nationalism historically, rather than through the lens of theoretical models borrowed from the social sciences, appreciating that ideas about what constitutes a nation, and about the relationship between nations and other forms of collective belonging, as well as between nation-states and other forms of statehood, are contested and have changed over time.7 At the same time, it opens up new analytical opportunities, allowing for the separation of questions of nationhood and nationalism from issues of sovereignty, statehood, and the boundaries of political community, issues with which they are often, but not always, intertwined.8 In this chapter I argue for a renewed attention to the enduring imaginative power of nationhood, both as a social and political identity and as a language of politics. This requires stepping outside national frameworks, both geographically and conceptually, and challenging linear narratives which assume an endpoint at which “nationhood” is achieved and national identities become the exclusive form of collective belonging. To make this argument, I first consider the specific circumstances in which nation-states came to be understood as the building blocks of the world order and what this meant for the history of nationhood and nationalism in Africa, and then move on to consider how nations have continued to be forged in the years since. 6

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Larmer and Lecocq, “Historicising Nationalism,” 895; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016). In a recent blog post, Michael Goebel reminds us of the risks which ensue when we “elevate congruency between the national and the political unit into a criterion for applying the label ‘nationalism.’” Michael Goebel, “After Empire Must Come Nation?,” https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/after-empire-must-come-nation-cd220f1977c. Frederick Cooper, “Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical Perspective,” Journal of African History, 49/2 (2008), 167–196.

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Nations in African History The drawing of boundaries, and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, have a long history in Africa, as elsewhere. In his account of the forging of political society on the frontier, the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff returned to early African history and described the ways in which boundaries were drawn as newcomers sought to claim the authority that derived from being firstcomers. In the case of the Kpelle of Liberia, for example, he writes, “a newcomer would found a ‘new’ political area by giving his chiefdom new boundaries and a new ritual existence; in this way, he could claim to be the firstcomer in it by virtue of having introduced social order into what he asserted was previously an inexistent territory in the civic sense, one that was politically disordered and ritually untamed.”9 Distinguishing between civilized selves and uncivilized others was thus a key foundational move. Origin myths commonly dismissed earlier inhabitants as “forest people,” effectively “deculturizing these ‘very first’ inhabitants and making them non-human.”10 But while such boundary drawing has long been important, the ways in which the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn are themselves historical, and have changed in important ways over time, in dialogue with changing global ideas about race, ethnicity, and nationhood and in relation to material conditions and structures of power. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questions of how best to live together, and to claim a place within the world, were increasingly articulated in a language of nationhood. This was true in Africa as elsewhere and is inseparable from a wider global history of political ideas. The language of nationhood was fluid enough to encompass a broad range of collective identities. As Stephanie Newell writes of 1920s and 1930s West Africa, [p]eople’s regional and political identities in the colonial period were characterised by great elasticity. An individual might identify as part of a local ethnoregional nation such as the Fante or the Yoruba, and/or as part of the British West African nation stretching from Nigeria up to the Gambia, and/ or as part of the global pan-African nation reaching from West Africa to the Caribbean, London, and North America, and/or as an imperial citizen, loyal to the British Crown.11 9

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Igor Kopytoff, The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1987), 56. Kopytoff, African Frontier, 57. Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa (Athens, OH:, Ohio University Press, 2013), 21.

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In Swahili-speaking East Africa, the term taifa could simultaneously be used within a pan-Africanist discourse to describe those who identified as African, to describe a territorial nation-state, or to describe ethnic groups such as the Chagga or the Sukuma for whom colonial officials used the language of “tribe.” In colonial Africa, as elsewhere, it was therefore perfectly possible to think of oneself within multiple layers of collective belonging, and to apply the term “nation” to more than one of them. At the same time, the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth saw changes to other ideas of collective belonging and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion based on religion, ethnicity, or race. Racial thinking changed from the late nineteenth century onwards, with the rise of pseudo-scientific understandings of race.12 Religious change and conversion to Islam or Christianity could contribute to new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion as, for example, new Christian converts might come to think of themselves as more connected to other Christians, perhaps living far away but united by a shared faith and by shared engagement in a printed public sphere, than to neighbors who followed other faiths. And where boundaries between ethnic groups had once been fluid, in the first half of the twentieth century new ways of thinking about ethnicity or “tribe,” in the language of the time, saw these identities become more tightly defined and more exclusive. In some cases, these identities were also politicized as a direct result of colonial policies as struggles over access to resources or to political power were framed in relation to ethnicity. This, then, was the mid-twentieth-century context in which nationalist movements began to claim self-government and independence within a wider context of anticolonial thought.

Nations in the Era of Decolonization Between 1957 and 1963 the geopolitical map of Africa was transformed. Returning to that moment, we need to remember that the form this map would take was not inevitable or preordained. In the 1940s and 1950s, claiming a place in the world on the basis of a claim to nationhood was not limited to those claiming to speak for colonial territorial states. In Tanganyika, now mainland Tanzania, the period after 1945 saw the steady growth of the Tanganyika African Association. In 1954, it was reformed as the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), led by Julius Nyerere with the 12

Christopher A. Bayly, Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 271.

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explicit goal of independence for Tanganyika, which was finally achieved in December 1961. But at the same time as the Tanganyika African Association and later TANU were developing a new national political organization, others were developing new forms of political consciousness at the local level. The language of nationhood was not limited to those organizing at the territorial level, but was fluid enough to be coopted at the local level too for the units which others called “tribes.” In northeastern Tanganyika, Thomas Marealle, elected to the new role of Paramount Chief of the Chagga in 1951, engaged in the same nation-building work as nationalists operating at the territorial level by, for example, establishing a new newspaper and commissioning a new history of the Chagga people.13 And yet over the course of the 1950s, territorial states increasingly won a monopoly over the language of nationhood. The singular context in which many African states achieved their independence stands out. They did so in a global context in which national units and the nation-state form had come to be seen by many as the very foundation of the international order, not as one potential form of sovereign political community but as the only legitimate form of political community.14 In this context, it was increasingly difficult to make the case for any other formation, such as revised imperial formations or regional federations. In Africa, the mid-1950s had been a time when, as Frederick Cooper has emphasized, it was possible to pursue an anticolonial politics while rejecting the nation-state form as its necessary consequence. The Senegalese political leader Mamadou Dia wrote in 1955 that “[i]t is necessary in the final analysis that the imperialist concept of the nation-state give way to the modern concept of the multinational state,” while Léopold Senghor argued forcefully against the “Balkanization” of West Africa and in favor of a reconfigured French Union.15 But by the late 1950s, it was very difficult to resist an argument that equated freedom with independence on the basis of territorial nationstates. The process by which this happened was in part a story of high politics, at both the international and the national level. Across the world, new states 13

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Emma Hunter, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2015). The process by which this idea was universalized is explored in interesting ways in Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998). Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 68–69.

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gained their independence. They entered existing international institutions, such as the United Nations, as sovereign states. Within African countries, political leaders established new movements organized along national lines. Ideas were borrowed from one context to another, so that, for example, Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, founded in 1949, was modeled on the Congress Party in India, while Julius Nyerere’s TANU, founded in 1954, was in turn modeled on the Gold Coast Convention People’s Party. But the growth of territorial nationalisms was not solely a high political story, it was also a story of the everyday political struggles of the workplace or the town, and of developments in the realms of society and culture. For Nigerian seamen who had worked before independence for the British shipping company Elder Dempster, working instead for a new Nigerian-owned shipping company held out the prospect of better treatment and higher pay. It also meant Nigerian food in place of the European dishes they had long complained about. As one retired seaman told the historian Lynn Schler, the new company “gave us local food, garri, and paid us overtime.”16 In Angola, Marissa Moorman argues, “cultural sovereignty” was expressed before political sovereignty was achieved in 1975. It was, Moorman explains, through the distinctive musical genre of semba that angolanidade or Angolanness was forged. In the words of the Angolan musician Amadeu Amorim, “[p]eople felt an angolanidade; they would get together to hear the music of Ngola Ritmos [of which he was a part] and they would feel Angolan . . . since their songs woke up people’s consciousness, they woke up many who were politically distracted and inspired nationalism.”17 Struggles for nationhood were entangled with wider anticolonial struggles. Being recognized in the world on an equal basis was tied to belonging to an independent nation-state. Navigating this intellectual and political environment meant navigating expectations as to what a nation was, and this had implications for what happened after independence.

Building Nations from Above and Below in the 1960s and 1970s Africa’s newly independent nations came into being at a time when it had come to be seen as natural that the international order was one of 16

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Lynn Schler, “Becoming Nigerian: African Seamen, Decolonisation and the Nationalisation of Consciousness,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11/1 (2011), 42–62, at 54. Marissa Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), 52.

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nation-states, and that those nation-states should share characteristics such as language and culture. Yet identities that transcended the nation-state remained powerful, and in some cases alternative political formations, such as regional federations, had a compelling pull on both citizens and their leaders. Again, it bears repeating that this was a very particular moment in the global history of thinking about nations, in two regards in particular. The first way in which this moment stands out is in the expectation that nation-states should be homogeneous, and that one territorial national identity should replace alternative identities, such as local or religious identities. Thinking about nations was tightly linked to thinking about states and the powerful idea that strong central governments were essential if economic and social development were to be achieved. For some, subnational identities, such as ethnic identities, were perceived to be hangovers from an earlier age which would either be stamped out of existence or fade away as “modernization” proceeded. For others, like the Mozambican politician Samora Machel, they were tools of imperialism. As Machel wrote, “[w]e killed the tribe to give birth to the nation.”18 This had implications for the types of discussions that took place. We have already seen that the language of nationhood in 1950s Tanzania was fluid enough to incorporate both local and territorial conceptions of nationhood. The rise of Thomas Marealle and others like him elsewhere in Tanganyika in the 1950s had set up the possibility of an independent Tanganyika organized perhaps along federal lines, in which substantial power lay at the local level with groups like the Chagga. And yet by the end of the 1950s, it was increasingly hard for Marealle and the political party which supported him to gain a hearing, faced with the rise of the explicitly modernizing nationalist party TANU in the region. The contrast which this example reflects, between a centralizing nationalist party and alternative visions of the nation which understood nation-states to be agglomerations of other identities, was one echoed across the continent. In Kenya, the politics of late colonialism saw the centralizers of KANU opposed to the federalists of KADU, who sought a weak center and devolution of power to the provinces.19 18

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Barry Munslow (ed.), Samora Machel: An African Revolutionary: Selected Speeches and Writings (London: Zed Books, 1985), 78–79. David Anderson, “‘Yours in Struggle for Majimbo’: Nationalism and the Party Politics of Decolonization in Kenya, 1955–64,” Journal of Contemporary History, 40/3 (2005), 547–564.

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In many cases, contrasting ideas as to where power should lie in new states were associated with different groups. Modernizing – and centralizing – elites employed a rhetoric of social equality, in contrast to the claims of “traditional” leaders, who celebrated the past and sought to retain social and economic hierarchies. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah proposed a centralized nation-state in which Asante cocoa wealth would drive development projects for the benefit of all Gold Coast people. But Asante political entrepreneurs responded with an alternative vision of an Asante nation within a looser, more federal structure.20 Similar dynamics were at play in Guinea, as John Straussberger has recently shown. Straussberger shifts his focus away from the dramatic moment in 1958 when Guinea decided to break with France, and instead explores the territorial elections of 1957 as they played out in the region of Futa Jallon.21 The region stood out within Guinea for its reluctance to embrace the increasingly popular PDG, led by the charismatic Sékou Touré. In contrast to the PDG’s “territory-wide aspirations and a uniform conception of political space,” Futa Jallon’s dominant political parties, the BAG and the DSG, were defined by “regionalism and a colonial politics of difference.” These differences extended into the social and cultural sphere too, as they argued over “the legacy of social hierarchies in the Futa Jallon, the legitimacy of the ‘traditional’ chieftaincy and the function of regional cultural and social practices within a ‘modern’ Guinea.”22 A second important dimension of the 1950s and 1960s was the question of who belonged. In a continent which had long been characterized by mobility, across both land and sea, deciding who could and could not qualify for citizenship, and on what grounds, raised a set of difficult questions. One aspect was that of race. As independence approached in Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere spoke eloquently in favor of a conception of citizenship open to all those who had chosen to make Tanzania their home, regardless of their origin.23 His speeches were carefully crafted to present a cosmopolitan vision of the nation. Yet grassroots politicians presented a different picture to cheering crowds. In a speech to a public meeting in Marangu in Moshi district in northeastern Tanzania on 14 February 1960, for example, the TANU National Executive Committee member Philemon Paul Muro set out, in 20

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Jean Allman, “The Youngmen and the Porcupine: Class, Nationalism and Asante’s Struggle for Self-Determination, 1954–57,” Journal of African History 31 (1990), 263–279. John Straussberger, “Storming the Citadel: Decolonization and Political Contestation in Guinea’s Futa Jallon, 1945–61,” Journal of African History, 57/2 (2016), 232. Ibid. Ronald Aminzade, Race, Nation and Citizenship in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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language inflected by colonial categories, “five things done by the Europeans which were sins against the Africans.” According to a Special Branch report of the meeting, he “stated that these matters would be remedied after selfgovernment was achieved, when the government would develop the country. Europeans and Asians remaining in Tanganyika would have to assist or leave Tanganyika. ‘Maganga, Smith and Patel, will work together at Kilombero. Maganga will drive a tractor, Smith will use a hoe and Patel will plant seeds. If Smith or Patel refuse they will have to leave Tanganyika.’”24 As Jonathan Glassman shows in his study of the Zanzibar revolution, mid-twentieth-century thinking about race drew on older ways of distinguishing between groups and thinking about difference in eastern Africa, but also on the newer racial theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which proposed very sharp lines of inclusion and exclusion.25 Another dimension was the status of migrants from other parts of Africa. In Côte d’Ivoire in 1958, for example, riots were directed against “Dahomeyans and Togolese” in the country who were perceived to have a privileged position in relation to employment.26 This was the context in which states worked to attach nationhood exclusively to the geopolitical contours of the state. Doing so was in part a process of drawing boundaries and defining who belonged, and new citizenship laws were created in a context of lively political debates as to who would qualify for citizenship and what it meant to belong. When these discussions took place in Ghana after independence in 1957, parliamentarians proposed adding “good character” and “sufficient knowledge of a language indigenous to and in current use in Ghana” to residence requirements for those seeking citizenship.27 In Tanzania, citizenship laws which formally opened the possibility of citizenship to all existed in a context in which the popular press frequently portrayed members of Tanzania’s South Asian community as “exploiters.”28 When Idi Amin came to power in Uganda, this popular 24

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Director of Special Branch to Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Security and Immigration: “Philemon Paul Muro,” TNA: UK FCO 141/17761, f. 164. Jonathan Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). H.-M. Yere, “‘Double Nationalité’ and Its Discontents in Ivory Coast, 1963–66,” in Emma Hunter (ed.), Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016), 139. Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017), 86–87. James Brennan, “Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958–75,” Journal of African History, 47/3 (2006), 389–413.

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economic nationalist thought was elevated to the level of state policy, as Uganda’s Asian citizens were expelled from the country in 1972, a move which some in Uganda and elsewhere in the region welcomed as an important and necessary step in Africa’s liberation.29 Nation-building, though, was also a process of creating national institutions and national forms of belonging. In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere and the party he led, TANU, moved quickly to create a national political culture and used cultural policies to build a Tanzanian nation. Chiefship was abolished in early 1962 and political parties were prohibited from organizing along ethnic, racial, or religious lines.30 Swahili, already a lingua franca of politics, was promoted as Tanzania’s national language.31 Identity markers and natural resources from around the country were taken out of their local settings and inscribed into a new national identity. Local dances, for example, became part of “national” dance culture. Tanzania’s rich wildlife, and protecting the country’s national parks, became constituent elements of Tanzania’s national identity, to be cared for and preserved for future generations.32 There was a strongly gendered element to developing a culture fit for a modern nation, with campaigns against fashion items such as wigs and mini-skirts considered to be at odds with Tanzania’s “national culture.”33 In political discourse, leaders like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania or Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana sought to delegitimize alternative claims to political authority. Jeffrey Ahlman writes that Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party’s nation-building involved mounting the accusation of “tribalism” against “nearly every opposition movement or party that arose.” This not only served to “surround the Gold Coast’s various anti-CPP movements with an aura of anachronism,” but also “aimed to siphon the colony’s local and regional variation out of the country’s political scene.”34 Across the continent, less dramatically, the everyday attributes of nationhood – stamps, currency, or flags – served to routinize national membership. 29

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See, for example, a letter from L. K. Kigato, “Rais Amin kufanya kazi ngumu,” Baraza, 14 September 1972, 4. Andrew Coulson, Tanzania: A Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 174. Mohamed H. Abdulaziz, “Tanzania National Language Policy and the Rise of Swahili Political Culture,” in Lionel Cliffe and John S. Saul (eds.), Socialism in Tanzania: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1986), 155–164. Julie Weiskopf, “Socialism on Safari: Wildlife and Nation-Building in Post-Colonial Tanzania,” Journal of African History, 56/4 (2015), 429–447. Andrew Ivaska, “‘Anti-Mini Militants meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style, Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,” Gender and History, 14/3 (2002), 584. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism, 79.

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This is the realm of what Michael Billig has termed “banal nationalism.” In his 1995 book of that name, Billig drew attention to the curious blind spots in writing about nationalism. When social scientists addressed “nationalism,” they tended to gravitate either toward the processes by which nations were created, or toward far-right political ideology termed “nationalist.”35 They had much less to say about how such everyday objects as a national flag on a government building or a coin or stamp might serve to create the conditions in which people came to understand the nation as the natural unit of belonging and to cement the loyalty to their own nation, which could then be activated in moments of perceived national crisis, such as the first Gulf War or the Falklands War.36 In postcolonial Africa, such symbols as coins, stamps, and flags played an important role as new states moved quickly to distinguish themselves from their colonial predecessors. For Kwame Nkrumah, the relatively low rates of literacy in mid-twentieth-century Ghana made national symbols such as the national anthem, a national flag, currency, and postage stamps even more important than they were in other new states. And so, two years before independence a Postage Stamps Committee was established to begin planning the iconography of independent Ghana’s stamps, and international designers were commissioned to produce designs for the new stamps.37 Similar techniques were adopted by those leaders whose nation-state projects did not ultimately succeed. In 1960, Moїse Tshombe attempted to lead a new nation, Katanga, out of the newly independent Congo. As Miles Larmer and Erik Kennes have emphasized, this was more than merely a case of the Cold War machinations of external powers. Tshombe kept the secession going for three years, in part through “visible performance” of statehood as a historical narrative of Katanganness was constructed and reinforced through imagery on Katangan banknotes, stamps, and flags.38 As the anthropologist Kelly Askew writes, “[s]aying and, notably, performing the nation brings it into being. Words alone are insufficient.”39 And so postcolonial leaders demanded that their citizens performed allegiance. This could be as simple as singing a national anthem, but it could also be much more elaborate. In Nkrumah’s Ghana, the Young Pioneers of the ruling 35 37

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Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), 4. 36 Ibid., 6. Harcourt Fuller, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 4, 40–41. Miles Larmer and Erik Kennes, “Rethinking the Katangese Secession,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42/4 (2014), 752. Cited in Yolanda Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism and Everyday Performance in Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 23.

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Convention People’s Party sang about socialism and nation-building with words that evoked the “new Ghana” they were creating.40 In Congo, renamed Zaire in 1971, Mobutu Sese Seko embedded the performing of the nation into everyday life. A worker on a cattle farm, Ne Mosi, told the anthropologist Yolanda Covington-Ward, “[e]ach morning before beginning work they made the workers dance . . . Each morning . . . for thirty minutes, one must dance, to glorify the Guide.”41 In this way, Zaireans inscribed themselves in a national, rather than local, community, under Mobutu’s leadership. But, as Kelly Askew reminds us, performance is a “powerful social force” in part because it is risky and can easily go wrong.42 While performing the nation may begin as a state initiative, it cannot be purely a story of states and their actions; it requires the participation of citizens. Nationhood acquired meaning because citizens played an active role in giving it meaning, sometimes reinforcing state visions and sometimes contesting them. For example, building the institutional structures of new territorial nationstates served to create groups whose professional identity was tied to a particular territorial nation-state. But this was a two-way process. In her study of prison officers in postcolonial Uganda under Milton Obote and Idi Amin, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart evokes the ways in which prison service leaders called on staff to be prepared to work anywhere in the country and to “love Uganda and forget tribalism.”43 This rhetoric of public service to the nation was in turn deployed by prison officers who emphasized their command of Uganda’s numerous languages and their experience of working in prisons across the country when presenting themselves as suitable candidates for promotion or for a new post.44 In Zaire, the task of constructing a new national museum pushed researchers who, in the doctoral research they were conducting alongside their work for the museum, were studying one of Zaire’s ethnic groups, to directly address the “diversity of the nation” and how to represent it.45 And as Miles Larmer has shown in his study of Zambian diplomats in the Congolese 40 42

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Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism, 100. 41 Covington-Ward, Gesture and Power, 159. Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, “The Archival Afterlives of Prison Officers in Idi Amin’s Uganda: Writing Social Histories of the Postcolonial State,” History in Africa, 45 (2018), 267. Ibid., 267. Sarah van Beurden, “The Art of (Re)Possession: Heritage and the Cultural Politics of Congo’s Decolonization,” Journal of African History, 56 (2015), 154.

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city Elisabethville, the everyday decisions of new states’ representatives in foreign embassies played a key role in determining and embedding the contours of national belonging.46 At the same time, there was space to argue over what kind of nation was being constructed. In Tanzania, the state sought to use culture to build a Tanzanian nation. But at the local level, officials were left to interpret this brief in their own ways. When Ernest Kongola was appointed to the position of Dodoma Region Culture Officer in 1974, he was initially unsure of where to start. But on his second day in the post, he asked himself “What is culture?” and concluded that it was “the things that enable one to see that a person is of that tribe or that nation.” He went on to list “nine things that show a person to be of a certain tribe or a certain nation,” consisting of “dance, games, art, music, language, clothing, hair styles, cooking and work culture.”47 He produced a list “and sent it to all chairs of the Ujamaa [socialist] villages in the region so that they would start to educate the citizens.”48 And even where the government did have a clear idea of which cultural forms it wished to privilege within a new national culture, they did not have things all their own way, as the story of taarab music in postcolonial Tanzania makes clear. This musical style, firmly disapproved of by Tanzania’s ruling party, was so forcefully demanded by audiences that the government eventually had to incorporate it into its conceptions of national culture and include it in the program of music played at national occasions.49 So, while state-led nation-building was important, those in power could not fully control the meanings that national belonging took on for their citizens or competing understandings of what the nation was. And at the same time, thinking about borders reminds us that while the birth of nations is often written about as a positive experience, the process of drawing new borders and boundaries led to feelings of loss and rupture as well as gain, as older connections and solidarities were broken. This sense of loss was captured by Lynn Schler’s interviews with Nigerian seamen, reflecting on their experiences in the 1960s. If embracing a Nigerian identity enabled new forms of claim-making, it also meant that alternative identities and sources of support were marginalized. As the new Nigerian shipping line struggled after 46

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Miles Larmer, “Nation-Making at the Border: Zambian Diplomacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 61/1 (2019), 145–175. Gregory Maddox and E. M. Kongola, Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing, Memory and Performance (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2006), 58–59. Ibid., 59. Karin Barber, A History of African Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 124–126.

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independence, workers complained that this meant they could no longer depend on international regulations or access international organizations such as the International Transport Workers’ Federation.50 In a similar vein, while the CFA franc was shared across Francophone West Africa, in East Africa the 1960s saw the birth of new national currencies to replace older colonial-era arrangements. While for some these new currencies were a sign of the positive benefits of newly won sovereignty, for others they were perceived as cutting Tanzanians, Kenyans, and Ugandans off from their nearest neighbors.51 The result was that even where states adopted vigorous top-down policies of nation-building, the social, cultural, and political content of what it meant to be Tanzanian, Kenyan, or Ghanaian was different for different people, as was the relationship between national forms of belonging and other forms of collective belonging such as ethnic, religious, or transnational ties. In Africa, as elsewhere, nations were powerful precisely because they were contested: people were invested in arguing over what the nation was and how it related to other collective identities or forms of belonging. And the forms which nations are imagined to take have changed over time.

Nationhood, Memory, and Languages of Politics As we have seen, the years after independence saw nationhood become increasingly important as a form of collective belonging and way of defining one’s place in the world. But nationhood continued to be important as a language of politics too. This is not surprising. In a world of nation-states, arguments about political legitimacy and accountability have often taken place in idioms of nationalism and nationhood. This was an important basis of the claim of new territorial nation-states in the 1960s, and it has continued to be used after independence by those who claimed nationhood but did not (yet) possess a state, increasingly so in the recent past. And because other identities have not gone away, there were, and indeed are, an almost infinite number of potential nations. We can see this, for example, in Mali. In his book Disputed Desert, the historian Baz Lecocq situates the late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury conflict within the state between “its Tamasheq and Bidan inhabitants” historically in relation to two competing national ideas which were 50 51

Schler, “Becoming Nigerian,” 57. Editorial, “Hatua ya kurudi nyuma,” Baraza, 17 June 1965, 4.

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powerful in Mali in the second half of the twentieth century: a Malian nationalism and a Tamasheq or Tuareg nationalism.52 Lecocq traces the efforts by the Malian state to create Malian citizens by, for example, banning the speaking of the Tamasheq language in schools and demanding forced labor and military service from groups that had formerly been exempt.53 The response of some Tamasheq to incorporation in the Malian state was to fight for independence from Mali. Crucially, and in contrast to those who would portray Tamasheq nationalism as “ethnicity” or “ethnonationalism,” for Lecocq “Tamasheq efforts to obtain their national independence should be referred to as Tamasheq nationalism,” “making it both an equal and rival to Malian nationalism and the creation of the Malian nation.”54 The continued power of nationhood as a language of politics helps us understand the apparent resurgence of national projects in the recent past. In other cases, those forced into exile have turned to conceptions of nationhood to articulate a place in the world. Conducting fieldwork in the mid-1980s among two groups of Hutu refugees in western Tanzania who had fled Burundi in 1972, the anthropologist Lisa Malkki found that the two groups experienced the relationship between exile and nation in very different ways. One group, settled among Tanzanians in a Kigoma township, adopted strategies of assimilation into Tanzanian society and did not define themselves in terms of a collective Hutu identity. The other group, settled in a physically remote refugee camp, were, Malkki writes, “continually engaged in an impassioned construction and reconstruction of their history as ‘a people.’” This was a narrative in which they had been driven out of their homeland, but which looked forward to the time when they would “reclaim (or create anew) the ‘homeland’ in Burundi.”55 Nationalism was a language of politics for those in power too. In some contexts, targeting internal “others” by questioning their right to belong to a national community served as a way of building support and reinforcing fragile coalitions. The experience of the Kenyan Nubian community as, in Samantha Balaton-Chrimes’s terms, “ethnic strangers,” marginalized within the political community of postcolonial Kenya, serves as one powerful example of this.56 At other times, nationalism was invoked by political leaders 52

53 55

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Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum Series, 2010), 365. Ibid., 157–158. 54 Ibid., 30. Lisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, “The Nubians of Kenya: Citizenship in the Gaps and Margins,” in Emma Hunter (ed.), Citizenship, Belonging and Political Community in

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to unite their populations against external others as, for example, when Tanzania went to war with Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1978.

Nations in the 1990s and Beyond The 1960s moment which marked the birth of so many new states in Africa was, as we have seen, defined by a conception of nationhood that was closely tied to wider understandings of modernization. But by the 1980s, it was increasingly clear that subnational identities would not simply fade away or be forced out through assertive nation-building. If anything, they seemed to be becoming more important. The period also saw the resurgence of religion as a form of identity and as a language of politics, challenging earlier assumptions of the 1960s and 1970s about the inevitability of secularization. Political liberalization and the return of multiparty politics to much of Africa after 1989 created a space for the reemergence of autochthony discourses and of sharp lines being drawn over who did and did not belong. In this context, political theorists turned to thinking about how identities other than the national could be incorporated into democratic polities through concepts of “multicultural citizenship” or the “politics of recognition.”57 But the period also saw the resurgence of arguments which identified some as external to the national political community. In some cases, ruling parties used exclusionary nationalisms to create and maintain support. For others, a language of nationalism could be used to drive secessionist politics. At the same time, the period saw new conceptions of nationhood being forged from above, below, and between states. To see these processes in action in the post-Cold War world, we might first turn to the example of Côte d’Ivoire. Until the death of its founding president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, in 1993, Côte d’Ivoire was celebrated internationally as an example of successful nation-building in postcolonial West Africa. Yet after Houphouët-Boigny’s death, his successors turned to an exclusionary nationalism which defined national membership in terms of “Ivoirité” and excluded others from membership in the national community.58

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Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016), 149–178. John M. Lonsdale, “Have Tropical Africa’s Nationalisms Continued Imperialism’s World Revolution by Other Means?,” Nations and Nationalism, 21/4 (2015), 622. Ruth Marshall-Fratani, “The War of ‘Who Is Who’: Autochthony, Nationalism and Citizenship in the Ivoirian Crisis,” African Studies Review, 49/2 (2006), 9–43.

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In Tanzania we find another case often taken as an emblematic example of successful nation-building. And in contrast to Côte d’Ivoire, in Tanzania the party which took power at independence succeeded in navigating the return to multiparty politics and remaining in power after the return of multipartyism. But while attention has generally focused on the nation-building policies of the immediate aftermath of Tanzanian independence, in fact, as Cyrielle Maingraud-Martinaud has recently shown, apparent continuity hides a continual renegotiation of what constitutes Tanzanian nationalism and nationhood.59 By 2015 Tanzanian nationhood was, she argues, substantially more encompassing of subnational identities framed around religion and ethnicity than its 1960s and 1970s incarnation. The 2015 election campaign was emblematic of this shift, when speeches by candidates for election explicitly celebrated Tanzania’s diversity. This move in state ideology away from a conception of the nation focused on homogeneity to a vision of “unity in diversity” is evident in other countries in Africa too, Izabela Orlowska argues, notably in Ethiopia.60 In her study of celebrations to mark the Ethiopian millennium in 2007, Orlowska focuses on the ways in which the Ethiopian state used the occasion to develop and promote new idioms of identity. For example, in place of the queen of Sheba as mother of the nation, “Lucy, the hominid discovered in the 1970s in the Ethiopian Afar depression,” began to appear on billboards and on coins. Her power as a national symbol, Orlowska explains, derives from the way that her “legacy makes Ethiopia the symbolic cradle of mankind and defines all Ethiopians regardless of their ethnic identification as her descendants.”61 If the recent past has seen the rise of nationalisms within states, it has also seen the continued importance of national allegiances which transcend the geopolitical boundaries of the state. The case of Somalia is instructive in this regard. If Somalia was once seen as the most “natural” of Africa’s nations, benefiting as it did from a shared language and a shared religion, by the end of the twentieth century it was associated more readily with state collapse. Yet, as Peter Chonka has shown in his research on Somali-language publics, a powerful Somali national imaginary transcends 59

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Cyrielle Maingraud-Martinaud, “Dynamiques autoritaires en Tanzanie: Le régime au prisme des processus de regulation du pluralisme politique et culturel,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Bordeaux (2018). Izabela Orlowska, “Forging a Nation: The Ethiopian Millennium Celebration and the Multi-ethnic State,” Nations and Nationalism, 19/2 (2019), 298. Ibid., 303.

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geopolitical divides in the region, bringing together Somalis living within and outwith Somalia.62

Conclusion As the cases explored in this chapter make clear, nationhood and nationalism in sub-Saharan Africa must be approached historically and in a non-linear fashion if we are to understand their power in modern Africa. While this is true of nationhood and nationalism globally, it is perhaps particularly worth emphasizing in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, where nations have often been treated by scholars as though they were somehow more “artificial” than nations elsewhere, on the grounds of externally drawn borders and internal heterogeneity. The imaginative power of territorial nationhood shaped the era of anticolonialism and decolonization in Africa. And it did not go away after independence. Indeed, in many cases nationhood became increasingly important over time as a space of social identity and way of defining a place in the world, both for states and for individuals, alongside other forms of collective belonging which transcended territorial nation-states, such as panAfricanism or world religions. Nations matter precisely because nationhood and national identity have always been more fluid and contested than models drawn from the social sciences might suggest. They have been forged and reforged in the decades since independence and will surely continue to be so in the future.

Further Reading Askew, Kelly, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Brennan, James, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, OH; Ohio University Press, 2011). Dorman, Sara, Daniel Hammett, and Paul Nugent, Making Nations, Creating Strangers: States and Citizenship in Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Falola, Toyin, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001). Fuller, Harcourt, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 62

Peter Chonka, “News Media and Political Contestation in the Somali Territories: Defining the Parameters of a Transnational Digital Public,” Journal of Eastern African Studies, 13/1 (2019), 140–157.

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African Nationalisms Larmer, Miles, and Baz Lecocq, “Historicizing Nationalism in Africa,” Nations and Nationalism, 24/4 (2018), 893–917. Malkki, Lisa, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Moorman, Marissa, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008). van Beurden, Sarah, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015).

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14

Bringing Empires Back in: The Imperial Origins of Nations in Indochina tuong vu

Introduction The twentieth century witnessed the rise of nationalism associated with decolonization throughout Asia and Africa. Indochina inspired nationalist movements around the world as communist-led movements there scored major victories against French colonialism and American intervention. The phenomenon was complex not only because Indochinese nationalisms were entangled with communism, but also because of their apparently ancient roots. This chapter aims to explore the origins and nature of nationalisms in Indochina. It examines the processes that gave birth to national consciousness among the people in the Indochinese peninsula. Indochina, a modern name for this region born out of French imperial conquests, consisted of diverse communities of different religions, cultures, and histories. These communities had existed and interacted with each other for centuries prior to their contact with European powers. The chapter will begin with a discussion of the precolonial era during which processes of imperial expansion and contraction shaped the various communal identities among the people in question. The account must begin in ancient times in order to assess the widely popular belief about the ancient origins of Indochinese nationalisms. As it will show, this belief has some historical basis but relies predominantly on myths. For example, some communal identity did exist among inhabitants of the Red River delta as early as a millennium ago, but it was not defined ethnically, nor did it coincide much with modern Vietnam’s national territory until the early modern period. On the eve of the modern period, we find that the identity of elite Vietnamese was not national but imperial. This identity, which was rooted

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in loyalty to an imperial dynasty, was based on their pride in the history of Vietnamese imperial conquests and in their belonging in the Sinic (Chinese) civilization. Throughout the centuries prior, Vietnamese, as well as Khmer, Tai, and other inhabitants on the southern frontier of the Chinese Empire who had all once been imperial subjects, actively took part in the process by creating their own empires and subjecting weaker groups under their rule. By the early nineteenth century, the Vietnamese Empire had come to dominate most of the Indochinese peninsula, and (together with Siam and Burma) supersede the Angkor Empire of the Khmers, which was the dominant empire in the twelfth century. The vigorous imperial identity of Vietnamese elites at that point explains the difficulties they encountered under French colonial rule in contrast to Laotian and Cambodian elites. The latter by this time had developed ethnic identities connected to their Buddhist beliefs. During the colonial period, the same processes of imperial expansion and contraction were repeated and gave rise to new communal identities that both challenged and incorporated elements of earlier identities. One of the emerging identities was ethnic nationhood that eventually became associated with the three states – Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – on the peninsula today. Yet nationhood was neither the only nor always the dominant identity produced by these processes. Other identities, from Buddhist to communist, dominated in some contexts. Nationhood remains far from consolidated and continues to be challenged today in Indochina long after the demise of world communism. This chapter hopes to dispel the widespread myths about the ancient origins and modern destiny of Indochinese ethnic nationalisms. Scholarship influential during the Vietnam War (with a strong antiwar leaning) as well as propaganda from both communist and republican Vietnams have popularized the myth that Vietnamese had developed a shared, vigorous ethnic identity for millennia in response to China’s attempts to control them.1 In 1

Notable examples of antiwar works during and after the war were George McTurnan Kahin and John Wilson Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York: Dial Press, 1967); David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). Examples of popular works by American journalists who helped perpetuate the myths are Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972); Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983). As antiwar authors, their arguments were primarily intended to show that Vietnamese communists were not really communists; thus the USA had no reason to intervene. The ancient roots and power of Vietnamese nationalism as represented by North Vietnam would, they predicted, doom the American effort of

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contrast, modernists such as Benedict Anderson who stake their claim on the colonial origins of Indochinese nationalisms romanticize and wildly exaggerate the power of modern nationalism over other identities that also mattered to Indochinese, such as religion and communism.2 We argue that Indochinese ethnic nationalisms were not ancient phenomena, nor were they destined to triumph in the modern world. Our analysis highlights not only their imperial roots but also imperial possibilities under the guise of ethnic nationalism, even in the age of decolonization, as in the case of Vietnamese hegemony over Indochina. By expanding our perspective from ancient to modern time and from southern China to the entire Indochinese peninsula, we hope to escape the trap of methodological nationalism while transcending the stale debate between modernism and perennialism in the study of nationalism.

Formation and Evolution of Early Communal Identities The early history of the region is discovered through archeological and textual sources. Two thousand years ago the region included scattered communities who inhabited the numerous upland valleys and river deltas. Although it is not known with much accuracy, the primary forms of political communities appeared to be tribal or primitive states that occupied small territories and had simple social structures. Among the earliest polities that left records and were located in today’s Indochina were Ou-Luo (Vietnamese, henceforth V: Âu Lac; northern Vietnam), Linyi (V: Lâm  ´p; central Vietnam), and Funan (V: Phù˙Nam; southern Vietnam and Cambodia). This section will be divided into four parts: the Red River and Ma river deltas; the coastal region; the upper Mekong region; and the lower-middle Mekong region. Each of these geographical regions was home to major premodern communities and polities on the modern Indochinese peninsula.

The Red and Ma River Deltas and Origins of the Yue The Red River and Ma River deltas are located in northern Vietnam today. The area is believed to be the cradle of “Vietnamese” civilization and is where

2

protecting a non-communist South Vietnam from the start. See Tuong Vu, “Vietnamese Political Studies and Debates on Vietnamese Nationalism,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 2/2 (August 2007), 175–230. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991).

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one of the first “Vietnamese” polities, the Luo (V: Lac), existed, as recorded in ˙ region are believed to Chinese sources. The people who first inhabited this have spoken a language in the Mon-Khmer family, which was likely distinct from languages spoken outside these two deltas. As the Qin Empire emerged in 221 B C E and expanded its rule from northern to southern China, a man likely from Ou (V: Âu) in Guangxi, who had apparently fled the Qin invasion from the north, defeated a local ruler in the Red River delta.3 The title of the new ruler was recorded as King An Duong and his kingdom as Ou-Luo. When the Qin Empire collapsed in 206 B C E, a Qin official named Zhao Tuo (V: Triê u Đà) seized the opportunity to proclaim his kingdom, Nan Yue (V: ˙ Nam Viê t), based in today’s Guangdong and Guangxi.4 Two years later, ˙ Zhao took control of Ou-Luo after a brief war. Nan Yue lasted for nearly 100 years before being conquered by northern troops under Emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty. The Red River delta and some adjacent areas thus became provinces of the Han Empire, divided into three commanderies – Jiaozhi, Jiuchen, and Rinan. Yue (Viê t) had been the name used since the Warring State period (403– ˙ 221 B C E) to refer to various groups living southeast of the Yangzi River. It was also the name of an older kingdom based in modern Zhejiang that would be absorbed into other kingdoms during that period. The first centuries C E saw significant migration from north of the Yangzi into the Yue realm as a result of massive wars in the north. As those migrants moved south, many resettled in the Red River delta. They mingled and intermarried with local inhabitants to form a creole group that would think of themselves or be labeled by northerners as “Viê t” or “Yue.”5 The Yue world thus spread from the ˙ Yangzi River all the way to the Red River thanks to Qin Shihuang, Zhao Tuo, and Han Wudi’s imperial ambitions. From language to culture and society, the inhabitants in the Red and Ma river deltas were part of the diverse southern frontier of the Qin and Han empires; this frontier encompassed the entire region south of the Yangzi River and included numerous other groups besides the “Yue.” The subtropical climate and wet-rice economy of the frontier deltas were distinct from those north of the Yangzi, reinforcing the cultural differences. 3

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Chun-shu Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, vol. I (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 45–64; Keith Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 14–16. ˘ Hóa Lê Tá̆ c, An Nam Chí Lư ơ ̣c (Huê ́ : Nhà Xuâ ́ t Bả n Thuâ ̣n Hóa and Trung Tâm Van Ngôn Ngư ̃ Đông Tây, 2002), 220–224. Erica Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B C E – 50 C E (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Located farthest from the imperial center in the north, the Red and Ma river deltas gradually broke away from northern imperial rule out of not just desire for autonomy but also the urgent need to defend themselves against other frontier groups during times when the imperial center collapsed.6 By the tenth century the delta had become an autonomous region, having its own king who called his realm “Great Viet” (Da Yue or Đai Viê t).7 Given its ˙ ˙ was leaders’ creole background, Great Viet’s political autonomy not accompanied by any distinctive ethnic identity as assumed in modern nationalist scholarship. Their identity appeared to draw from sentiments associated with a particular local environment where they had lived for generations. Until the eighteenth century, “Vietnamese” official history still considered Zhao Tuo the first king who established their realm, and considered Guangdong and Guangxi a part of their ancestors’ homeland. The fact that Zhao came from north of the Yangzi River (outside the Yue realm and someone who would be called a “Han Chinese” today) was not a concern. Despite modern claims that Vietnamese had been “Vietnamese” prior to their contact with “Chinese,” the “Chinese” were referred to in historical sources as “northerners” but not “Chinese.” “China” was called the “northern country.” A vast realm associated with ancestors (many of whom were “Chinese”), not circumscribed territory associated with (imagined) ethnicity as in modern times, appeared a salient and perhaps central aspect of the Viet elites’ identity at the time. Culturally this vast realm would be absorbed into the domain of the Sinic civilization to which the Vietnamese were proud to belong.

The Coastal Region The coastal region of Indochina is a narrow strip of land along the eastern coast of the peninsula. This region is hemmed in by the Annamese cordillera on the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east. To its immediate north is the Ma River delta and then that of the Red River. To its south is the lower Mekong River delta. Inhabitants of this region are believed to have been Mon-Khmer and are related to groups such as the Jarai and Rhadé who lived in the uplands along the cordillera.8 Beyond the cordillera is the area that lies 6 7

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Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 59. By this time, Đai Viê t elites must have developed a spoken language that mixed ˙ ˙ Mon-Khmer languages (esp. Mu ong) and languages from elements of indigenous ̛ ̛̀ other Yue groups as well as migrants from the north. Their written language was the language used in the Tang court in Chang’an. Their languages were likely distinct from those spoken by inhabitants of the Red and Ma river deltas discussed above.

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in today’s Laos. The ocean connects this coastal region to Japan and China to the north, the Malay world in the far south, and the Indian continent to its west. The records about this region are very limited. “Linyi” was founded thanks in part to the expansion of the ancient Chinese Empire.9 As the empire extended its rule down to this region, increasing levels of both trade and local resistance were recorded. The son of a local official in the southernmost district of the empire assassinated an imperial magistrate in 192 C E and founded Linyi. Han sources recorded Linyi as responsible for many raids on the Rinan commandery, which was the southernmost part of imperial territory (north-central Vietnam today). In 446 C E, imperial forces based in Jiaozhi raided Linyi’s capital in revenge for the latter’s raids. In the centuries that followed, Linyi maintained a tributary relationship with the dynasties that ruled China. During the eras of the Six Dynasties, Sui, and Tang (from the sixth to the tenth century), Linyi sent more missions to the northern court than did other polities in southern China. Linyi gradually adopted Indic culture after the fourth century. It was conquered and ruled briefly by Sui forces in the early seventh century, and a century later emerged in Chinese sources as “Huanwang,” the territory of which apparently extended north to the Ma River delta and covered nearly the entire coastal region. Like Linyi, Huanwang and its successor in the tenth century, “Zhancheng” (V: Chiêm Thành), appeared to be confederations of smaller polities with shifting alliances and centers of power.10 These polities were based on river mouths, had links to inland agricultural communities, and thrived on overland and overseas trade. It is unclear what concept of identity Zhancheng’s rulers and people had because few records are left. As people influenced by Indic culture, it is likely that the inhabitants of Zhancheng were similar to the Khmers (discussed below) in terms of their worldview. Zhancheng would pose a serious threat to Đai Viê t when the latter ˙ ˙ emerged autonomously from northern rule. The history between the two would be marked by much warfare. Zhancheng also engaged in war with the Khmer Empire (see below) and was for some time conquered by the latter. 9

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Momoki Shiro, “‘Mandala Champa’ Seen from Chinese Sources,” in Tran Ky Phuong and Bruce Lockhart (eds.), The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art (Singapore: NUS Press, 2011), 120–137. William Southworth, “River Settlement and Coastal Trade: Towards a Specific Model of Early State Development in Champa,” in Phuong and Lockhart, The Cham of Vietnam, 102–119.

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By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Zhancheng was powerful enough to sack Đai Viê t’s capital in the Red River delta and threaten its survival. Over ˙ ˙ the next centuries, Đai Viê t recovered and gradually pushed southward until ˙ Zhancheng was fully˙absorbed into the Viet realm by the eighteenth century.

The Lower Mekong Region This region spread along the Mekong River from central Cambodia to southern Vietnam today. It is a broad and open plain with access to the ocean through the Mekong River. The river also caused annual floods over much of the land downstream. Among the earliest polities was one, perhaps the largest, called “Funan” (V: Phù Nam) in Chinese sources, which existed between the third and sixth centuries C E and was located by the gulf of Siam near the Cambodian–Vietnamese border today.11 Like Linyi, Funan was inhabited by Mon-Khmer people, with their dialect distinct from other Mon-Khmer groups in Indochina. It thrived on trade, sent missions to Chinese courts, and adopted Indian religions and customs. The rise of Funan, just like in the coastal region above and the upper Mekong region discussed below, had to do with the expansion of trade under the Han dynasty.12 By the seventh century, the center of power in this region shifted further inland, up the Mekong River to the Tonle Sap River in central Cambodia today, with the Chen La (V: Chân Lap) kingdom the most powerful polity.13 ˙ Chen La would be superseded by Angkor, which Two centuries later, became the most powerful Hindu/Buddhist empire on mainland Southeast Asia by the twelfth century. Angkor’s rule was centered in western Cambodia and spread over much of today’s Laos, Thailand, and southern Vietnam.14 As Angkor declined in the thirteenth century, rival states such as Lan Xang, Lan Na, Sukhothai, and Ayutthaya emerged in its shadow. These Tai states had grown under Angkor’s civilizational influence but were now breaking away and threatening its survival. Modern Cambodian nationalist accounts use Angkor as the symbol of an ethnic “Khmer” identity. There exists no evidence that rulers and inhabitants of Angkor developed any unified communal identities, let alone an ethnic 11

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Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, The Khmers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), chs. 6–7; Charles Higham, The Civilization of Angkor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), ch. 3. Charles Keyes, The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 18. Higham, The Civilization of Angkor, ch. 4. 14 Ibid., chs. 5–8.

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one. Rulers established their rule by conquests and made claims to legitimacy by performing religious rituals that appealed to certain gods in Indic myths. Religion (first Hinduism and later Theravada Buddhism), not ethnicity, defined the worldview of contemporaries. In this respect, Angkor appeared not different from other Indic polities that existed in South and Southeast Asia at the time. Only by the early nineteenth century when the Vietnamese sought to colonize their kingdom (see below) did Khmers begin to develop anti-Vietnamese sentiments together with the breakout of two revolts against Vietnamese rule.15

The Upper-Middle Mekong River Region This region is located alongside the Thai–Lao–Cambodia border today. It comprises the river valleys along the middle section of the Mekong and its tributaries such as the Mun and Chi rivers. These valleys are connected to several plateaus in northern and southern Laos and northeastern Thailand today. Unlike the above regions, this region was inhabited by Tai people, who were distinct from Mons and Khmers, and who migrated here from further north from around the seventh century.16 The Tai people’s southward migration was partly attributed to the expansion of the Chinese Empire under the Tang.17 By the twelfth century, Angkor rulers had conquered this region. As Angkor declined, an imperial official founded the kingdom Lan Xang in the mid-fourteenth century located in today’s Luang Prabang.18 Culturally, Lan Xang was close to other Tai polities in the region, especially Lan Na (centered in today’s Chiang Mai in Thailand). Singhalese Buddhism was the court’s religion and the written language was a version of the Tai script. Lan Xang would dominate the region until the sixteenth century when it gradually disintegrated under repeated Burmese, Vietnamese, and Ayutthaya’s 15 16

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Mabbett and Chandler, The Khmers, 228–229. Constance Wilson, “Introduction: The Tai World,” in Constance Wilson (ed.), The Middle Mekong River Basis: Studies in Tai History and Culture (DeKalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 2009), 2, citing David Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 5–6. Georges Condominas, “Essay on the Evolution of Thai Political Systems,” trans. Maria Magannon and edited by Gehan Wijeyewardene, in Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai: Historical and Anthropological Aspects of Southeast Asian Social Spaces. Occasional paper of the Department of Anthropology (Canberra: Australian National University, 1990), 44–45. Martin Stuart-Fox, “Historiography, Power and Identity: History and Political Legitimation in Laos,” in Christopher Goscha and Søren Ivarsson (eds.), Contesting Visions of the Lao Past: Lao Historiography at the Crossroads (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003), 74–75.

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invasions. By the eighteenth century, Lan Xang had been split into three competing centers of royal power, Luang Phrabang, Vientiane, and Champassak. All three were beholden to Siamese and Vietnamese courts at various points. Modern Lao nationalist historiography would consider Lan Xang as the golden age of their nation, lament the division, and blame Siam primarily for the suffering of their country.19

On the Eve of Colonization After three centuries of civil war, the Nguyen dynasty was founded in 1802. For the first time in history, the territory under Vietnamese control now extended from the Red River delta in the north all the way to the southern tip of the Indochinese peninsula, approximating the size and shape of modern Vietnam. The vastly expanded territory greatly emboldened Nguyen rulers, especially the new dynasty founder, Emperor Gia Long, and his son and successor, Emperor Minh Mang. Gia Long picked Nam Viê t (or Nan Yue) to ˙ ˙ but the Qing Emperor proposed be the new name of the country, changing it to Viê t Nam (or Yue Nan) to avoid the memory of Zhao Tuo’s ancient ˙ kingdom that had challenged Han rule.20 Minh Mang, who ruled from 1820 to ˙ South).21 Both Gia Long 1840, would replace Viê t Nam with Đai Nam (Great ˙ ˙ and Minh Mang appeared to emphasize the “South” rather than the “Viê t” ˙ component ˙of their identity, signaling a subtle shift in their concept of Vietnam’s territorial realm. Despite the Qing Emperor’s concerns, Nguyen rulers appeared to have abandoned the ancient claim that the old Viet realm extended to Guangdong and Guangxi in southern China. This conceptual shift toward the south may have resulted from the fact that Gia Long and most of his entourage had spent their lives entirely outside the old Viet realm of earlier dynasties. On the one hand, they enthusiastically embraced northern (Chinese) culture and sought to import northern

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Grant Evans, “Different Paths: Lao Historiography in Historical Perspective,” in Goscha and Ivarsson (eds.), Contesting Visions of the Lao Past, 97–110; Mayoury Ngaosyvathn and Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn, Kith and Kin Politics: The Relationship between Laos and Thailand (Manila: Journal of Contemporary Asia Publishers, 1994). Kathleen Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). It is unclear why Minh Mang preferred Đai Nam; possibly he was even more ambitious ˙ by the Qing. Regardless of his motive, the than Gia Long and did not˙ like a name given name “Việt Nam” would not be used again until the early twentieth century – see below.

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(Chinese) institutions to serve their imperial ambitions.22 On the other hand, they were proud of their country’s new status relative to others around it, including the Qing Empire. Under Emperor Minh Mang, Đai Nam occupied ˙ colonizing ˙ much of today’s Cambodia and embarked on a serious project for two decades to impose Vietnamese rule and “civilization” over the Khmers. This project, which encountered Khmer revolts, was abandoned by Minh Mang’s successor, leaving the Khmers under the suzerainty of Siam.23 ˙In the early nineteenth century, the power of the Siamese Empire grew to match its Vietnamese rival. Siam occupied the western part of today’s Cambodia, and was the overlord of most Lao principalities, including the three largest, Luang Phrabang, Vientiane, and Champassak. As Siam sought to strengthen its control over these principalities in the 1820s, King Chao Anou, the ruler of Vientiane, led a war to challenge Siamese domination in 1826. The revolt was crushed with excessive brutality. Siamese forces leveled the entire city and forced the resettlement of a large number of Vientiane’s population to the Khorat plain northeast of today’s Bangkok. Modern Lao nationalist historiography would mythologize Chao Anou as a national hero who inherited the “glory” of Lan Xang and symbolized the Laotian independent spirit against Siamese domination.24 This section has tried to trace the evolution of major communities in the Indochinese peninsula from ancient times to the early modern era prior to French colonization. As we have seen, the history of these communities was shaped by the processes of imperial expansion and contraction involving different empires. The overland expansion of the Chinese Empire in the north brought some regions under direct imperial rule (the Red and Ma River deltas). The migration of northerners into these regions created a creole population, language, and identity as Yue or Viê t. ˙ The growth of both overland and ocean trade that accompanied imperial expansion encouraged the development of coastal communities (Linyi and Funan), and Mon-Khmer and Tai communities along the Mekong River and its tributaries. Trade brought cultural influence not only from China but also from India to this whole region. Indic religions from Hinduism to Buddhism gave local rulers tools and concepts to build their polities as religious communities. Religion formed the foundation for the identity of these

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Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Mabbett and Chandler, The Khmers, 227–232. 24 Evans, “Different Paths,” 103–106.

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people. More broadly, Indic civilization offered Khmer rulers the tools to build the Angkor Empire. Over time, as the Chinese Empire declined, broke up, or fell under nomad rule, the imperial center could not prevent its far-flung frontier lands from breaking away. The creole Yue or Viê t people who inhabited the Red River ˙ delta on the Chinese Empire’s southern frontier gained their autonomy by the tenth century, then pushed west and south relentlessly to colonize and annex many communities in the uplands and along the coastal region through the sixteenth to eighteenth century. The communal identity of the Vietnamese, who dominated the Indochinese peninsula at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was not national but imperial in character. This identity rested on the self-awareness and pride of Vietnamese culture, which drew from Chinese civilization. This confidence in their cultural superiority provided the justification for Viet rulers to conquer neighboring people deemed “barbarians” by Confucian standards. Vietnamese identity was also based on the belief in an ancestors’ realm that extended from southern China to the southern tip of the Indochinese peninsula. This belief was expressed by a historical narrative that dated from Zhao Tuo, if not earlier, and distinguished the “southern” polity from the “northern” empire. Imperial ambition and pride in conquests may have overshadowed any Vietnamese ethnic consciousness that remained vague and fluid. How elites and people of other parts of Indochina in the early modern period, including the Khmer kingdom and communities of Mon, Tai, Cham, and other groups along the Mekong River, perceived themselves is not known with much accuracy. It appears that these scattered communities remained religious, not ethnic. Religious belief bound the common people to particular rulers who could be replaced by their rivals if the latter were viewed as possessing greater religious merits. At the same time, as people in these polities struggled to survive under Vietnamese rule or under pressure from the neighboring Siamese and Burmese empires, the communal identities must have become sharper, at least among the elites. As Victor Lieberman argues for mainland Southeast Asia, imperial expansion by larger polities such as Đai Viê t, Siam (the successor to Ayutthaya), ˙ and Burma from the fourteenth ˙to the nineteenth century fostered greater interaction and integration among dispersed communities.25 As these empires expanded, cultural and communication links extended, together 25

Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 38–44.

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with wider literacy (in metropolitan languages) and denser market networks. Metropolitan elites’ greater demand for taxes and conformity yielded both accommodation and resistance. Certain cultural markers, from hairstyles and body tattoos to linguistic and religious practices, emerged that suggested the formation and consolidation of boundaries separating political communities. The new identity markers were neither national nor ethnic, pace Lieberman. They encompassed social hierarchy, were deeply intertwined with religious beliefs, and spread through mostly oral communication. They gradually gained significance over the period as the three major empires above expanded far enough across mainland Southeast Asia to come into direct conflict with each other. Greater salience was gained not only by identity markers associated with imperial capitals but also by those in communities such as Khmer, Tai, Lao, and Cham, which were large enough to resist full absorption into imperial identities. These markers would become both the foundations of new identities and the raw materials for ethnic and national mobilization when these forms of identity were imposed on most of Southeast Asia by European colonial powers. To conclude this section, various kinds of communal identities had existed in Indochina prior to French rule. For ordinary Indochinese, their identities were tied to a specific homeland, whether it was a village, a river valley, or an upland area. Many were loyal to their clans and worshiped the spirits of their ancestors. For Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus, their identities were also bound to their religious communities to varying degrees.

French Rule and the Rise of Modern Nationalisms in Indochina The hegemony of the Vietnamese, Burmese, and Siamese empires was cut short by British and French imperial ambitions from the middle of the nineteenth century. European traders and missionaries had been arriving in Vietnam since the civil war between the Trinh and Nguye˜̂ n houses in the ˙ sixteenth century. Vietnamese rulers were generally ambivalent about Europeans, calling them “barbarians” and suppressing Christianity in some periods. France began its conquest of Đai Nam in 1858, acquiring full control in 1884 by defeating Nguyen armies. ˙ Shortly after the French began their conquest of Đai Nam, the Khmer king ˙ accepted French protection in 1863. France gained control of Cambodia by invitation from its ruler – unlike in Vietnam, where wars were bitterly fought. After their successful conquest of Vietnam in 1884, the French turned 311

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to Siam and the Lao principalities as their next targets, with Laos intended more as a zone to protect northern Vietnam. Here, however, they encountered opposition from Britain, which had just established colonial rule in neighboring Burma. Following French–Siamese–British negotiation, Siam was kept independent as a buffer state and the middle Mekong River was accepted as the international border between northern Siam and northern Indochina.26 Lao communities that straddled the middle Mekong River were split: those on the right bank of the Mekong (most Lao people) became Siamese subjects, whereas those on the left became a French protectorate, later to be named the Lao Kingdom.27 Reflecting that complex process of acquiring different parts of Indochina by different methods with different goals, the newly born “French Indochina” was not under a single administration until years later, and even then, Tonkin (today’s northern Vietnam), Annam (central Vietnam), Cochinchina (southern Vietnam), Laos, and Cambodia had different laws and enjoyed different statuses within the French Empire. Among Indochinese, only Vietnamese resisted the imposition of French rule. As seen above, pride in their powerful empire was a central component of Vietnamese identity. Even when their emperors told them to submit, the Vietnamese literati refused to accept defeat and continued to fight. Revolts against French rule led by various groups broke out throughout the country and reached an apex with the “Aid the King” movement in 1885–1887. As the name of the movement indicates, the literati taking part in this movement were loyal to their king and wished to expel the French and restore the Vietnamese Empire. As a younger generation of Vietnamese literati came of age under colonial rule around the turn of the century, they initially were heavily influenced by Chinese and Japanese reformist thinking. This generation was still educated in the Chinese classics, which enabled them to read books by Chinese and Japanese reformers such as Liang Qichao. They quickly adopted social Darwinism – the idea that the world was divided into racial and national groups and only the fittest survived. This theory helped explain why their great countries were conquered and colonized. Like Japanese and Chinese reformers, Vietnamese intellectuals also rejected the Confucian worldview and literati traditions as outdated and as responsible for their country’s

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Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hemery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, trans. Ly-Lan Dill-Klein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 64–68. On the term “Lao,” see Grant Evans, “Introduction: What Is Lao Culture and Society?,” in Grant Evans (ed.), Laos: Culture and Society (Bangkok: Silkworms Books, 1999), 1–5.

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problems. They wanted to purge Sinocentric civilization, once a source of imperial Vietnam’s pride, from Vietnamese culture. Yet many among the first anticolonial activists, of whom Phan Bô i Châu ˙ (1867–1940) was the most famous, did not immediately embrace European civilization. Because their education was rooted in the Confucian classics, they had difficulties thinking beyond the traditional Sinocentric world comprising China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. They viewed their struggle as not just between Vietnam and France but also between Europeans and Asians. Impressed by Japan’s success in modernization and victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, they looked to it as a model and as a potential source of assistance for Vietnamese liberation. Phan led the “Eastern Travel” movement, sending many young men to Japan to study. He naively expected that Japan would help Vietnam because they belonged to the same race and used the same Chinese characters for written communication (đò ̂ ng v a˘ n, đò ̂ ng chủ ng). Phan would abandon this expectation only after the Japanese government acquiesced in the French request that Japan expel Vietnamese students. In contrast, Phan Châu Trinh (1872–1926) did not have much difficulty shedding the Sinocentric worldview. Rather than looking to Japan for inspiration and assistance, Phan called on Vietnamese to learn European ideas and adopt Europe’s institutions to liberate their country. He did not call for a violent struggle to overthrow French rule as the other Phan did, but accepted collaboration with French authorities to help Vietnamese socialize into the new civilization. By the 1930s, the Moscow-directed Comintern had trained a small number of Vietnamese communists, who were the most imaginative of all anticolonial activists by embracing communism as the new civilization. Communists dismissed national identity as “bourgeois” and “narrow,” and strove for a new kind of national and global community ruled by the working class. It was not just European civilization that Vietnamese communists aspired to as a model for their future country; it was a global Marxist utopia that they hoped to achieve. The new identity was both internationalist and nationalist: Vietnam was to become not only an independent nation but also a member in the community of fraternal communist states. As Vietnamese elites abandoned the Sinocentric civilization, their imagination of the homeland evolved in interesting ways. Under colonial rule, Vietnam was divided into three regions, with Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina roughly corresponding to the northern, central, and southern parts of the country. The three regions were under different administrative 313

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systems: Cochinchina was a full French colony, while Annam and Tonkin were protectorates (the latter two were under somewhat different systems at first but became similar by the early twentieth century). Cochinchina was ruled by French officials directly, whereas Tonkin and Annam were governed indirectly by the French. Both the Lao kingdom and the Cambodian kingdom were protectorates. All three Vietnamese regions, together with the Lao and Cambodian kingdoms, formed French Indochina and were placed under a single French governor-general by the turn of the century. Intense debates about the proper realm of their homeland territory took place among Vietnamese elites, including both anticolonial activists and colonial collaborators. Many, such as Phan Bô i Châu, Phan Châu Trinh, ˙ Nguye˜̂ n Thái Hoc, Pham Quỳ nh, and Trà ̂ n Trong Kim, were not confused ˙ ˙ ˙ by the complicated administrative schemes of the French colonial government – they still imagined “Viê t Nam” as a single realm composed of ˙ Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin and distinct from Laos and Cambodia. They did not readily accept the idea of Indochina as a real political and economic community. Interestingly, they resurrected “Viê t Nam,” the name ˙ once used under Emperor Gia Long but since dropped. Others supported “Indochina.” By the 1920s, as the various parts of French Indochina were better integrated politically, economically, and socially, the idea of Indochina gained some appeal among the Vietnamese elites. Leaders of the Constitutionalist Party in Cochinchina such as Bùi Quang Chiêu advocated in the 1920s for a fully integrated Indochinese Union.28 Indochinese, not Vietnamese or Annamese, was a viable and legitimate entity to them. Again, communists were at the forefront of embracing Indochina as a reality – in part to comply with the policy of their Comintern patrons. While some members of the earliest communist groups founded in the late 1920s retained their commitment to the old realm of the Vietnamese Empire, by the 1930s they had all adopted the vision of an Indochinese Communist Party to lead a revolution for an Indochinese Federation modeled after the Soviet Union. Together with new concepts of civilization and new imaginings of the territorial homeland, Vietnamese elites’ attitude toward the monarchy, a central institution that governed and symbolized the old empire, also shifted under colonial rule. Anticolonial activists at first fought to restore the Nguye˜̂ n monarch. After Phan Bô i Châu was betrayed by Japan in the ˙ 28

Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 120; Christopher Goscha, Going Indochinese: Contesting Concepts of Space and Place in French Indochina (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2012).

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early 1900s, he came to believe in the people, rather than in the Nguye˜̂ n dynasty, as the foundation on which his country rested. Popular sovereignty replaced the monarchy in his thought. This view was to be shared by many others in the anticolonial movement. Nguye˜̂ n Thái Hoc, the leader of the ˙ Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNP), which led a failed revolt in 1930, was influenced by the 1911 Revolution in China and Sun Yatsen’s thought. As its name indicates, the VNP fought for a republic under popular sovereignty. Again, the communists went furthest among all anticolonial activists. They did not simply reject the monarchy but regarded it as part of a “feudalistic” social structure that oppressed and exploited the peasant masses. They did not look to the people in general as the new basis of the nation. Rather, they believed in “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Popular sovereignty for the Vietnamese people as a whole was not sufficient for them. Colonial elites in Indochina were not the only actors who attempted to search for and create new communal identities. Colonial authorities were actively involved in the process, seeking to mold the emerging identities in ways that would serve the French Empire. They made different policies in different parts of Indochina, but were not always consistent in their policies, nor were they always able to achieve what they wanted. Some policies received wide support among the colonial elites. To some extent, the success of colonial policies resulted from the level of attention and resources the empire could devote to Indochina. Within the French Empire, metropolitan concerns and the needs of other colonies in Africa and Asia frequently competed for attention with those in Indochina. The French Empire also had to cope with threats from rival empires, especially the Japanese and the British, and neighboring states, including China and Siam/Thailand. The interaction of these forces and the interaction between colonial policies and ideas championed by the colonial elites shaped how national awareness evolved in different places and during different periods. Culturally, French administrators promoted loyalty to French Indochina but employed divergent strategies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In Vietnam, part of their strategy was to sever the century-old bond between Vietnam and China so that new Franco-Vietnamese ties could be grown in its place. French authorities thus suspended the Confucian examination system and promoted the use of vernacular Vietnamese instead of Chinese characters in official communication and in the new educational system.29 At the 29

Anderson also makes this point and other related points, but he neglects the role of Indochinese elites who also advocated the same policy. His view is essentially Eurocentric. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 124–132.

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same time, colonial rulers attempted to draw Vietnamese support by feeding into their traditional ambition to dominate Indochina. French GovernorGeneral Albert Sarraut, for example, called for Franco-Vietnamese collaboration to develop Indochina, while ignoring Cambodians and Laotians. As seen above, the French policy of promoting the vernacular language was fully endorsed even by many anticolonial elites who viewed Confucian culture as the root of Vietnamese national weakness. The Vietnamese response to Sarraut’s call was similarly not limited to Vietnamese collaborators. Yet it generated strong and negative reactions from Cambodian and Laotian elites – colonial authorities had inadvertently provoked nationalist sentiments directed against Vietnam among Cambodians and Laotians. In Laos, which was culturally close to Siam/Thailand, French authorities coped with the rising power of Siamese nationalism by helping Laotians imagine a continuous and autonomous history of their “nation” since the fourteenth century, with the Lan Xang kingdom representing the “golden age.” The collapse and subsequent breakup of Lan Xang was blamed on Siam, while French rule was described as liberating Laos from Siamese oppression.30 Many Laotians themselves were inspired by Siamese nationalism, as in the case of Sila Viravong, a Laotian writer who grew up partly in Siam and who wrote books about the Lao language.31 Although the Lao and Thai languages are closely related and mutually intelligible, colonial government sought to establish Lao as an independent language distinct from Thai.32 In Cambodia, as in Laos, French administrators and scholars actively “cultivated” a national culture and history.33 Angkor Wat, the huge temple complex in modern Siam Reap, was built under the Angkor Empire but was still regarded by Cambodians in the nineteenth century as a religious pilgrimage site connected to monarchs and religious deities. As the French discovered Angkor Wat, they made it into a symbol of greatness and continuity of the Khmer nation. Through colonial support for a range of programs and activities to promote learning and knowledge of the “Cambodian” past, from its archeological ruins to its palace dances, a new ethnonational consciousness began to emerge among the small Cambodian elites. 30

31

32 33

Søren Ivarsson, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860– 1945 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008), 111–120. Chalong Soontravanich, “Sila Viravong’s Phongsavadan Lao: A Reappraisal,” in Goscha and Ivarsson, Contesting Visions of the Lao Past, 111–128. Ivarsson, Creating Laos, 120–136. Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), ch. 1.

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Religion contributed in various ways to the formation of national consciousness among Indochinese. As seen above, Buddhism had for centuries provided the cultural foundation of identities for the inhabitants of mainland Southeast Asia. Both Siamese kings and French colonial rulers sought to use that foundation to bind subjects to their rule, and their rivalry helped create national awareness among their subjects in the process. As the Siamese king Mongkut led an effort to reform and purify Buddhism in the 1860s, French colonial authorities found it in their interest to patronize Khmer and Lao Buddhism. French authorities organized the Cambodian Sangha and established a school of Pali, a Buddhist Institute, and the Royal Library in Phnom Penh, and a teaching center for Buddhist monks in Vientiane. With these facilities it was hoped that Laotian and Cambodian monks would have no need to travel to Bangkok for training. French efforts achieved some results but did not prevent the spread of Buddhist reforms to Indochina. Prominent Cambodian monks took advantage of the new facilities provided by the French to spearhead a Buddhist reform movement that contributed to the spread of nationalism through the publication of books in the Khmer language.34 Three young men who taught or worked at the Buddhist Institute published in 1936 the influential newspaper Nagaravatta that sought to raise Khmer nationalist awareness. Son Ngoc Thanh, one of the staff of the Institute, would proclaim Cambodia independent in the wake of the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Besides Buddhism, many Indochinese groups influenced by millenarian beliefs existed and participated in activities deemed subversive by colonial authorities. In the 1880s, peasant revolts took place in Cambodia following the French administrative reforms that led to rising taxation. The revolts were motivated in part by millenarian religious beliefs in the imminent emergence of a righteous leader to prepare the way for the coming of the next Buddha.35 In southern Vietnam, Cao Đài and Hòa Hả o Buddhist sects emerged in the 1930s that attracted thousands of followers. Throughout Vietnam, Catholics increasingly viewed their church in national terms independent from the French missionary authority.36 34

35 36

Anne Hansen, “Khmer Identity and Theravada Buddhism,” in John Marston and Elizabeth Guthrie (eds.), History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004). Ibid., 46–49. Charles Keith, Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

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One major French policy, motivated in part by racist concepts and in part by practical needs, was to rely on the Vietnamese for the colonization of Laos and Cambodia. By the 1920s Vietnamese came to dominate the administration in both Laos and Cambodia, and Vietnamese professionals, workers, traders, and farmers were more numerous than the natives in Laotian and Cambodian cities and surrounding areas. As national consciousness was growing in Laos and Cambodia, this situation stirred deep concerns among Laotian and Cambodian elites who feared becoming minorities in their own countries. This fear aroused nationalist sentiments directed more against Vietnam than against France. Under Vichy rule (1940–1945), which launched a national renovation campaign in France, French Indochina witnessed a similar campaign to promote “national reawakenings” among Laos, Cambodians, and Vietnamese.37 The French did not want them to become independent countries. While development of ethnonational identities in each of the three Indochinese nations was encouraged, they were expected to submit to a future Indochinese supernationality for an Indochinese Federation under French rule. The ultimate goal was to defend and preserve the colony at a time when France itself was under German occupation. To support the campaign, colonial authorities opened more schools and increased investment in agricultural development and in the construction of infrastructure linking various parts of Indochina. They granted Laotians and Cambodians a much greater role in the administration of their countries. The authorities also sponsored the publication of newspapers, one of which was Lao Nhay, the first newspaper in the Lao language published in Laos. Hundreds of thousands of youths were mobilized through sports and other activities throughout Indochina.38 These youths adopted militant nationalist beliefs and were to play a critical role at the end of the war as the French sought to reassert control over the colony. This section has shown how national identities developed in Indochina among the elites of three major groups: Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians. Vietnamese struggled to shed their imperial identity under French rule; yet they were divided over Indochinese and Vietnamese as their new national identity. Laotians were influenced by Siamese 37

38

Anne Raffin, Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and Its Legacies, 1940 to 1970 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); Eric Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Raffin, Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and Its Legacies.

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nationalism, while Cambodians and Laotians both grew wary of Vietnamese domination. Recent scholarship has just begun to pay attention to the imperial origins of national identities in Indochina. Colonial policies played a critical role in the formation of ethnic national consciousness in Laos and Cambodia. Colonial policies had some influence on the Vietnamese, especially in regard to the spread of the elites’ nationalist ideas to the masses. For the Vietnamese, the acceptance among many anticolonial activists and collaborators of “Indochina” as a new multinational nation or federation carried traces of their imperial identity.

Postwar Evolution of National Identities On 9 March 1945, the Japanese army which had been occupying Indochina since 1941 suddenly disarmed French forces and took over the colonial government of Indochina. Japan soon allowed the declaration of independence by the monarchs of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. From then to 15 August 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Allies, indigenous governments with limited authority actually governed Indochina for the first time. They carried out many policies aimed at raising national awareness among their peoples, such as renaming streets after “national” heroes, destroying other symbols of French rule, liberating the presses from censorship, allowing the formation of political parties, and creating militias out of the youth groups that had earlier been mobilized by Vichy French in sports campaigns. The collapse of the Japanese Empire in August 1945 left a power vacuum in Indochina. In Vietnam, a communist-led front seized power on the back of popular riots in many towns. The communists led by Hò ̂ Chí Minh sought to mobilize national consciousness just as they waged a war against rival nationalists. This was just the beginning of the long and bloody polarization between communists and anticommunists, both of whom claimed the national mandate and denied their opponents any legitimacy. The polarization would result in the country being divided, with communists establishing power in North Vietnam while an anticommunist government was set up in South Vietnam by 1955. Both sides relied heavily on foreign support: the communists on the Soviet bloc and the anticommunists on the USA. In the late 1960s, the so-called “Vietnam War” was fought by large numbers of foreign troops. In the north, more than 100,000 Chinese troops, about 5,000 Soviet troops, and a few hundred North Korean fighters were tasked with maintaining roads, operating air-defense systems, and flying 319

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MiGs. About half a million American troops (at their peak), together with 10,000 South Korean soldiers and smaller numbers of Thai, Philippine, Australian, and New Zealand troops, were stationed in the south. The large number of American troops in South Vietnam, their central role and high visibility, and the bombing of North Vietnam generated a backlash and provoked strong nationalist sentiments among many Vietnamese in both regions directed against the USA and the anticommunist government of South Vietnam. In the competition for national loyalty, the communists were more skilled than their opponents in creating an appearance of independence from foreign powers, but they were in fact deeply loyal to the global communist camp and to communism as a global ideology.39 Their propaganda created a positive impression abroad about the power of Vietnamese nationalism, but they were as much internationalists as nationalists, being committed to the promotion of world revolution. Conventionally known as zealous nationalists, Vietnamese communists harbored regional hegemonic dreams – which were to a great extent their own imperial dreams of dominating China’s southern frontier, including the Indochinese peninsula and beyond. Vietnamese communists’ claim to be the vanguard of world revolution and their hegemonic ambitions contributed to their disputes with China and Cambodia and a war between the three communist brothers during 1978– 1989.40 It was not clear in late 1945 that Cambodia and Laos would experience a civil war as Vietnam would. In Cambodia, Son Ngoc Thanh, who had collaborated with Japan, became the first prime minister after the Japanese surrender. Lacking an army, he was soon deposed by returning French forces. By the early 1950s, Cambodia witnessed a similar polarization to that in Vietnam, but the groups were not the same and their relative strengths were also different. King Norodom Sihanouk and conservative monarchists were the most powerful bloc, confronting communists and republican nationalists. All three factions wanted Cambodia to be independent, but monarchists and republicans feared Vietnamese domination, while Cambodian communists were under the tutelage of Vietnamese communists 39

40

Tuong Vu, Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Anderson’s view that the conflict was caused by nationalistic sentiments seriously underestimates Vietnamese communists’ pride in themselves as the vanguard of world revolution as well as similar feelings on the Cambodian and Chinese sides. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1–2.

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and were pro-Vietnam. Some were from the ethnic Khmer community in southern Vietnam or were children of Khmer-Vietnamese parents. In the 1960s, however, a new generation of Cambodian communist leaders emerged who were as fiercely anti-Vietnamese as they were anti-imperialist, even though they relied on Vietnamese communists to defeat their enemies and take power in 1975. In Laos, a government was formed by Prince Phetsarath, a veteran nationalist, following the Japanese surrender. This government relocated to Thailand and organized a resistance when French forces returned in 1946. With support from Vietnamese communists, Lao communists also took up arms against the French. Following independence in 1954, Laos witnessed a three-way split among the elites analogous to that in Cambodia. Conservative monarchists shared power with “neutralists” (or republican nationalists), but neither faction was able to dominate the other. During the same period, communist forces gradually grew stronger thanks to direct assistance from their Vietnamese patron in Hanoi. As in Cambodia, the key difference between the communists and their opponents in Laos was the former’s solidarity with Vietnamese communists. All sides claimed to serve their nation: communists sought to mobilize national sentiments against American imperialism and its “lackeys,” while their opponents accused them of selling their country to the Vietnamese. But if a second generation of Cambodian communists grew hostile to their one-time Vietnamese patrons, Laotian communists remained close to their Vietnamese comrades throughout, long after they had taken power over the whole country in 1975.

Conclusion Under the influence of modern nationalist politics in Indochina and shaped by the politics of the Vietnam War in the West, the myths of Indochinese ethnic nationalism have pervaded extant scholarship. In popular and scholarly imagination, Indochinese nations, especially ethnic Vietnamese, have existed for millennia with distinct and powerful identities. These myths obscure the contentious processes by which modern Vietnamese and other national identities evolved. Yet, both those who imagine ancient roots of ethnic Vietnamese nationalism and those who assume its inevitable triumph in modern times fail to appreciate its imperial origins. We have attempted to show in this chapter the imperial origins of the identities held dear by people inhabiting Indochina since ancient times. The processes of imperial expansion and contraction have been instrumental in 321

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their identity formation. For example, the expansion of trade and empire during the Qin and Han dynasties was central to the formation or consolidation of state-level political communities in Indochina. The formation of an ancient Vietnamese identity resulted from the interactions between the natives of the Red and Ma River deltas and the force of empire from the north. Pride in Sinocentric/Confucian civilization was one of the key components of premodern Vietnamese identity. For centuries the Vietnamese imagined their ancestral lands being part of southern China. Modern Indochinese ethnic nationalisms were created by the same process of imperial expansion and contraction under the French. The process gave rise to not only ethnic nationalism but also other transnational or subnational identities such as Buddhism and communism. Vietnamese communists may have inherited their ancestors’ dream not only of building a powerful Vietnamese realm but also of dominating Indochina and beyond.

Further Reading Brindley, Erica, Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 B C E – 50 C E (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Edwards, Penny, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007) Goscha, Christopher, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016). Goscha, Christopher, and Søren Ivarsson (eds.), Contesting Visions of the Lao Past: Lao Historiography at the Crossroads (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003). Higham, Charles, The Civilization of Angkor (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). Ivarsson, Søren, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860– 1945 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008). Mabbett, Ian, and David Chandler, The Khmers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Taylor, Keith, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Vu, Tuong, “Vietnamese Political Studies and Debates on Vietnamese Nationalism,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2/2 (August 2007), 175–230. Wilson, Constance (ed.), The Middle Mekong River Basin: Studies in Tai History and Culture (DeKalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 2009).

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A quick glance across a set of world maps spanning the period from the 1500s to the present creates the impression that an early modern era dominated by empires gave way, by fits and starts over the course of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, to a modern global system composed of nation-states. Indeed, the prevalent view of nationhood and nationalism as quintessentially modern phenomena is, in part, premised on the typological and chronological contrast between empire (understood as a realm composed of various lands and peoples governed under a diversity of legal and institutional arrangements) and nation-state (understood as a more homogeneously governed polity whose legitimacy is derived from its claim to embody the will and interests of a particular people) and on the notion that the transition from the former to the latter was unidirectional and irreversible. And yet, the very phenomenon of overseas imperialism on a global scale, as distinct from territorially contiguous empire, was itself one of the defining aspects of the second half of the second millennium. Indeed, many of the chapters in Part I have shown how mutually intertwined the evolutions of imperialism and nationalism have been. Most obviously, it was a group of European nation-states that established the vast overseas colonial empires in the first place, beginning around 1500 and continuing deep into the twentieth century. The very development of national identities in a number of European states was intimately bound up with the course of their global expansion. By the same token, subjection to often brutal conquest and oppressive, exploitative, and/or humiliating rule by people from distant lands claiming cultural and/or racial superiority was a powerful spur to the development of anticolonial nationalism among the colonized. Imperialism and modern nationalism were thus mutually constitutive political formations that shaped and reshaped one another dialectically over a very long period of time. On the other hand, it would be myopically Eurocentric to regard nationalism outside the Euro-Atlantic sphere as

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nothing but an ideological import from, and reaction to, Europe. As many of the chapters across these volumes suggest, precolonial polities and social elites around the world had long sought to legitimize their authority through the propagation and manipulation of particularistic ethnocultural and religious identities, in ways variously suggestive of imperial or national conceptions of statehood. These precolonial legacies both shaped, or constrained, and served as material for, the articulation of latter-day responses to colonial subjugation, even as those responses were framed in the universalistic language of popular sovereignty and the self-determination principle. Well into the twentieth century, possession of an empire was widely viewed as the attribute of a fully successful, modern nation-state. As Sherzod Muminov points out in Chapter 9, Japanese strategists were driven to their overseas conquests by their conviction that becoming an imperial power itself was a sine qua non of Japan’s national self-realization. After all, talk of national self-determination in the aftermath of the First World War had gone hand in hand with the practice of British and French imperial expansion in the Middle East and Africa at the expense of the defeated Ottoman and German empires, all under the guise of League of Nations mandates. It was all the more galling to Japan’s militarists that their own establishment of a nominally independent puppet state in Manchuria in the 1930s should fail to gain a similar stamp of approval by the League. In the case of Indochina, as Tuong Vu argues in Chapter 14, the legacy of precolonial Vietnamese-dominated imperial states has shaped latter-day conceptions of national identity and colored nationalist responses to Western imperialism and interventionism. By the same token, the emergence of self-declared nation-states out of the rubble of empires does not mark an end point in the development of modern political identities. As Emma Hunter points out in the case of postcolonial Africa (Chapter 13), and as is the case globally, the question of who belongs to the nation and who should be excluded (or, conversely, has a right to secede from it) is continually being contested, redefined, and renegotiated. Given how much violence, conflict, and persecution have been associated with these issues, it is perhaps not surprising that some historians have come to look back rather favorably upon empire as a form of polity more adept at accommodating diversity – better equipped in some ways to deal with certain challenges of modernity – than the stereotypical nation-state. This is a position that is very hard to maintain in the case of overseas colonial empires, given the racism, institutionalized inequality between center and periphery, and patterns of structural exploitation that characterized these 324

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formations and stands in such stark and jarring contrast to the idealistic verbiage apologists for empire and/or advocates of imperial reform churned out (as documented, for instance, in Krishan Kumar’s discussion of British liberal imperialism in Chapter 5). Yet even here, scholars have sought to square the circle by questioning the inescapability of the fully sovereign nation-state as the only possible solution to the inegalitarianism of empires. As Eric Jennings reminds us in his study of the French Empire in Chapter 6, post-1945 discussions of reforming colonial empires into democratized federations have been the focus of much research in recent years, as historians have speculated about the potential viability and desirability of such paths that were not, in the end, taken. But it is in the study of what could be thought of as the more old-fashioned (because harking back to a pre-1500 model), territorially contiguous, multinational empires such as the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman states – discussed in this part of the volume by Bálint Varga (Chapter 4), Ronald Grigor Suny and Valerie Kivelson (Chapter 8), and Ebru Boyar (Chapter 2), respectively – that what might be termed the imperial-nostalgic turn in historiography has been most marked. This is in part a reflection of how horrifically cataclysmic the twentieth-century aftermaths of these three polities’ collapses have been. The nation-state may have been the immediate or eventual successor to empire in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but the often violently unstable history of nationalism across these regions over the course of the past century does not suggest that the idea or practice of the nation-state (or the nominally ethnofederal Soviet state) was a more successful response to the challenges of modernity than the imperial formations it replaced. Particularly in the cases of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, scholars have been revisiting reform efforts in the years before 1914, wondering not only whether there are some useful models to be found there for managing ethnocultural diversity in the age of democratizing politics, but also whether these states were not in fact on a path toward successful modernization – a path cut tragically short by the body blow of the First World War. A complementary theme has been the argument that nationalist secessionism tended to be a very late response to catastrophic crises born of total war; most nationalist movements prior to the final collapse of empires had sought autonomy and reform rather than the complete dissolution of imperial bonds. Once again, we are reminded not to assume that nationalism and empire can be understood simply as one another’s opposites. Yet there are also dangers in taking such lines of argument too far. Certainly, in the absence of global, total wars, empires – territorially 325

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contiguous and overseas colonial alike – might have lasted longer. But the governments of imperial powers such as the Habsburg Monarchy themselves played decisive roles in the outbreak of the First World War in the first place. Moreover, once at war with one another, rival empires actively incited and supported nationalist separatist movements among one another’s subject populations. There is something profoundly ahistorical about claiming that empires which disintegrated under the pressure of total war would have been viable in the long term in the absence of such conflict, given that periodic war between major powers was the norm in prenuclear world history. And while it is true that secessionist forms of nationalism tended to remain politically marginal until the paradigm-shifting moment of imperial collapse, it may be a mistake to infer that the outcome of a former empire divided up into multiple nation-states was highly contingent. After all, this very pattern – of political elites in territories on the imperial periphery initially demanding from the center a redistribution of power and resources within a reformed empire, before a final crisis culminates in their breaking away altogether – is one that repeats itself time and again across history, as many of the chapters in these volumes suggest. Variations on this theme can be seen in the lead-ups to the American Revolution, the Latin American wars of independence, the Habsburg Monarchy’s disintegration, and the decolonization of French-ruled portions of Africa. In each case, any fundamental democratization of relations between core and periphery, or between dominant and subject nationalities (as in the relationship between French citizens and the overwhelmingly larger number of non-Europeans in French-ruled Africa or between Magyars and minority groups in the Hungarian part of the AustroHungarian Empire) would have entailed subverting ethnocultural or colony–metropole hierarchies in ways that would have been unacceptable to those who had held dominion (or in whose name power had been exercised) in the past. In the absence of reforms that could reconcile modern conceptions of popular sovereignty, representative government, and/or selfdetermination with the persistence of imperial frameworks, the alternative became complete independence for formerly subject populations. To be sure, this solution only carried within it the seeds of new contradictions and conflicts, sometimes culminating in so-called ethnic cleansings (i.e. violent mass expulsions of minority populations) and/or outright genocides. The nationalist ideal of integrating everyone within a nation-state into a collectively sovereign whole greater than its parts did indeed carry a high risk of spiraling toward mass violence rather than inspiring efforts at the construction of a transethnic civic consciousness. Yet as they strove to 326

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centralize their rule and instill loyalty in their populations, some of the multinational empires themselves proved susceptible to this destructive form of political logic. If, as Ebru Boyar’s chapter argues, Turkish nationalism was not yet a defining force in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the First World War, that certainly did not prevent the ruling Committee of Union and Progress from carrying out the Armenian genocide in 1915. Roughly at the same time, the Russian Empire was deporting large numbers of Jews from the Pale of Settlement into the interior of the country out of the irrational conviction that their presence behind the front lines constituted a security risk of some sort. What these observations suggest is that, as we seek to escape the pitfalls of methodological nationalism, we must take care not to relapse into methodological nostalgia for empire. The history of the interplay between empire and nationhood over the past several centuries suggests an overarching theme of societies around the world gradually coming to confront the challenge posed by modern notions of human equality to the institutionalized hierarchies and formalized inequality on which most premodern societies were based. The global near-monopoly that the idea of popular sovereignty came to have as a legitimizing basis for the exercise of political authority did threaten the viability of imperial forms of rule and may have made the transition away from formal empire almost inevitable, even if it did take crises brought on by major global wars from the eighteenth century onward to precipitate the collapse of empires. From that point of view, the inference drawn from the survey of historical maps alluded to at the opening of this brief essay appears not to be quite so ill-founded after all. That said, it may be overly hasty to assume that empire is strictly a phenomenon of the past. After all, the nominally equal sovereignty of roughly 200 contemporary nation-states across the face of the earth is belied by the radically uneven distribution of power both among and within them. Formal empire may not be in vogue, but informal mechanisms of exercising hegemony remain very much in play. Moreover, a close look at any number of self-described nation-states will reveal patterns of regional and ethnocultural domination and subordination that are quite reminiscent of imperial relationships between cores and peripheries. In a world that is continually reinventing itself, it would be folly to assume that any one form of statehood constitutes history’s final word on the matter.

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part ii *

TRANSNATIONAL AND RELIGIOUS MISSIONS AND IDENTITIES

15

Liberalism and Nationalism: Trajectories of an Entangled Relationship j o¨ r n l e o n h a r d

Two of the most influential concepts of the long nineteenth century developed in a complex and entangled relationship that cannot be reduced to a mere dichotomy. At first sight, however, liberalism has often been interpreted “as both logically and morally incompatible with nationalism.”1 This incompatibility has been derived from the perspective of the early twentieth century when from the early 1920s onwards liberalism seemed to come under increasing pressure from both Bolshevism and fascism. Whether in its Italian version of fascism or in German National Socialism, European fascisms as the culmination of radical nationalism seemed to rely on the ultimate negation of those values and institutions which had been identified with the legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, such as personal liberty, free trade, or a constitutional order. Hence the search for the early origins of the apparently obvious dichotomy between liberalism and nationalism followed the logic of retrospective teleology. Yet this interpretation overlooks overlaps, amalgamations, and interrelations between liberalism and nationalism which are the topic of this chapter. In the course of the long nineteenth century, Germans, Italians, but also Poles and Hungarians, to name but a few prominent examples, regarded themselves as both liberal and national, and were also perceived as liberal nationalists or national liberals. The experience of the post-1918 crises of political legitimacy must not be taken as an explanation for the nineteenth century. The entangled history of liberalism and nationalism had become apparent already in the course of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic regime. The two decades after 1789 not only gave an enormous momentum to the idea and practice of personal liberty, constitutional order, and the overcoming of social structures defined by corporatist traditions, but were also marked by 1

John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 13.

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a new understanding of the revolutionary nation‘s sovereignty and by the rise of social movements which sought to establish independent nation-states. Thus, the 1790s marked a watershed in the history of the Irish national struggle, when the United Irishmen came to regard France as a model and expected support from there. In the words of Wolfe Tone, the leading Irish revolutionary figure of the 1790s, the ideal of nation-building through constitutions as experienced in North America after 1776 or in Poland in the early 1790s was more than obvious: “I have pursued the path chalked out by Washington in America and Kos´ciuszko in Poland. Like the latter I have failed to emancipate my country; and unlike both I have forfeited my life.”2 His words point to another important constellation that would characterize the entangled history of liberalism and nationalism, i.e. the combination of liberal institutions and the preparedness to wage wars in the name of national independence. In other words, the promise of popular participation in politics and the resort to violence were inseparable elements that bound together liberalism and nationalism.3 This background is also visible in the historical semantics of the concept “liberal” which at the same time illustrates the variants of liberalism and nationalism in different European contexts.4 For the meaning of liberalism in continental European societies, the confrontation with the French Revolution, the export of French institutions such as the Code Civil, but also the wars against Napoleonic occupation played a fundamental role, even as these conflicts had a huge impact on early national movements. It was continued French expansionism after 1800 that led to a direct confrontation with the French “idées libérales” – Bonaparte’s programmatic formulation of the results of 1789.5 In his Proclamation of the 18th Brumaire 1799, justifying his coup d’état, Bonaparte referred to a defensive strategy in order not only to safeguard the revolution’s legacy by ending political instability and social anarchy, but also to guarantee the nation’s sovereignty and its universal mission against all external and 2 3

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Quoted in Robert Kee, The Green Flag (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 144. Antony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 213–214. Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus. Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 127–257; Jörn Leonhard, “Formulating and Reformulating ‘Liberalism’: Germany in European Comparison,” in Michael Freeden, Javier Fernández-Sebastián, and Jörn Leonhard (eds.), In Search of European Liberalisms (Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 102–134. Jörn Leonhard, “1789 fait la ligne de démarcation: Von den napoleonischen idées libérales zum ideologischen Richtungsbegriff libéralisme in Frankreich bis 1850,” Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung, 11 (1999), 67–105.

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internal enemies.6 Napoleon’s understanding of the liberal agenda became part of his short-lived but influential imperial ideology which at the same time provoked national resistance movements, be it in Italy, Spain, or Germany. As the “héro des idées liberales” Napoleon had proclaimed himself to be both the only legitimate heir of 1789 and the only “garant” of the revolution’s positive achievements, as incarnated by the Code Civil and the idea of the nation’s sovereignty.7 By referring to these liberal ideas, Napoleon claimed to fulfill the revolution’s original and legitimate aims and thus legitimized his military campaigns. However, when Napoleon’s critics turned the liberal principles against his military despotism after 1810, the anti-Napoleonic opposition became much more integrated. Thus Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël insisted that it was they who represented the true values of the French nation against military dictatorship.8 When contemporaries referred to liberal ideas by 1815, this key concept had already been emancipated from its Napoleonic origin. Yet it did not have a universal meaning. Instead, particular national horizons were associated with the liberal agenda. British authors around 1815 identified the new concept of “liberal” with continental European conflicts and continued to use English party names that had originated in the seventeenth century. Liberalism and struggles for national independence stood in the same context. The enthusiasm for the Greek movement for national independence from apparent Turkish despotism found many supporters in England. The London Greek Committee organized a special loan to help the Greeks and many popular radical reformers like Jeremy Bentham appeared in the subscribers’ lists.9 Bentham contributed his “Constitutional Code” of 1822 to Greece “for the use of All Nations and all Governments professing Liberal Opinions,” which for him stood for universal suffrage, a representative political system, and freedom of speech.10 Edward Blaquiere, a leading 6

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“Proclamation du général en chef Bonaparte,” Le Diplomate, 16, quoted in P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française ou journal des assemblées nationales depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815, vol. X X X V I I I (Paris: 1838), 257. Mémoires de M. de Bourrienne, ministre d’état; sur Napoléon, le directoire, le consulat, l’empire et la restauration, vol. I I I (Paris, 1829), 28. Xavier Martin, “Libéral/illibéral: Sur l’emploi de ces mots dans les Travaux préparatoires du Code civil (1801–1804),” in Dictionnaire des usages socio-politiques (1770–1815), vol. I I: Notions-concepts (Paris: Klincksieck, 1987), 45–53. Fred Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 229–43. Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code, vol. I (1822), ed. Fred Rosen and J. H. Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 1.

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member of the London Greek movement and a close friend of Bentham, after a long journey in the Mediterranean countries developed the idea of promoting “a closer union and clearer understanding between the liberal thinkers throughout Europe.”11 The view on nation-building in Italy or Greece, imagined as a heroic fight against repressive empires, became an essential part of British politics and parliamentarian life even before the reforms of the late 1820s and early 1830s. The fate of Lord Byron was exemplary in this respect, showing a characteristic ambivalence between his aristocratic origin and his romantic enthusiasm for national independence and political freedom.12 But for many British contemporaries in the 1820s, identifying with national independence movements in the Mediterranean offered an opportunity to indicate one’s own progressive political opinions on British politics and the need for evolutionary reforms. This entanglement of liberal ideas and nation-building became the context which explains how the onceforeign concept “liberal” became a positive self-description of reformoriented Whigs and philosophic radicals. A particularly strong link between liberalism and nationalism developed in Italy and Germany. In both contexts the confrontation with the French Revolution’s progressive legacy and the experience of occupation by and wars against French armies were linked to each other and illuminated the ambivalent legacy of participation and violence. For Germany in particular, the period between 1789 and 1815 marked a fundamental watershed in the development of the country’s political landscape. The territorial reordering during Napoleon’s reign, confirmed by the Congress of Vienna, meant that neither the Holy Roman Empire with its anachronistic structures nor the temporal powers of the Catholic Church were restored after 1815. German liberals after 1815 thus confronted fewer, larger, and more secular states which, especially in the southern states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, because of their earlier membership in the Confederation of the Rhine, had been deeply influenced by the experience of the French administrative and legal system. No restoration took place here after 1815 that could go back behind the experience of the Code Civil. However, and in contrast to the patriotic hopes of many who had participated in the anti-Napoleonic 11

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Blaquiere in a letter to Dumont (November 1820), in The Iberian Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham: A Provisional Edition, vol. I, ed. Pedro Schwartz (London: Bentham Committee, 1979), 358. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, or Contemporary Portraits (1832), ed E. D. Mackerness (London: Macdonald and Evans, 1969), 115–116, 125; Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 195.

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wars, in 1815 Germany had become neither a united national nor a constitutional state.13 Instead, from September 1815 onwards it consisted of forty-one members forming the German Confederation, established by the sovereign princes and free cities of Germany and dominated by Austria’s Count Metternich. If hopes for a liberal constitution and the ideal of a German nation seemed inseparable for many returning from the so-called “wars of liberation” in 1815, Metternich and other representatives of state authorities sought to suppress national and liberal movements. From the Vienna government’s perspective, they meant a permanent threat to the multiethnic character of the Habsburg Empire as the case of Italy clearly demonstrated.14 The lack of a national state and of a political center with a national representation made it difficult for liberals in both Germany and Italy after 1815 to develop an organization going beyond regional frontiers.15 When the French liberal ideas became translated into “liberale Ideen” in Germany after 1815, they reflected the overall demand for both national unity and constitutional progress in Germany. A similar development took place in Italy.16 For politicians such as Metternich and the authorities of the newly established German Federation, liberal and national agendas were but two sides of the same revolutionary coin. When it became clear that there would be neither further constitutional concessions nor steps in favor of a unified nation-state in Germany or Italy, both liberalism and nationalism turned into opposition labels, thereby defining progressive and backward forces in society.17 The consequences of these developments in the early nineteenth century were particularly obvious in Germany. As a consequence of the different political traditions in the individual states of the German Confederation and the absence of a nation-state, liberals after 1815 were confronted with different challenges and developed different strategies, depending on individual 13 14

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Leonhard, “Ligne de démarcation,” 67–105. James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 403–404. Rudolf Muhs, “Deutscher und britischer Liberalismus im Vergleich: Trägerschichten, Zielvorstellungen und Rahmenbedingungen (ca. 1830–1870),” in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988), 227. Jörn Leonhard, “Italia liberale und Italia cattolica: Historisch-semantische Ursprünge eines ideologischen Antagonismus im frühen italienischen Risorgimento,” in Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 80 (2000), 495–542. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Geschichtliche Darstellung des Liberalismus alter und neuer Zeit. Ein historischer Versuch (Leipzig, 1823); Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Liberalismus – Antiliberalismus: Oder ein Wort über die Schrift des Herrn Professor Krug in Leipzig (Neustadt, 1824).

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contexts. In the south German states of Württemberg and Baden, surviving creations of Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, the French influence of natural-right philosophy and the tradition of the French legal system remained strong, whereas the north German variant showed a more organic and historical conception, influenced by the English example, which included some distinctively conservative elements.18 In the Rhineland and Saxony a distinctly bourgeois liberalism with an economic agenda emerged in which economic integration beyond the borders of individual German states gained importance. Despite this regionalized political culture which had a major influence on the work of the Frankfurt parliament in 1848/1849,19 one has to underline a broad uniting agenda of liberals in the 1830s and 1840s. They wanted to achieve constitutional government and some measure of constitutional representation in the particular states. Furthermore, German liberalism developed more and more as a national movement, though a loosely organized one, since a national orientation became an almost necessary element in any realistic liberal project for the future. From that point of view, the period after 1830, highlighted by the powerful impact of the French Revolution of July 1830 and the Hambach Festival in May 1832, marked a watershed in the long-term emergence of a set of liberal aims for transforming state and society. Those coming to Hambach in 1832 were proud to present their flags in black–red–gold, as symbols of liberty and the nation-state. But there were also delegations present from other stateless nations in Europe, for example Poles, Hungarians, and Italians, and the speeches were dominated not by ideas of national antagonism but by signs of international solidarity among all free nations. When revolution broke out in spring 1848, the interrelation between liberalism and nationalism reached a critical moment. In Central and Eastern Europe, as in large parts of Scandinavia and western Europe, nationalism retained a strong trace of emancipation and ideals of civic participation.20 At the same time liberals in Poland, in Italy, or in Hungary were confronted with an imminent conflict with imperial authorities, whether in St. Petersburg or Vienna. In these regions, as in Germany, the revolution failed to achieve its dual aim of constitutional governments and a national state. But in the long 18

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Peter Brandt, “Liberalismus,” in Lutz Niethammer (ed.), Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 143–165. Heinrich Best, Die Männer von Bildung und Besitz (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 247–269, 285–298. Mark Hewitson, “Conclusion,” in Timothy Baycroft and Mark Hewitson (eds.), What Is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 331–336.

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run, the revolutionary experience intensified politicization and nationalization of the political public, which in turn had a profound impact on the development of liberalism’s agenda. In Germany, the revolution brought about a heterogeneity of interests and competing strategies which led to a disintegration and fragmentation of opposition forces. Already in summer 1848 the split between moderate and constitutional liberalism and democratic radicalism was obvious, weakening the forces of the movement against potentially counterrevolutionary actions. Furthermore, the dual aim of achieving political liberty and national unity, of state- and nation-building under increasing time pressure and against the background of Austrian and Prussian moves to open counterrevolution, reduced the political freedom of action after September 1848. But it also meant an important political lesson for liberals: The gap between constitutional and national intentions, on the one hand, and the lack of executive power that would have made the Frankfurt Assembly more independent of cooperation with the single German state governments, on the other, demonstrated, at least in the eyes of many liberals, the widening gap between political ideals and a need to overcome mere opposition policy. This explains the career of the key concept of Realpolitik in the postrevolutionary decades.21 Many moderate and constitutional liberals did not regard themselves as revolutionaries. Rather they tried to contain a social movement, which had started on the streets in the spring of 1848, by legalizing and channeling it through a national parliament. In that way they acted like the “moderati” in the Italian Risorgimento, who in 1848 were prepared to fight for an Italian nation-state, freed from what was regarded as Austrian occupation in the north, but did not want a social republic. Hence the nation-state was a condition for many liberals’ evolutionary strategy. In Germany, their temporary freedom of action was based on revolutionary legitimacy in March 1848, but their political strategy rather pointed back to the pre-1848 experience. Many based their hopes on the reform-minded state as motor and guarantee of gradual changes that were needed to prevent explosions of social revolution like the June 1848 uprising in Paris. However, the key problem in state formation based on liberal ideals and parliamentary rule lay in the fact that the basis of Germany’s political culture was still largely regional. In many cases political divisions expressed regional ones.22 Thus the creation of a Prussian Assembly in Berlin actually increased the regional 21

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L. A. von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (Stuttgart, 1859). Best, Männer von Bildung und Besitz.

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differentiation by weakening the link between the Prussian Rhineland and the southern and western parts of Germany. The complexity of national unification thus also lay in the territorial segmentation of Germany’s political culture.23 Realpolitik and the aim to overcome mere opposition politics became ever more important in the context of Prussian political successes in the 1860s, based on military victories.24 For the interrelation between liberalism and nationalism the period after 1850 proved important, and different war experiences became the key. Although Germany is often cited as one of the most prominent examples for the ethnic model of nation-building, stressing the importance of the Kulturnation instead of the west European Staatsnation, the liberals’ focus on war experiences after the 1850s reveals important civic elements as well.25 Doubtless, the legacy of the anti-Napoleonic wars stood for ethnic connotations of a shared history and common sacrifices, but also for many liberals’ hopes to achieve a constitutional and unified nation-state after 1813/1815.26 After the disillusioning experiences during the revolution of 1848/1849 liberals looked to the Italian peninsula and the successful national war against Austria in 1859. These events intensified public debates about the changing character of war. “National war” became a key concept, which especially liberal writers referred to, stressing their hope for a unified and constitutional nation-state and combined with a radicalized image of the enemy.27 In a contemporaneous German definition of the early 1860s it was thus pointed out that in a national war, not only the military was to be regarded as the enemy, but the whole people, which had to be defeated in all circumstances. The concept of an international civil war of all the suppressed against their oppressors, as had still dominated in the enlightened paradigm of war in the later eighteenth century, was replaced by a war fought for the nation, and carried out by a nation in arms. In the words of contemporary German encyclopedias: “If war shall be fought with the full vigor of the nation, then it

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Wolfram Siemann, The German Revolution of 1848–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998). Hermann Baumgarten, Der deutsche Liberalismus: Eine Selbstkritik (Berlin, 1866). Jörn Leonhard, “Nation–States and Wars,” in Baycroft and Hewitson, What Is a Nation?, 242–243; Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 253–282. Karen Hagemann, “Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre”: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002). Jörn Leonhard, Bellizismus und Nation: Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, 1750–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008), 517–739.

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has to originate from the will of the nation.” Wars, it seemed, could only be “fought for great and just, national interests.”28 A particularly national imagination of war experiences was not restricted to German or continental liberals. As a result of Britain’s colonial small wars not only the political role of the army changed, but also its social composition, with decreasing numbers of officers recruited from the landed gentry and aristocracy. The army as a whole became more urban and, in contrast to the ideal of Scottish and Welsh soldiers, also more English.29 This also changed British liberals’ attitude toward the army and war. The traditional focus on the antagonism between Gladstonian liberalism, with its focus on home rule for Ireland, and the army as a symbol of the Union under English dominance, changed fundamentally after the 1850s. With the institutionalization of regular police forces, the army was freed from domestic functions of maintaining law and order. In combination with the heroic and Christian image of the military in colonial conflicts, the army became the very symbol of the British Empire and Britishness.30 Given the absence of large standing armies in Britain itself, the image of the “true Tommy” as the incarnation of national and Christian values became ever more popular and began to overshadow traditional antimilitarism.31 That process had started already during the wars against France before 1815 and was revived during the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny. The civic element of antimilitarism, derived from the conflicts of the seventeenth century and so important for the national self-image, became more and more overshadowed by the ethnic and racial connotations of the superior empire nation.32 In 1856, The Times remarked that “any hostility which may have existed in bygone days towards the army has long since passed away. The red coat of the soldier is honoured throughout the country.”33 28

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Albert Friedrich Berner, “Krieg, Kriegsrecht (Politisch und völkerrechtlich),” in Johann Caspar Bluntschli and Carl Brater (eds.), Deutsches Staatswörterbuch, vol. V I (Stuttgart: 1861), 105; Renatus Gotthelf Löbel, “Krieg,” in Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (eds.), Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste (Leipzig, 1886), 381. Hew Strachan, “‘Militär, Empire und Civil Society: Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Ute Frevert (ed.), Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 86; Gwyn Harries-Jenkins, The Army in Victorian Society (London Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); H. J. Hanham, “Religion and Nationality in the Mid-Victorian Army,” in M. R. D. Foot (ed.), War and Society: Historical Essays in Honour and Memory of J. R. Western, 1928–1971 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973), 159–181. Charles E. Callwell, Small Wars: A Tactical Textbook for Imperial Soldiers (London, 1896). Olive Anderson, “The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain,” English Historical Review, 84 (1971), 46–72. Quoted in C. J. Bartlett, Defence and Diplomacy: Britain and the Great Powers, 1815–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 126. The Times, 22 October 1856, 6.

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In contrast to Britain’s imperial perspective, the German wars of the 1860s stood in the context of a struggle for a unified nation-state. After 1848 the liberals’ move toward Realpolitik was far from inevitable. But when the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck promised to overcome the paralyzed situation of the German Confederation through war, the disillusioned hopes of many liberals for a German nation-state turned into praise for Realpolitik. While the war of 1866 was welcomed by many liberals as a step toward unification, it also catalyzed the split between National Liberals and Progressive Liberals following the victory of Sadowa. For some decades, historians have argued that the completion of nation-state building through war in 1871 became a major cause of German liberalism’s long-term decline. According to that interpretation it was a “weak” German liberalism that was unable to resist Bismarck and thus contributed to the authoritarian character of the Second Empire as an aggressive nation-state. Sacrificing freedom for unity, this also provided an apparently convincing paradigm to explain the specific vulnerability of the middle classes for the völkisch variant of nationalism from the 1880s on, and its extreme forms following the defeat in 1918. The retrospective focus on peculiarities of nineteenth-century German history, especially the apparent decline of German liberalism and the rise of extreme and exclusive nationalism, was used to explain the failure of the Weimar democracy. However, the picture is much more complex and ambivalent, and much research on the liberal achievements of German society before 1914 has led to a more critical evaluation of the Sonderweg paradigm, i.e. the idea of a deterministic, special German historical path leading to authoritarianism and ultimately to the Nazi dictatorship.34 Already in 1865, the National-Zeitung, the major Berlin liberal newspaper, argued that the party’s way had to be from national unity to freedom. It was not a simple sacrifice of freedom, but a different prioritization of political objects which distinguished the liberals of 1848 from those in 1866 and after who felt that it was necessary to compromise with Bismarck’s government in order to achieve the nation-state first and then reform it according to liberal principles. Thus, Realpolitik as the key term in the post-1848 period meant to accept that the embrace of ideals was senseless without the power to control the executive forces of government, bureaucracy, diplomacy, and the military. The National Liberals, who finally supported the Indemnity Bill with which Bismarck ended the constitutional crisis over the Prussian military 34

David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).

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reforms of the 1860s, did not act from a position of weakness. They regarded themselves, and indeed were regarded, as the strongest political force in favor of national unification. In close cooperation with Bismarck’s government until 1878, liberals participated in essentially illiberal state actions in their support of the new nation-state, first in the Kulturkampf against Catholicism and later in the antisocialist legislation. This conflict was paradigmatic for the position of liberals vis-à-vis their nation and nation-state. It had a European dimension in that it went far beyond conflicts arising from the states’ activity in education. Rather, the bitter antagonisms between state governments and the Catholic Church in countries with large Catholic populations reflected a new dichotomy between nationalism and internationalism in which liberals played a crucial role. In France, the republican governments expelled teaching congregations from the primary school sector in 1886, provoking the growth of private Catholic schools which did not receive any state funds but attracted many pupils. In Germany, the Kulturkampf (“Culture War”) between the government and the Catholic Church not only was about the church’s educational influence, but represented a bitter conflict over loyalty to the new nation-state of 1871. In the eyes of German liberals, not only did Catholicism stand for a Römisch (Roman) and hence universalistic set of ideas which was deemed unpatriotic, but they also pointed to the antagonistic ideologies between apparently enlightened, liberal tendencies, on the one hand, and reactionary, Catholic ones, on the other. Here the conflict between state and church only concealed deeper-rooted conflicts over identity patterns in a period of nation-state building. In Italy, the anticlerical left unsuccessfully tried to abolish the catechism in state schools. In Spain, the new school reform of 1902, which introduced state-paid teachers and supervision by local and regional boards, provoked strong resistance from the Catholic Church, Catholic politicians, and associations.35 In both Italy and Germany, those representatives of liberalism who had identified with nation-building became bitter enemies of the Catholic Church, and contributed to a transformation of nationalism. After 1861 in Italy and 1871 in Germany, liberals believed that they had to defend the newly created nation-state against apparent internal enemies. The result was a bitter confrontation between the new Italian state and Catholicism, an ideological confrontation made worse by the “Syllabus errorum” of Pope Pius IX, who in 1864 condemned all modern ideologies, including liberalism. In Germany, the 35

Jörn Leonhard, “The Rise of the Leviathan: The State in the Nineteenth Century,” in Stefan Berger (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe (1789–1914) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 146–147.

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alliance between Bismarck’s government and the National Liberals failed to achieve its aims: neither the Catholic Center Party nor the socialists were weakened. Instead they benefited from the confrontation in that it strengthened the supporters’ loyalty and intensified the distinct political and cultural identity of the Catholic and socialist milieu before 1914 and beyond 1918. In that way the entangled history of liberalism and nationalism had a profound impact on the long-term evolution of political cultures. With regard to internal state building, liberals succeeded in implementing many of those demands which corresponded to their political and constitutional principles. On the one hand, German liberals were credited with the creation of common institutions, such as the Supreme Court and the start of the work on a common civil codification, completed after 1900 with the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, the Civil Code. Furthermore, and continuing economic trends since the 1860s, Bismarck together with the liberals first supported free trade. In combination with the huge war reparations that France had to pay after 1870/1871 according to the Treaty of Frankfurt, this led to a short period of rapid and intensive economic growth after 1871 which was cut short by the beginning of a great economic depression in 1873. On the other hand, the expectation of further constitutional reforms, including the transformation from a constitutional to a parliamentary monarchy with a government based on a majority in parliament, though still part of the Progressive Liberals’ program rather than of the National Liberals’ agenda, was disappointed.36 The German Empire’s constitution had not put the army under the full control of the parliament, so that the budgetary control of the military remained a highly controversial topic between government and parliament. Given that this conflict had been at the core of Bismarck’s beginning as Prussian prime minister, it is clear that a compromise on that question was difficult to achieve. Before 1914, the military remained an extra-constitutional factor in Germany that fueled an aggressive nationalism. Since the army had not only an external but also an internal function, safeguarding public order and serving as a “school of the nation” through general conscription, the liberals’ failure to strengthen parliamentary control over it had far-reaching consequences for Germany’s political culture until 1914 and well beyond 1918.37 In the last third of the nineteenth century it became ever more difficult for liberals to present themselves as the only guarantee for the nation-state. In 36

37

Alastair P. Thompson, Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001).

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nearly all European societies they came under increasing pressure from competing parties from the left and the right. In Germany, liberals suffered, paradoxically and in contrast to the Catholic Center Party and the social democrats, from universal suffrage in federal elections. Despite the end of their direct political influence on the federal level after 1878, the National Liberals succeeded in dominating politics in many major German cities, where elections were based on a restricted franchise. The local sphere became a specific liberal stronghold, as was demonstrated by Rudolf von Bennigsen as mayor of Hanover and Johannes von Miquel as mayor of Frankfurt. What proved to be a weakening factor for liberals in the empire’s general elections – namely the regional fragmentation – became a particular strength for liberal politicians in local political markets. In that way local and regional peculiarities made it possible for the liberal parties to monopolize political power on this level and to modernize institutions, even after the National Liberals had ceased to act as Bismarck’s natural allies in Berlin. Restricted political participation created a freedom of political action for liberal modernization.38 Toward the end of the nineteenth century many contemporaries diagnosed a triumph of liberalism. In the United States the “Gilded Age” and the open frontier seemed to offer unrestricted possibilities for the future of individual liberty.39 And at first sight German liberals had achieved what they had been seeking since the early nineteenth century. The unified German nation-state of 1870, although excluding Austria, was regarded by most contemporaries not just as Bismarck’s creation but as a success of German liberalism. Progressive and National Liberals together had won an impressive majority of 52 percent of seats in the first general elections to the new Reichstag of 1872, which, given the democratic franchise, was a remarkable political success.40 The new nation-state provided a stable framework for further political and constitutional reforms, as the successful coalition between Bismarck and the National Liberals seemed to indicate. Germany’s economic strength together with the rise of bourgeois culture and 38

39

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Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt-am-Main, 1866–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Jörn Leonhard, “Progressive Politics and the Dilemma of Reform: German and American Liberalism in Comparison, 1880–1920,” in Maurizio Vaudagna (ed.), The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth Century Perspectives (Turin: Otto Editore, 2007), 115–132; Hans Vorländer, Hegemonialer Liberalismus: Politisches Denken und politische Kultur in den USA, 1776–1920 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997), 137–165. Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 135.

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the successful implementation of a state founded on the rule of law, as the completion of the Civil Code in 1900 illustrated, reflected a silent, yet very successful bourgeois revolution, indicating an impressive learning process since the days of the 1848 revolution.41 This triumph of liberal Realpolitik, to use Ludwig August von Rochau’s famous phrase from the 1850s,42 seemed to mark the essence of Germany’s modernity as both a successful industrial society and a strong nation-state. However, at the same time a deepening crisis of liberalism was under way. Election results for the German Reichstag between 1871 and 1912 show not only a long-term decline of support for all liberal parties, but particularly stable results for the Catholic Center Party and a most significant increase for the SPD (Social Democratic Party) from 3.2 percent in 1871 to 34.8 percent of the vote in 1912.43 It also demonstrated the failure of Bismarck’s attempts to marginalize the political parties of Catholicism and of the industrial workers. Whereas the parties behind national unification lost their momentum during the 1880s and 1890s, the Catholic and socialist milieus remained stable or expanded their political spheres of influence. This constellation explains why aggressive nationalism found an echo in liberalism’s agenda. The idea of a strong nation-state with an imperial mission could be used to underline the continuity of liberals’ achievements between 1848 and 1871 and beyond. It served as a rallying ground in a period of increasingly antagonistic forces in the political mass market. Before 1914, liberal intellectuals such as Max Weber and Friedrich Naumann argued in favor both of an externally strong nation-state, including the necessity to establish a colonial empire, and of social reforms at the same time.44 Progressive liberals and in particular the supporters of social liberalism around Naumann made use of nationalist and imperialist agendas to present themselves as a convincing political alternative, encompassing the dynamic forces of the new German nation-state. In fact, this choice of strategy revealed that German liberals, experiencing the limits of domestic power and the pressure from more successful political competitors on both the left 41

42 43

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Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History; Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 128–232. Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik. Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 108–153. Friedrich Naumann, “Der Niedergang des Liberalismus: Vortrag auf der 6. Vertretertagung des Nationalsozialen Vereins zu Frankfurt a.M. 1901,” in Naumann, Politische Schriften, vol. I V: Schriften zum Parteiwesen und zum Mitteleuropaproblem, ed. Thomas Nipperdey and Wolfgang Schieder (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964), 215–236.

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and the right, had to look for compensatory discourses in order to appear as a popular and progressive movement. But in stark contrast to the nationalism of German liberals between the mid-1860s and the early 1870s, which had been regarded as an essentially modernizing force, providing the framework for further political, constitutional, legal, and economic reforms after 1871, the liberal nationalism in the era of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik reflected a defensive position of liberalism, unable to compete with the nationalist agenda of the right.45 It was this constellation which ever more limited German liberals’ freedom of political action. In combination with the revolutionary connotations still associated with social democracy by many liberals, it postponed the development of a proactive concept of social liberalism, and it turned into a major obstacle when after 1917/1918 progressive liberals and social democrats were forced to cooperate in an effort to create a more stable basis for Germany’s first democratic republic. Before 1914, the relationship between liberalism and nationalism reflected the ambivalence of modernity on different levels: first, a progressive analytical framework, as Max Weber and Friedrich Naumann demonstrated, which concentrated on the complex relations between state and society; second, a restricted political influence in the federal state before 1914; third, a serious polarization between sociocultural milieus by which the liberals became “sandwiched” between the Catholic Center Party and the Social Democrats; and fourth, a tendency among many liberals of a younger generation to develop compensatory discourses, focusing on both imperialist and social reform agendas in order to demonstrate the German Empire’s ability to respond to the need for integration at home and increasing international competition. The latent crisis of liberalism and the need to reformulate the relationship between liberalism and the nation found a fascinating echo in the United States. That America needed a new balance between state and society was also a basic premise for Herbert Croly, spokesman of a group of progressive intellectuals, among them Walter Lippman and Walter Weyl, who in 1914 founded the weekly New Republic as an organ of progressive liberalism against agrarian radicalism.46 Croly identified a fundamental crisis which was about 45

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James J. Sheehan, “Deutscher Liberalismus im postliberalen Zeitalter, 1890–1914,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 4 (1978), 29–48; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Wandlungen der liberalen Idee im Zeitalter des Liberalismus,” in Karl Holl and Gunther List (eds.), Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975), 109–147; Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 216–222. Paul F. Bourke, “The Status of Politics: The New Republic, Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks,” Journal of American Studies, 8 (1974), 171–202; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 192.

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to challenge the American promise of individual liberty and economic wealth: During the past generation, the increased efficiency of organization in business and politics, the enormous growth of an irresponsible individual money power, the much more definite division of the American people into possibly antagonistic classes . . . [have driven] new wedges into American national cohesion . . . [These changes] . . . have brought out a serious and a glaring contradiction between the demands of a constructive democratic ideal and the machinery of methods and institutions which have been considered sufficient for its realization.47

Croly regarded the weakness of the American executive, in particular the presidency, as a major obstacle to liberal reform. For him, the American Constitution with its focus on decentralization, localism, and antistatism prevented the development of a truly democratic state, capable of fulfilling its moral and educational functions. Against the tradition of individual liberty and equality, Croly favored a political and social elite of experts and charismatic citizens. For him, average Americans needed “the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints.”48 It was no accident that President Theodore Roosevelt took up this argument and used it to coin the political motto of “New Nationalism.”49 In his attempt to achieve an improvement of the social situation of the masses, Croly was deeply influenced by his perception of Bismarckian Germany. The German chancellor, in his historical function of organizing the new nation-state of 1871, could not follow a policy of laissez-faire. His attempt to win the support of the industrial workers by state-led social insurance legislation alienated him from theories of strictly individualistic liberalism. The framework of an empire could not work according to the principles of a democracy with unrestricted market forces. Thus Bismarck’s role had been to translate a program “of responsible administrative activity into a comprehensive national policy.” Bismarck, in Croly’s eyes, had succeeded in bringing about “the all-round development of Germany as an independent national economic unit.” Prussia, the nucleus of the German Empire of 1871, with its advanced educational system, became a model of 47

48

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Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909), ed. A. M. Schlesinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 269–270; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 193. Croly, Promise, quoted in Hans J. Petersen, “Liberal” im Amerikanischen: Eine Studie zur historischen Semantik im gesellschaftlichen Kontext (Kassel: Gesamthochschul-Bibliothek, 1992), 55. Croly, Promise, 265–267, 286–288; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 195.

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a state in which skilled scientific experts and industrial efficiency went hand in hand. Croly was full of enthusiasm when commenting on the German model: “In every direction German activity was organized and was placed under skilled professional leadership, while at the same time each of these special lines of work was subordinated to its particular place in a comprehensive scheme of national economy.”50 When the First World War broke out in 1914, conditions under which liberals operated varied from country to country and laid open the different layers of liberalism and nationalism, from authoritarian, constitutional, and parliamentary monarchies to parliamentary republics in France and the United States.51 The weakest foundations were those of the Russian Duma, which after 1906 was unable to develop into a stable forum for liberal politics. Prorogued by the tsar in the event of conflict, the parliament and its liberal representatives were lacking political self-confidence. In 1915, they helped to form the Progressive Bloc opposition, but they eventually swallowed the tsarist clampdown in 1915–1916 and lost the confidence that the Duma would have required in 1917 to assert itself against competing movements. For tsarist Russia’s main problem, its multiethnic composition, liberals did not have a solution – which explained the success of the first Bolshevik decrees after October 1917 calling for national self-determination. In the Habsburg Monarchy, the crisis of constitutional liberalism had been obvious before 1914, and here again it was the insecure future of the multinational empire which paralyzed many liberals. With the parliament in Vienna adjourned soon after the outbreak of war, Hungarian Magyars opted for repression against other ethnic groups. The liberal ideal of constitutional integration of the multiethnic monarchy did not succeed in either part of the empire. In Germany, the tensions associated with nation-building since 1871 continued into the war years. As explained above, universal manhood suffrage in Reichstag elections tended to benefit the social democrats and the Catholic Center Party more than the liberal parties, even as electoral restrictions gave the latter the basis for considerable political success in many local areas. For many contemporaries, the liberals’ relationship to the Prussian three-tier suffrage was the measure of their credibility in the future constitutional framework of the German nation-state. In all these cases, liberals mostly acted as an opposition force with no direct responsibility for political decisions. In Italy, they came to power as part of 50 51

Croly, Promise, quoted in Petersen, Liberal, 58. Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 677–685.

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the destra storica, the historical right, under Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti. But here the stark contrast between a formal parliamentary monarchy and the reality of a deeply corrupt parliamentary system led to growing estrangement between parliament and the population of the country. Mounting criticism of the “liberal system,” represented by Giolitti as prime minister before 1914, also questioned the real animosity of national secular liberalism toward political Catholicism and socialism. In 1914–1915 liberalism was often identified with Giolitti’s strategy of neutrality in the war, and therefore with the negative attributes of cowardice, defeatism, and lack of patriotism. Here the traditional cohesion of liberalism and nationalism came to an end – which would allow Mussolini after 1918 to accuse liberalism of national betrayal and a mutilated victory, a vittoria mutilata. In France, the strong role of parliament and the weakness of the executive, reflected in the succession of fifty governments between 1871 and 1914, was seen as a problematic legacy of the revolution and of constitutional liberalism. The question of whether a republic organized along these lines could survive in wartime therefore gave rise to heated debate. In Britain, not only did much more highly organized parties exist before 1914, but liberalism was actually in government again from 1906 onward.52 Against this background, the First World War posed at least four new challenges to liberalism. The first of these came from tensions within national communities that had both to show themselves strong externally and to mobilize with determination internally. In practice, the quest for unrestricted loyalty meant that, as the principles of exclusion and inclusion asserted themselves in a climate of growing suspicion, the liberal paradigm of a plural society came under ever greater pressure to justify itself. Ideological mobilization under the influence of an ever more exclusive nationalism became a radical challenge to many liberal values in Europe. Liberals actively participated in the various kinds of wartime “social truce” but the main concern was to ensure the integration of forces on the left. German liberals were prepared to postpone their agenda of political reform until the end of the war and contributed to the evolution of a particular war nationalism. Many emphatically welcomed the “ideas of 1914” against the “ideas of 1789” and intensively engaged in debates on war aims. By 1915 the demands of Prussian National Liberals for an area of German settlement in 52

John A. Turner, “The Challenge to Liberalism: The Politics of the Home Fronts,” in Hew Strachan (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 163–167.

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Eastern Europe were beginning to overlap with those of the Pan-German League.53 Liberals in many countries took part in the cultural dimensions of the war, and early on some strongly antiliberal tendencies appeared in this context – for example, in the British philosopher Thomas Ernest Hulme or, on the German side, Max Scheler and Ferdinand Tönnies, each focusing on the organic community against the principles of the plural society. These antiliberal animosities were thoroughly transnational; they would grow considerably in the course of the war, again placing liberals on the defensive programmatically.54 Ideological polarization grew sharper in 1916 and especially 1917. On top of defensive operations against left and right at home, liberals now had to face ideological competition from abroad, in the shape of the utopias of democratic egalitarianism and Bolshevik internationalism. The persuasiveness of their ideas had to be measured against the new political, social, and international models represented by V. I. Lenin and Woodrow Wilson. In Petrograd, it was possible to see as in a laboratory how war and revolution were interlinked, and how traditional institutions such as dynasty, monarchy, and empire could be swept aside in short order. The existence of a practical countermodel to which people could appeal gave added drama to the fact that by 1917 the social truce was crumbling in the western belligerent countries. Above all, the reform orientation of socialist and social democratic parties in Europe seemed not only to fit the social and economic challenges as well as the de facto recognition of labor unions, but to be actually superior to the liberal models of order. All in all, the ideological hostility to liberalism grew considerably sharper from 1917 on. Writers invoking a decidedly non-political bourgeois way of life appealed before and after 1918 to a nationally charged concept of “liberality,” in order to demarcate themselves from the democratic-participatory connotations of liberalism. Many saw Thomas Mann as representative of this trend. In his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, written mainly in the last two years of the war, he emphasized a bourgeois, non-political understanding of “liberality”: if he was “liberal,” it was only in the sense of “liberality and not liberalism. For my thinking is unpolitical – national but unpolitical – like that of Germans of bourgeois culture and like the Romantics, who knew no other political demand than the lofty national one for Kaiser and 53 54

Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 288. Peter Hoeres, Krieg der Philosophen: Die deutsche und die britische Philosophie im Ersten Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 196, 439–440.

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Reich.”55 Max Weber, in his 1919 lecture on “Politics as a Vocation,” would historicize the traditional concepts of legitimate rule based on monarchs, dynasties, and empires; he now emphasized the masses and democracy as new factors shaping politics in nation-states. These reactions underlined that liberals, and not only in Germany, saw how the war had shattered their interpretive monopoly on the basic concepts of nation and citizenship.56

Further Reading Baycroft, Timothy, and Mark Hewitson (eds.), What Is a Nation? Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006). Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Brubaker, Rogers, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Freeden, Michael, Jörn Leonhard, and Javier Fernández Sebastián (eds.), Liberalism: A Comparative Conceptual History (Oxford: Berghahn, 2019). Langewiesche, Dieter, Liberalism in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Roshwald, Aviel, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Trentmann, Frank (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). von Hirschhausen, Ulrike, and Jörn Leonhard (eds.), Nationalismen in Europa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001). Woolf, Stuart (ed.), Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1996). Zimmer, Oliver, Nationalism in Europe, 1890–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

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Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in Thomas Mann, Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. X I I/1, ed. Hermann Kurzke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2009), 22–23. Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, 683–684.

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16

Marxism and the National Question enzo traverso

Marx’s thought on nationhood emerged from the cosmopolitan legacy of the “radical Enlightenment.” It took shape in the crucible of European nationalisms, the persistence of dynastic multinational empires, and the appearance of socialism as a new political actor.1 In 1848, the national question was deeply intermingled with the question of class. As a minority current of socialism, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism promoted a new form of political internationalism of which the most significant expression was the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. A constitutive tension quickly appeared between this cosmopolitan aspiration – well synthesized by The Communist Manifesto’s sentence: “the workers have no country”2 – and the growing tendency of the nascent socialist movements to inscribe themselves into national patterns made of inherited cultures, languages, traditions, and social practices. In spite of its proclaimed internationalism, socialism was unable to contest a process of the “nationalization of the masses” – the reshaping of collective imagination through nationalist ideas, symbols, and myths – the epilogue of which was the breakdown of the Second International in August 1914, when its parties voted almost everywhere in favor of war credits. At that moment, the national and international souls of socialism could no longer coexist and split into two radically opposed currents. After the Russian Revolution, this dissension led to the birth of the Third International.

Cosmopolitanism Like most political thinkers of their age, the founders of historical materialism frequently used words such as nation, fatherland, and people as synonyms. 1 2

See Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–2004) (hereafter CW), vol. V I, 502.

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But differently from Giuseppe Mazzini and Ernest Renan, who emphasized the spiritual dimension of modern nations (as the embodiment of collective will), Marx pointed out their economic and political content. As Eric Hobsbawm stressed, classical liberalism indicated three major criteria for recognizing the legitimacy of national movements: state past; national language, culture, and literature embodied by an intellectual elite; and finally, a proven capacity for expansion.3 Nation-states acted as vectors of “progress” and could assimilate ethnic minorities not equipped for political independence. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Romanticism merged with social Darwinism and soul with race: a primitive form of völkisch nationalism, i.e. ethnically and racially circumscribed, joined a vision of modern nations as the result of a process of natural selection. Departing from this widespread trend, Marx and Engels refused to consider nations as natural or homogeneous bodies shaped by providential destinies. They thought that instead of revealing the soul of a particular people or its ethnic and immutable character, nations were historical formations the future of which depended on the development of capitalism.4 As several scholars have emphasized, Marx and Engels did not produce any accomplished theory of nationhood and nationalism. Some of them, like Tom Nairn, saw this as Marxism’s greatest “failure.”5 Just as they were much more interested in class struggle than in a purely abstract definition of social classes, they analyzed the historical dynamic of national conflicts without explaining them through a normative concept of nation. More comprehensive – and sometimes dogmatic – Marxist theories of nationhood appeared later, at the turn of the twentieth century, in the writings of thinkers such as Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer, and Josef Stalin. Living at the time of imperial Europe, the triumph of colonialism, the national unification of Germany and Italy, and the rise of national movements in Ireland and Poland, Marx and Engels could not analyze nations as fixed bodies. In their view, capitalism forged, transformed, consolidated, and dissolved nations. Furthermore, they scrutinized this historical context as external observers: two German intellectuals exiled in the United Kingdom, thus escaping from strong national constraints. They thought beyond national borders, with a deep conviction that bourgeois cosmopolitanism was announcing the advent of a socialist 3

4 5

Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 37–39. Maxime Rodinson, “Le marxisme et la nation,” L’Homme et la Société, 7 (1968), 133. Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain: Crisis and New Nationalism (London: Verso, 1981), 329.

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order in which national antagonisms simply would disappear. In The German Ideology (1845–1846), they defined the development of capitalism as a process of the undoing of nations. Big industry, they wrote, “produced world history for the first time, insofar as it made all civilized nations and every individual member of them dependent for the satisfaction of their wants on the whole world, thus destroying the former natural exclusiveness of separate nations.”6 Differently from the ruling elites that still conserved particular interests, the laboring classes naturally tended to overcome any national economic or cultural boundaries. Capitalism, they added, “created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead.” In 1847, writing some preliminary notes to The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels put the question: “Will nations subsist under communism?” He answered that, once gathered in a single community, they inevitably would “merge with one another and thereby supersede themselves” (zu vermischen und dadurch sich aufzuheben).7 Nations were transitional categories moving toward their radical extinction.8 Socialism will be not only a classless and a stateless but also a nationless organization of human life. Like the state, nations too will be relegated “into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.”9 In other words, Marx and Engels viewed socialism as an accomplished and successful Tower of Babel. Myth and utopia merged in this vision of futurity. This depiction of an emancipated universal community unconsciously secularized through the categories of historical materialism the idea of messianic redemption: the advent of a realm of transparency in which language immediately reveals the message of God without requiring any translation. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), however, this idea was nuanced: now, what disappeared was no longer the nations as such but rather “the exploitation of one nation by another,” thus eliminating “the hostility of one nation to another.”10 According to the Ukrainian historian Roman Rosdolsky, the famous passage of this seminal text positing that the workers “have no country” referred to the bourgeois nation-state rather than to the nation as a cultural community.11 6 8

9 11

7 Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V, 73. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I, 103. See Georges Haupt, “Histoire du problème,” in Georges Haupt, Michael Löwy, and Claudie Weill (eds.), Les marxistes et la question nationale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 12. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X X V I, 272. 10 Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I , 503. Roman Rosdolsky, “Workers and Fatherland: A Note on a Passage in the Communist Manifesto,” Science and Society, 29/3 (1965), 336; see also Solomon F. Bloom, The World of Nations: A Study of the National Implications in the Work of Karl Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 160; Michael Löwy, “Marx and Engels: Cosmopolites,” Critique, 14 (1981), 11–12.

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In the eyes of Marx, capitalism was unifying the world by absorbing and destroying all premodern economic formations. Since its historical premise was a higher development of productive forces, socialism had to be intrinsically supranational. Thus, it would powerfully implement the assimilation of nations, which had already started under the capitalist mode of production. Many passages of The Communist Manifesto depict enthusiastically this form of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, embodied by a class that had played a “revolutionary role” in history. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products,” Marx and Engels wrote, “chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.”12 Against the romantic nostalgia for premodern forms of life cultivated by the aristocracy and its conservative thinkers, cosmopolitanism had become “a life and death question for all civilized nations.” Breaking the isolation of backward countries, capitalism created the economic “interdependence of nations.” And this was true in both material and intellectual production. “The intellectual creations of individual nations,” they wrote, “become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”13 Built on such cosmopolitan bases, socialism will be a universal community. Charged with an evident teleological flavor, this vision reformulated some ideas borrowed from both Kant and Hegel: cosmopolitanism and a Eurocentric philosophy of history. Behind the inexorable march of Hegel’s “absolute mind,” Marx saw the world expansion of capital. Capitalism “created a world after its own image,” and just as it placed the country in submission to the cities, it “made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”14 Whereas these assumptions were quite widespread amongst many thinkers of classical liberalism from the eighteenth century onwards, from Locke and Montesquieu to Adam Smith, Marx and Engels pushed them further to the point of flipping them upside down. In their view, Western rule was not the telos; it was rather a historical step in the dialectical process of universal emancipation.

“Peoples without History” A fundamental political criterion informed Engels’s theory of “peoples without history” (geschichtslose Völker), which he derived from the reactionary 12 14

Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I , 487. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I , 488.

13

Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I , 488.

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role that he attributed to most Slavic nations during the revolutions of 1848. “Peoples without history,” he wrote in 1849, were national groups that lacked “the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability.”15 Such peoples, he explained, “never had a history of their own” and were “forced to attain the first stage of civilization only by means of a foreign yoke.” In other words, they were not equipped to “achieve any kind of independence,” and therefore their vocation was to be assimilated by superior and more developed nations. Engels formulated his historical diagnosis as follows: There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples (Völkerruinen), the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standardbearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.16

Engels included in this category the Gaels of Scotland, who had supported the Stuart dynasty since the seventeenth century; the Bretons, who had defended the Old Regime during the French Revolution; the Basques, reactionary Catholics and partisans of Don Carlos in Spain; and finally, the Slavic nationalities of the Habsburg and tsarist empires, with the exception, of course, of Russia and Poland. The only cement of unity for the myriad peoples of the tsarist empire, he wrote, was the “Russian knout.”17 In 1866, in the crucible of the German and Italian unification wars, Engels explained that the existence of such “ruins of peoples” put into question the “principle of nationality.” He suggested replacing this old, debatable, and finally obsolete doctrine with a new – in his view more democratic – conception that conferred the right of self-determination exclusively to the great European nations. History had proved that it was nonsensical to consider the Romanians of Wallachia, “who never had a history, nor the energy required to have one,” as equal with the Italians, “who have a history of 2,000 years, and an unimpaired national vitality,” or the Welsh with the English.18 15 16 17

Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I I I , 367. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I I I , 234, italics in the original. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I I I , 235. 18 Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X X , 157.

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It should be noted that such a conception, in which Hegel’s Volksgeist joins an almost social Darwinist idea of natural selection, does not appear in Marx’s writings. In 1848, the director of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung distinguished between “revolutionary” and “counterrevolutionary” nations, according to a purely descriptive typology that did not pretend to evaluate their historical character, or to prejudge their future. At the same time, he never criticized the views of his friend, whose articles were published in the German newspaper that he led for two years. More than a doctrinal discrepancy, their writings reveal a difference of accents within a shared analysis of the 1848 revolutions. At that crucial moment, the Slavic nations – with the exception of Poland – had acted as outposts of reaction. Instead of investigating the social roots of their “Vendean” role, Engels ascribed to them a “counterrevolutionary essence.” According to Roman Rosdolsky, the key to understanding the revolutions of 1848 in Central and Eastern Europe was the deep entanglement of their social and national goals.19 In this multinational crucible, where different communities shared the same territory intermingled with each other, some nations like Poland and Hungary played a double role, at different moments, by being at the same time oppressing and oppressed, ruling and ruled nations. They struggled for independence from tsarist Russia and the Habsburg Empire but did not offer any improvement to other groups submitted to their social rule. Their national movements were led by landed aristocracies that exploited “peasant nationalities.” Ukrainians could not support the Polish claim for independence insofar as their own national identity arose from their class conflict with the Polish landowners. Slovaks, Serbs, Romanians, Croats, and other “peasant nations” of Southeastern Europe found themselves in similar positions with respect to the Magyars and the German-speaking Austrians. The necessary condition for bringing these backward nations into the revolutionary wave was agrarian reform, but none of the great European nations was ready to allow this. Such was the social root of reactionary “pan-Slavism” in 1848. Such socioeconomic and geopolitical factors were oddly absent from Engels’s analysis.

Colonialism Outside Europe, a national question almost did not exist for Marx and Engels. They probably shared Hegel’s vision of world history as a movement going 19

See Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the “Non-Historic” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986).

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from east to west, positing Europe as the end of history and Asia as its beginning.20 In his view, the distinction between prehistory and history was not only chronological but also geographical, insofar as it corresponded to the separation between Europe (civilization) and the extra-European world (barbarism): universal history meant the triumph of the West over a multitude of non-historical peoples. The founders of Marxism did not abandon this assumption but reformulated it within a dialectical vision of history of which the telos was socialism. Therefore, colonialism became a necessary step for integrating non-Western peoples into history, first as objects of imperial conquest and spoliation – the inevitable consequences of the establishment of a capitalist world market – and then as conscious actors within a universal socialist community. In spite of its violence, colonialism had broken the immobile and stagnating structures of the “Asiatic mode of production.” In India, British rule accomplished a double function: on the one hand, it destroyed the structures of an ancient, archaic civilization and, on the other hand, it established the foundations for modern economic and social development, notably by building railways and industrial plants. By provoking such a social upheaval, Marx wrote in 1853, the British acted in India as “an unconscious tool of history.” He deplored the violence and inhumanity of colonialism, but this was the price of progress, a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”21 A famous chapter of Capital (1867) depicted colonialism as “the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production”22 – a process of spoliation, uprooting, enslavement, and destruction that engendered unimaginable sufferings – but the horrors of the primitive accumulation of capital were an inherent part, in their very negativity, of the dialectic of historical progress. It is with similar criteria that Engels approved the annexation of California by the United States and the French conquest of Algeria: “an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization.”23 These assessments are more than enough to dissuade one from anachronistically including Marx and Engels among the forerunners of Third Worldism, alongside twentieth-century thinkers such as Frantz Fanon or C. L. R. James. As Kevin Anderson has convincingly proved, however, from the 1870s on, Marx and Engels reinforced their anticolonialism and 20

21 23

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980), 197; see also Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X I I , 222. 22 Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X X X V , 739. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I , 471.

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progressively abandoned the Eurocentrism of their early writings.24 Edward Said’s vision of Marx as a representative of orientalism along with Sacy and Renan is perfectly arguable since colonialism remained the epistemic horizon of his time.25 Nonetheless, it would be misleading to identify him with Benjamin Disraeli, Alexis de Tocqueville, or John Stuart Mill, the most enthusiastic apologists of colonialism. He never wrote that America before colonization was a continent waiting for its legitimate owners or that despotism was an appropriate mode of government in dealing with “barbarians.” In the 1860s, Marx enthusiastically envisaged a possible convergence between the emancipation of the slaves in the United States and the serfs in tsarist Russia, a junction that would have changed history and announced a revolutionary wave on a global scale.26 And coming back to Algeria, it is Engels himself who, in an article written in 1857 for the American Cyclopedia, denounced French colonialism that had transformed this “unhappy country” into an “arena of unceasing bloodshed, rapine, and violence.” During this war of conquest, he added, “all the horrors of lust and brutality” had been displayed. He concluded by paying homage to the resisters, “the Arab and Kabyle tribes, to whom independence is precious, and hatred of foreign domination a principle dearer than life itself.”27 These quotations show the ambiguity of a historicist approach that simultaneously justified and denounced colonialism; which depicted the victims of imperial rule as “peoples without history” and admired their resilience; which welcomed the submission of the “barbarian nations” to the forces of economic progress and stigmatized the horrors of their extermination. In a famous passage of his preface to Capital, Marx wrote that the most developed countries simply showed to the backward ones the image of their future.28 In his preface to the second Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto (1882), he foresaw the possibility of a direct transition from the obshchina – the Slavic rural community grounded on a collective property of land – to communism. In his correspondence with his Russian readers, he pointed out that the process of primitive accumulation he had depicted in Capital did not pretend to be a universal paradigm and warned against the mistake of transforming his “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in 24

25

26

27

Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 237, 244. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2014), 154–155; see also Gilbert Achcar, Marx, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 182–189. See Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso, 2011). Marx and Engels, CW, vol. V I I I , 67. 28 Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X X X V , 9.

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Western Europe into a historico-philosophic theory of the marche générale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself.”29 Engels abandoned this vision only in 1891, almost ten years after the death of Marx.

The Irish Question In spite of their prefiguration of socialism as a supranational (or nationless) world, Marx and Engels did not ignore the conflicts of their time. They welcomed the state unification of Italy and Germany and advocated for Irish and Polish independence. The crucial factor that pushed them to support the Irish national movement was exclusively political. In Engels’s view, the Irish aspiration to political independence was the result of a violent process of denationalization – economic spoliation and linguistic assimilation – that had been carried out by the British: “After the most savage suppression, after every attempt to exterminate them, the Irish, following a short respite, stood stronger than ever before . . . The more the Irish accepted the English language and forgot their own, the more Irish they became.”30 The living character of the Irish nation pointed out a subjective element: its political will. In analyzing the Irish question, Marx and Engels drew a crucial distinction between ruling and oppressed nations. In their eyes, colonialism meant much more than Irish exploitation, impoverishment, and cultural dispossession; it was also a source of political impotence for the English working class itself. Thus, the British rule of Ireland was the key to explain the alienation of both the colonizer and the colonized. In Marx’s words, “a nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free.” This meant a dialectical relationship between nationalism and internationalism, the trajectories of which were not necessarily conflictive. Being internationalist in England meant recognizing the right of Ireland to self-determination. In 1882, Engels argued that “there are two nations in Europe which do not only have the right but the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalists: the Irish and the Poles. They are internationalists of the best kind if they are very nationalistic.”31 A similar reconciliation of nationalism and internationalism was defended, a few years later, by James Connolly, the leader of Irish socialism.32 29 31 32

Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X X I V , 200. 30 Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X X I , 312. Marx and Engels, CW, vol. X L V I , 193. James Connolly, Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 1973).

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Both the Irish question and the Polish question dealt with European nations. Marx and Engels problematized, nuanced, and sometimes even criticized the idea of a European “civilizing mission” in the colonial world, without radically departing from it. They could feel compassion or admiration for the non-European colonized peoples but never considered them as historical and political subjects. This theoretical (and practical) change was accomplished by a further generation of Marxist thinkers.

Multinational Empires A systematic Marxist theory of nationhood came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Marxism became almost the official ideology of the Socialist International and a hegemonic current of thought for a new intellectual generation in Central and Eastern Europe. It is not astonishing that, as it extended its influence amongst the intelligentsia of multinational states like the tsarist and Habsburg empires, Marxist thought focused on the national question as a privileged topic. This engendered a large debate, of which the most ambitious work was undoubtedly Otto Bauer’s The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, published in Vienna in 1907. Its author was the principal representative of Austro-Marxism, one of the most significant expressions of the intellectual effervescence of the fin-de-siècle Austrian capital. Nourished by his neo-Kantian philosophical background, solid historical knowledge, and mastery of a rich body of empirical documentation, Bauer sought to fill a gaping lacuna in Marxist theory. He defined the nation as “the totality of human beings bound together through a community of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) into a community of character,”33 adding that “community” does not mean homogeneity. The pillar of this conception lies in a shared culture that acts within everyone as the living inheritance of a collective history (“history in us”). Focused on culture, nations transcended territories. Following the lead of fellow Austro-Marxist Karl Renner, Bauer suggested the idea of national-cultural autonomy, a right to be granted to all national components of the Habsburg Empire regardless of their members’ place of residence. Approved by the Austrian Social Democratic Party at its Brno congress in 1899, this program was intended to preserve and develop the “national individuality” of all Austrian peoples (one of its logical consequences was, twelve years later, the secession of the Czechs from its ranks). Once 33

Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 117.

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separated from a territorial basis, nations could survive and even flourish in a socialist world. “The fact that socialism will make the nation autonomous, will make its destiny a product of the nation’s conscious will,” Bauer wrote in his book, and it “will result in an increasing differentiation between the nations of the socialist society, a clearer expression of their specificities, a clearer distinction between their respective characters.”34 As a realm of freedom fulfilling all the creative potentialities of human beings, socialism would be the opposite of the capitalist standardization of ways of thinking and living; therefore, it would reinforce rather than repress the particular characteristics of national cultures. Bauer shared Marx’s view that socialism would develop a cosmopolitan tendency already established by capitalism through the building of a world market, but pointed out that cosmopolitanism and differentiation went together. Of course, the material content of culture – scientific discoveries, technological innovation, and scholarly productions – became more and more international, but its diffusion depended on specific modalities of “national apperception” (nationale Wahrnehmung).35 Once assimilated by different national communities, international culture would enrich and sharpen their diversity rather than overwhelm it. Using the Kantian category of “apperception,” Bauer defined socialism as a universal community made of national differences. Bauer’s book was the object of Karl Kautsky’s radical criticism. The guardian of Marxist orthodoxy did not contest the relevance of culture in the process of national building but stressed that an exclusive focus on it was not a fruitful materialistic approach. In his view, culture could not be separated from territory. Observing that a Viennese university professor had much more in common with an American colleague than with a Tyrolean peasant, Kautsky insisted that cultural characters should not be fetishized, that international tendencies inevitably prevailed over national impulsions and resistances, and finally, that the idea of national-cultural autonomy risked hindering the necessary territorial centralization of economy required by modern industry. Against Bauer’s vision of a growing differentiation, he defended the principle of a fusion of nations in a socialist future. Replacing the Kantian concept of “apperception” with a social Darwinist idea of natural selection, Kautsky foresaw the eclipse of linguistic pluralism. Like capitalism, nations were transitional formations and a socialist society would be both stateless and nationless. When their current spatial delimitation through 34

Ibid., 96.

35

Ibid., 105.

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juridical and political borders disappeared, nations would be extinguished. In his eyes, socialist cosmopolitanism meant a universal community beyond nations and languages. He conjectured the emergence of a universal language from a process of natural selection amongst existing national idioms. Sketched for the first time in 1887, he reaffirmed this idea in 1917 with the following words: “The assimilation and dissolution (Assimilierung und Auflösung) not only of some linguistic islands and ruins of nations but also of entire nationalities, will succeed much more quickly than now . . . The goal of socialist development is the assimilation rather than the differentiation of nationalities.”36 In this socialist eschatology, the right to national self-determination was progressively replaced by the principle of national self-negation.

Bolshevism Without endorsing Kautsky’s prefiguration of a universal language, Lenin shared his vision of cosmopolitanism as national assimilation. In the tsarist empire, Bauer’s theory of national-cultural autonomy had a strong impact on the intelligentsia of several diasporic minorities like the Jews and the Armenians, and Lenin had the delicate task of finding a balance between internationalism, the struggle against Great Russian nationalism, and the preservation of the unity of a pan-Russian party. Most Marxist Russian intellectuals, amongst whom there was a very significant Jewish component, had studied and lived in western Europe, where the capitals were centers of Russian political exile. Strongly opposed to tsarist obscurantism and backwardness, they were Westernizers: the defense of national culture appeared to most of them as both conservative and anachronistic. “The slogan of national culture,” Lenin wrote in 1913, “expresses only the limited bourgeois understanding of the national question.”37 In his view, a socialist approach consisted in favoring “the mingling of nations and the expression of the principles of a different, international culture.” On this basis, he endorsed the project of a socialist assimilation of nations that meant gradually erasing their differences. Under capitalism, the process of assimilation was carried out through violence and oppression, by establishing inequalities and privileges, but socialist assimilation excluded any form of discrimination. “Is there anything really left in the concept of assimilation,” he rhetorically asked, 36 37

K. Kautsky, Die Befreiung der Nationen (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1917), 46. V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: International Publishers, 1960–1970) (hereafter CW), vol. X I X, 250.

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“after all violence and all inequality have been eliminated?” Yes, he answered: “What is left is capitalism’s world-historical tendency, to break down national barriers, obliterate national distinctions, and to assimilate nations – a tendency which manifests itself more and more powerfully with every passing decade, and is one of the greatest driving forces transforming capitalism into socialism.”38 Prizing this form of progressive assimilation, he accused the partisans of national-cultural autonomy of “turning back the wheel of history,” not from Warsaw and St. Petersburg toward Berlin, Paris, and London, but rather in the reverse direction.39 In 1913, the Bolshevik Party sent its Georgian member Josef Stalin to Vienna to write a theoretical essay on nationhood. In the Austrian capital, Bukharin helped familiarize him with the Marxist (notably Austro-Marxist) debate by gathering considerable materials for accomplishing this task. The result was Marxism and the National Question, Stalin’s only significant contribution to Marxist theory, which was canonized after the October Revolution. Aimed at fixing some cardinal points of Bolshevik policy, this booklet offered a definition of the concept of nation, as remarkable for its synthetic clarity as for its dogmatic stringency. According to Stalin, “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”40 The existence of a nation lay in the harmonious and coherent correlation of all these elements: “it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be lacking,” he explained, “and the nation ceases to be a nation.”41 On this basis, he criticized Otto Bauer, whose theory was contradicted by the dominant tendencies of historical development. The future theoretician of “socialism in a single country” reproached Bauer for his supposed nationalism that denied the reality of cosmopolitanism. Prisoner of a narrow-minded perspective, Bauer confused “nation, which is a historical category, with tribe, which is an ethnographical category,”42 and did not understand that nations melt into each other instead of differentiating themselves. “National barriers,” Stalin concluded, “are being demolished and are falling, rather than becoming firmer.”43 A similar kind of national “nihilism” was supported by the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek, according to whom the right of national self-determination was “utopian” under capitalism and “useless” in a socialist society. In his view, workers had no country in 38 40

41

Lenin, CW, vol. X X , 28. 39 Lenin, CW, vol. X X , 29. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question: Selected Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 12. Ibid., 12. 42 Ibid., 16. 43 Ibid., 38.

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the most literal meaning of the word: they belonged not to any national community but rather to humankind, i.e. “a single and unique community of fate.”44 The Bolsheviks criticized Otto Bauer but their privileged target was in reality the Jewish Bund, which belonged to Russian social democracy and claimed national-cultural autonomy for the Jews of the tsarist empire. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, this extraterritorial minority had experienced a process of modernization and secularization that, in a context of endemic anti-Semitism, had resulted in a new national consciousness. The pillar of this modern Jewish nationality was no longer religion but rather culture, and its vector was the Yiddish language. Strongly opposed to Zionism, the Bund claimed the right for the Jews to live as a national community amongst the other nations of Russia, on the basis of cooperative and egalitarian relationships. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s theoretician, explained his concept of internationalism with the following words: Anybody who has the least familiarity with the national question knows that internationalist culture is not a-national. An a-national culture, neither Russian nor German nor Polish . . . but a pure culture is an absurdity. In order to attract the working class, the internationalist ideas need to be adapted to the language spoken by the workers and to the concrete national conditions in which they live. Workers should not be indifferent to the condition and the development of their national culture, for it is only through it that they can participate in the internationalist culture of democracy and the world socialist movement. It is obvious, but Lenin turns a deaf ear to all this.45

As for the question of assimilation, Medem adopted a “neutral” position, pointing out that he neither embraced nor rejected it. He did not prejudge the future and did not fear Jewish assimilation, a tendency that had prevailed in western Europe; he simply observed that in Russia the Jews had created their own nationality and wished to preserve it by living with other nationalities in a common, multinational, and multicultural space. Jewish assimilation, he thought, could not be considered “a goal in itself.”46 It is an irony of history 44 45

46

Anton Pannekoek, Klassenkampf und Nation (Reichenberg: Verlag Runge, 1912), 166. Quoted by Rachel Ertel, Le Shtetl: La bourgade juive de Pologne (Paris: Payot, 1982), 64. See, in particular, Jonathan Frankel, Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 185, 497; Enzo Traverso, The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (Leiden: Brill 2018), 108–114. Vladimir Medem, “Nationalism or Neutralism,” in Tsum tswantsikstn yartsayt (New York: American Representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union, 1943), 189.

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that, after the October Revolution, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party abandoned their assimilationist posture and tried to realize a form of Jewish nationalcultural autonomy. At that moment, Medem denounced the Bolshevik “putsch” and moved from Warsaw to New York. A left-wing current within the Bund joined the Bolshevik Party, where it led its Jewish policy for a decade. Truthful to their cosmopolitan endeavor, the Bolsheviks in power promoted a Jewish culture that was “Yiddish in form and socialist in content.” The Bund was strongly opposed to Zionism, a form of Jewish nationalism that, according to Medem, united the Jews by transcending their class divisions and therefore paralyzed the class struggle in the diaspora. At the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism influenced a current of Marxist thinkers who, like Ber Borokhov, associated the birth of a Jewish state with national liberation and socialist revolution; whereas the choice of Palestine was rooted in a premodern religious tradition, the political project of Jewish nationalism was finally formulated in secular terms.47 The colonial idea found many enthusiastic defenders among “revisionist” Marxists: colonialism would bring Western civilization to backward Palestine and Zionism could become an instrument of historical progress. From Edward Bernstein to Ber Borokhov, several Marxists stressed that European Jewish settlers could develop the productive forces in Palestine, creating there the premises of socialism. As we have seen, Marx thought that, in spite of its violence, British imperialism was bringing progress in India, where it acted as “an unconscious tool of history.” Why could the Jews not play a similar role in Palestine? The multiple implications of this approach would appear many decades later, after the creation of the state of Israel.

Internationalism The most significant feature of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings on the national question is her intransigent opposition to both the right of self-determination and any form of national separatism. As a Polish Jew living in Germany, she observed the debate on Polish independence with a critical distance. In her view, this demand originated in the conservative sections of the landed aristocracy and, given the integration of the most dynamic components of Polish industry with the Russian economy, there were no solid bases for an 47

Ber Borokhov, Class Struggle and the Jewish Question: Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism, ed. Mitchell Cohen (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1984).

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independent Polish state. She was deeply attached to her language, literature, and culture – she wrote her most important essay on the national question in Polish – but criticized as regressive and nonsensical the nationalist orientation of the socialist movement in Poland. She emphasized the vitality of national cultures inscribed into a unified world, but she considered the creation of new national states in the twentieth century – the age of cosmopolitanism and world politics – to be purely anachronistic. “Capitalism annihilated Polish national independence,” she wrote in 1908, “but at the same time created modern Polish national culture.”48 Basically, she reversed Lenin’s perspective: whereas Lenin admitted national independence as a necessary step toward a federation of supranational socialist states, Luxemburg considered the right of nations to self-determination as “only a metaphysical formulation of an idea which in bourgeois society is completely non-existent and can be realized only on the basis of a socialist regime.”49 Thus, in her own way, she joined Bauer’s idea of national differentiation in socialism. Despite their radical discrepancy on the question of state independence, this idea was shared by Kelles-Krauz, the most important Marxist thinker of Polish nationalism.50 Standing between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks – he joined the latter in May 1917 – Leon Trotsky was not interested in elaborating a systematic concept of nation, but strongly emphasized the necessity of dissociating its cultural dimension, which he did not see as transitional or perishable, from its political form, which he saw as completely anachronistic in the age of imperialism. Imperialism had engendered the historical crisis of national states, in the face of which the only viable solution was a reorganization of Europe on federal bases. Nations had a future, including in socialism, whereas nation-states were vestiges of a finished time. According to Trotsky, the First World War was the most dramatic evidence of a clash between the development of supranational productive forces and the survival of national states, egoistically conserved by narrow-minded political and military elites. The collapse of the Second International in August 1914 meant that the historical crisis of the nation-state was also the crisis of the socialist movement, which had been unable to impede such a political catastrophe. The nation, he wrote in The War and the International (1914), 48

49 50

Rosa Luxemburg, The National Question: Selected Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 255. Ibid., 140. Timothy Snyder, Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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“must continue to exist as a cultural, ideologic and psychological fact, but its economic foundation has been pulled from under its feet.”51 In such historical circumstances, he observed, the proletariat should not defend “the outlived and antiquated national fatherland”; its task was rather “to create a far more powerful fatherland, with far greater power of resistance – the United States of Europe as the foundation of the United States of the World.”52 This approach was finally adopted by the Bolsheviks in power, who created a federation of Soviet republics, and by the Third International, which embodied the project of a socialist universal community. Summarizing this Marxist debate on the brink of the First World War, we may distinguish among several options: (1) the partisans of the right to selfdetermination, a principle sketched out by Marx and Engels, officially claimed by the Second International, and theoretically codified by leaders such as Kautsky, Lenin, and Stalin; (2) a minority of Marxist nationalists like Ber Borokhov, James Connolly, and Kelles-Krauz, the representatives of oppressed nations or national minorities; (3) the advocates of nationalcultural autonomy, mostly identified with the Austrian socialist party and the Jewish Bund (Bauer, Renner, and Medem); (4) the radical internationalists who rejected the principle of self-determination as “reactionary” and anachronistic (Luxemburg, Pannekoek); and, finally, (5) the defenders of socialist federalism like Trotsky. As for the predictive (and prescriptive) outlook on the national question, three main tendencies remained: (1) the vision of socialism as a universal human community, not only supranational but also postnational, i.e. based on the disappearance of national pluralism (Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin, Pannekoek); (2) the vision of socialism as a stateless but nationally differentiated universal community (Bauer, Luxemburg, Trotsky); and (3) an agnostic position on this issue, conceptually formulated as “neutralism” (Medem). Marx and Engels’s writings offered arguments for all these interpretations. The contrast is striking between the richness of this debate before the First World War and the silence of Marxism on the national question in the following years, when the collapse of the Habsburg, Prussian, tsarist, and Ottoman empires engendered millions of stateless people. Torn between the right to self-determination and nationless socialism, most Marxists were unable to grapple with the condition of minorities excluded from the new architecture of nation-states imposed by the Paris Peace Conference on 51 52

Leon Trotsky, The Bolsheviks and World Peace (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), 21. Ibid., 28.

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a multinational space. This is astonishing, since the concept of nationalcultural autonomy offered a potentially satisfactory response to this unexpected situation. The emergence of a mass of refugees – modern “pariahs” according to Hannah Arendt53 – resulted from the transformation of national sovereignty into a kind of territorial property from which all “aliens” were excluded. In the interwar years, Marxism interpreted the refugees almost uniquely as victims of political repression and rising fascism, without seeing them as a product of the very nature of nation-states. There is something paradoxical in this theoretical gap within an intellectual current embodied by banished, émigré, exiled, and sometimes stateless thinkers. Positing socialism as a postnational and stateless world, they disregarded the emergence of a fundamental contradiction between nationality and statehood: in a stateless community, cosmopolitan citizenship simply becomes a useless category. The October Revolution moved the national question from theory to practice, transforming it into a set of government policies. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the right to self-determination for all the nationalities of the Russian Empire, the application of which dangerously intertwined with the constraints of civil war. In many cases, they had to choose between the recognition of this general principle and the defense of revolution, which – particularly in the Caucasus region – implied forced Sovietization. On the other hand, the October Revolution signified a historical turn that started the process of decolonization. In 1920, the Bolsheviks organized in Baku a Congress of the Peoples of the East, which gathered anticolonialist intellectuals, trade unions, and workers’ and peasants’ associations from several continents, and laid ideological foundations for some of the Asian revolutions of the following decades.54 In the nineteenth century, anticolonialism had been much more widespread among anarchists than among socialists, but the October Revolution turned it into a mass movement. Sometimes, this created controversial relationships between the USSR and national liberation movements themselves, whose objectives could diverge, at least temporarily: during the Second World War, when the United Kingdom and the USSR were allied in the struggle against the Axis powers, the tension between the struggle for independence and the need to rally to the defense of the Soviet “socialist fatherland” tore Indian Marxism apart. In the 1930s, Marxist scholars pointed out the aggressive and expansionist character of fascism, which most of them related to the rise of monopoly capital 53 54

H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976). Stephen White, “Communism and the East: The Baku Congress,” Slavic Review, 33/3 (1974), 492–514.

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and imperialism in a continent devastated by the First World War. Trotsky emphasized the dialectical entanglement of fascism – the racist ideology of which was a peculiar form of “zoological materialism” – with modern cosmopolitanism. In the absence of a proletarian revolution, fascism was an attempt at solving the contradiction between the internationalization of productive forces and the persistence of national boundaries. “The totalitarian state,” he wrote in 1940, “is the instrument for creating a super-nationalist state, an imperialist empire, the rule over continents, the rule over the whole world.”55

The Jewish Question The overwhelming majority of Marxist thinkers underestimated the strength, persistence, and depth of modern anti-Semitism, a phenomenon which they mostly depicted as an anachronistic survival of backward, conservative social layers, a form of obscurantism inevitably condemned to disappear with the accomplishment of modernization. Pogroms were a symptom of Russian primitivism and the Dreyfus Affair a late expression of French antirepublicanism. Nazi anti-Semitism was the lethal disease of “decaying” capitalism, not the ideology of modern totalitarianism. In a similar way, Marxists regarded Judaism itself as a legacy destined to be dialectically “sublated” (aufgehoben) in a socialist world, where a universal community of equals would replace present national and religious cleavages. This was the position of many of the intellectuals whom Isaac Deutscher called “non-Jewish Jews,” the Jews who had broken with religion and traditional culture but recognized themselves as Jewish because of antiSemitism.56 According to this vision, the universalistic core of the Jewish tradition could be developed only beyond Judaism itself. Belonging to the first generation of assimilated German Jews, Marx considered Judaism as a form of religious obscurantism. In a famous essay written in 1843, Zur Judenfrage, he violently criticized it by combining atheistic arguments drawn from “radical Enlightenment” with several widespread prejudices of his time: “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist . . . The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.”57 From this perspective, 55

56 57

Leon Trotsky, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 462. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). Marx and Engels, CW, vol. I I I , 172.

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Marx identified “the emancipation of the Jew with the emancipation of society from Judaism” and his disciples thought this assessment was obviously shared by any reasonable person believing in progress. Of course, this vision of both anti-Semitism and Judaism as archaic vestiges of a premodern world was deeply rooted in a teleological vision of history that goes from Marx to Abraham Léon, the Polish-Belgian author of The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (1946).58 After the war, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) was probably the first attempt to integrate the Holocaust into a Marxist vision of history that radically broke with any form of teleology. Paying attention to certain formulations of this seminal book, one could suggest that they turned upside down the old Hegelian philosophy of history and presented Auschwitz as the dialectical accomplishment of civilization. Instead of creating the premises of an emancipatory historical break, the conflict between productive forces and the social relations of production had increased class domination to the point of establishing totalitarian rule. Thus, anti-Semitism, aggressive nationalism, and racial hatred resulted in the Nazi camps, the emblematic expression of a process of the “self-destruction of Enlightenment,” i.e. reason deprived of its emancipatory potentialities and reduced to blind, purely instrumental ratio.59 In many respects, Adorno and Horkheimer’s book could be considered as the real conclusion of the Marxist debate on the Jewish Question.

Aftermath Since the 1930s, the anticolonialist reinterpretation of Marxism has produced a variety of ideological and political currents, from Latin America (JoséCarlos Mariátegui and Che Guevara) to Asia (Manabendra Nath Roy in India; Mao Zedong in China; Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, etc.).60 In the United States and the Caribbean, thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Frantz Fanon created a distinctive form of Black Marxism.61 All these intellectual currents belonged to the culture of Marxist 58

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Abram Leon, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970). Max Horkheimer and Theodor. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xvi, 218. See Michael Löwy, Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991); Colin Mackerras and Nick Knight (eds.), Marxism in Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985). Cedric J. Rodinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, 1983).

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anticolonialism but did not express any interest in the Marxist debates on nationhood. These radical thinkers analyzed the interdependence between capitalism and slavery, the relationship between the rural peasantry and the urban working class in guerrilla warfare, or the emancipatory character of revolutionary violence, but were no longer interested in conceptualizing nation and nationalism. As Robert Young has pointed out, Marxism is one of the most significant matrices of postcolonialism,62 but the latter could hardly be considered to be a branch of Marxist theory (this also explains why it has been strongly criticized by several Marxist scholars).63 And similar considerations should be used to approach the work of an extraordinarily fruitful scholar like Benedict Anderson, who elaborated his vision of nations as “imagined communities”64 through a constant dialogue, simultaneously made of assimilation and criticism, with Marxism. Marxism has become influential after exhausting its insular existence as an autonomous “science” of history and society; this is probably the key for explaining its current vitality.

Further Reading Achcar, Gilbert, Marx, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). Anderson, Kevin, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Bloom, Solomon F., The World of Nations: A Study of the National Implications in the Work of Karl Marx (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941). Frankel, Jonathan, Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Haupt, Georges, Michael Löwy, and Claudie Weill (eds.), Les marxistes et la question nationale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). Hobsbawm, Eric J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Luxemburg, Rosa, The National Question: Selected Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976). Marx, Karl, On Colonialism (Moscow: Progress, 1968). Molnár, Miklós, Marx, Engels et la politique internationale (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Rosdolsky, Roman, Engels and the “Non-Historic” Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848 (Glasgow: Critique Books, 1986). Traverso, Enzo, The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Young, Robert, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001). 62

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Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001). See Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).

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The Catholic Church lawrence c. reardon

During the past 2,000 years, Christianity has evolved from a small group of fishermen recruited on the Sea of Galilee to become the world’s oldest continuously operated religious institution and largest Abrahamic religion. Of all the Christian denominations, including Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism remains the largest denomination.1 In 2018, the population of practicing Catholics was equivalent to the population of the People’s Republic of China, or 1.33 billion adherents. Traditionally Europeans dominated the church (21.5 percent). However, the majority of global Catholics are now composed of North and South Americans (48.3 percent), while the fastest growing communities are in Africa, at more than 17 percent.2 During the three eras of church history, the Jewish Christian Church Era (33–313), the European Catholic State-Church Era (313–1965), and the Global Catholic Church-State Era (1965–present),3 the Roman Catholic Church endured and engaged in religious persecution, internal doctrinal differences, and organizational problems. The underlying cause of these problems often has been nationalism, which has been the greatest impediment to church autonomy and its long-term goal of global evangelization. To understand how the church has adapted over the centuries and transformed itself into a global religious institution, this chapter analyzes cases across four categories 1

2

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Conrad Hackett and David McClendon, “Christians Remain World’s Largest Religious Group, But They Are Declining in Europe,” Pew Research Center, 5 April 2017; Conrad Hackett, Brian J. Grim, Vegard Skirbekk, Marcin Stonawski, and Anne Goujon, Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2011). Central Office of Church Statistics, Annulariid Statisticum Ecclesiae 2018 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2020). Karl Rahner, “Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II,” Theological Studies, 40/4 (1979), 716–727.

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of religious (Islamic expansionism, northern European Protestantism), economic (English Reformation), political (Italian Risorgimento and fascism), and communist (Chinese Sinicization) nationalism.

Three Eras of Church History The Jewish Christian Church Era occurred between 33 and 313 C E, when the twelve Apostles and their disciples moved beyond their Jewish roots to establish a Gentile Christianity in the Mediterranean area.4 From its very inception, the Christian Church dealt with a variety of internal and external challenges, especially religious persecution. Peter and Paul’s newer version of Christianity emphasized ethical and universalistic teaching, the popularity of which among the Roman people challenged Roman Jews and Emperor Nero, who feared the revolutionary potential of this new foreign Jewish Christian religious sect.5 Nero and subsequent Roman emperors transformed the religious persecution of Christians into a public spectacle and accused Christians of atheism and sacrilege that contradicted Roman religious norms.6 Early church leaders thus adapted their proselytization strategy by maintaining a decentralized, underground religious movement with secret house churches and social welfare organizations, which allowed Christianity to flourish and survive the persecution campaigns. Emperor Constantine dramatically transformed the early Christian Church when he issued the Edict of Milan in 313 that integrated the church with the declining Roman Empire. Constantine’s edict laid the political and religious foundation for two state-churches: the western Latin state-church established in Rome that eventually became the European Catholic state-church (313– 1965), and the eastern Greek state-church based in Constantinople that became the Byzantine Empire.7 These state-churches continued many of the political, economic, and social customs of the older Roman Empire; Christian bishops 4

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Margaret M. Mitchell, “From Jerusalem to the Ends of the Earth,” in Margaret M. Mitchell, Frances M. Young, and K. Scott Bowie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. I: Origins to Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 293–301. Daniel R. Langton, “The Myth of the ‘Traditional View of Paul’ and the Role of the Apostle in Modern Jewish–Christian Polemics,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 28/1 (2005), 69–104; Paul Keresztes, “Nero, the Christians and the Jews in Tacitus and Clement of Rome,” Latomus, 43 (1984), 404–413. W. H. C. Frend, “Persecutions: Genesis and Legacy,” in Mitchell, Young, and Bowie, Cambridge History of Christianity, 502–527. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 13–23; Steven Runciman, The Byzantine Theocracy: The Weil Lectures, Cincinnati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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were appointed as governors and local judges using Roman law to adjudicate legal cases.8 Constantine imposed a common core of religious beliefs during the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325; Theodosius I later declared Christianity as the empire’s official religion in 380 and the NicenoConstantinopolitan Creed set forth correct orthodoxy that continues to be shared by the Roman Catholics, major Protestant religions, and eastern and oriental Orthodoxy.9 Justinian I of the Eastern Roman Empire called for the establishment of five centralized religious organizations managed by the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem – a Pentarchy.10 However, Justinian’s vision of a universal church was not to materialize fully despite his early sixth-century efforts to reestablish part of the western empire, which had formally ceased to exist in 480. Half a millennium later, political and ecclesiastical differences between Rome and Constantinople resulted in the Eastern Schism of 1054.11 The Islamic caliphates gained control of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem starting in the seventh century and eventually took Constantinople by 1453. By the Middle Ages, the western Latin state-church had developed into the European Catholic state-church. With the “Donation of Pepin” in 756, the bishop of Rome regained temporal control over Rome and the former Byzantine provinces in central Italy, which were renamed the Papal States.12 While building churches throughout western Europe, Catholic religious orders converted the ancient Roman latifundia system into Catholic monasteries, which acquired land, established large farming estates, and monopolized the provision of agricultural goods and services.13 The bishop of Rome thus was the temporal ruler of the Papal States and the universal church, which managed the transnational political, religious, economic, and sociocultural activities that dominated medieval Europe. 8 9

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Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 37. Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, vol. I V (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 50. Loannis A. Panagiotopoulos, “The Pentarchy of the Patriarchs: The Presuppositions, the Evolution and the Function of the Institution,” Ph.D. dissertation, Durham University, 1996. James C. Skedros, “You Cannot Have a Church without an Empire,” in George E. Demacopoulos, and Aristotle Papanikolaou (eds.), Christianity, Democracy, and the Shadow of Constantine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 219–231; Brett Whalen, “Rethinking the Schism of 1054: Authority, Heresy, and the Latin Rite,” Traditio, 62 (2007), 1–24. Courtney E. Bowers, “Pepin, Power and the Papacy: The True First Holy Roman Emperor,” The Histories 4/2 (2019), 13–19. Audrey B. Davidson, “The Medieval Monastery as Franchise Monopolist,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 27/1 (1995), 119–128.

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Envious of the growing wealth and political power of the bishops of Rome, various European monarchs appointed more than thirty antipopes to promote their political and religious agendas.14 To strengthen its organizational autonomy, the church established the College of Cardinals in 816, members of which elected the pope and used the Roman Curia to manage the universal church and Papal States.15 The bishop of Rome also sought to regain the right of investiture from the European royal houses, which had usurped it after 480 to appoint Catholic bishops and monastery abbots as local temporal and religious leaders. Gregory VII (1073–1085) thus enacted the Gregorian Reforms that centralized the pope’s organizational authority, reduced the bishops’ powers, and asserted the church’s authority over secular rulers, especially the Holy Roman Emperor.16 By the early Renaissance, the European Catholic state-church had reached its zenith of political and religious power. However, challenged by Protestant reformers, absolute monarchs, and the new Westphalian system of nationstates, the European Catholic State-Church Era effectively ended with the 1871 unification of Italy and the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which reduced the temporal control of the pope to the 110 acres encompassing the Vatican City State.17 By 1962, John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council that recognized that the universal church had transformed from a temporal European power into a formidable global, transnational religious organization involved in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Vatican II thus ushered in the church’s third historical era as a Global Catholic Church-State (1965–present), which adopted an ecumenical approach to deal with doctrinal differences. However, one of the underlying causes and catalysts for change during the three historical church eras has been some form of nationalism, including religious, political, economic, and communist nationalism. 14

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Harold A. Drake, “The Impact of Constantine on Christianity,” in Noel Lenski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11–36; Richard Leonard, “The Legacy of Constantine,” America, 20 November 2008, www.americamagazine.org/content/good-word/legacyconstantine (accessed 1 September 2020); Mary Stroll, Popes and Antipopes: The Politics of Eleventh Century Church Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2011); “Antipope” and “Avignon,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907). Christopher M. Bellitto, The General Councils: A History of the Twenty-One General Councils from Nicaea to Vatican II (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002), 52. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarch from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Duffy, Saints and Sinners, 121–138. David Ryall, “The Catholic Church as a Transnational Actor,” in Daphné Josselin and William Wallace (eds.), Non-State Actors in World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 41–58; José Casanova, “Globalizing Catholicism and the Return to a ‘Universal Church,’” in Susanne H. Rudolph (ed.), Transnational Religion and Fading States (New York: Routledge, 2018), 121–143.

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Nationalism Among the myriad definitions of nationalism,18 Jack Snyder argues that it is a doctrine that a people who see themselves as distinct in their culture, history, institutions, or principles should rule themselves in a political system that expresses and protects those distinctive characteristics. A nation is, therefore, a group of people who see themselves as distinct in these terms and who aspire to self-rule. Nationalist conflict is defined as organized, large-scale violence motivated or justified by a nationalist doctrine.19

Thus, the primary goal of leaders pursuing a nationalist agenda is to guarantee self-rule and strengthen a distinct and strong national identity. Nationalist leaders thus hope to strengthen their distinctive national political institutions and principles, economic structures, culture, language, and religion against undue foreign interference. Leaders are primarily motivated by nationalism, which drives their religious, political, economic, and ethnic policies. The Roman Catholic Church has used a variety of strategies to deal with nationalism while achieving its long-term goal of global evangelization. While failing to use its military power to counter the religious nationalism of the Islamic caliphates and the northern European Protestants, the state-church successfully adapted by expanding into colonial religious markets abroad during the Age of Exploration. The church also failed to overcome the Italian political nationalism of Mazzini and Garibaldi, although it learned to cooperate with Mussolini. While confronting communist nationalism in Eastern Europe and Asia, the church learned to circumvent and cooperate with communist parties. The church is currently learning to deal with growing political nationalism arising from its failure to protect minors and other vulnerable people.

Religious Nationalism and the European Catholic State-Church Scholars traditionally have argued that nationalism is a secular phenomenon without religious association.20 Asad, Brubaker, and Habermas argue that 18

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For instance, Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964); Ernest Gellner and John Breuilly, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960). Jack L. Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: Norton, 2000), 23. Roger Friedland and Kenneth B. Moss, “Thinking through Religious Nationalism,” in Ernst van den Hemel and Asja Szafraniec (eds.), Words: Religious Language Matters (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 420–422.

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religious movements are distinct from the state and are not part of nationalism, which is a secular concept.21 Yet, in discussing the role of religious nationalism in the Balkans, Loizides argues that “nationalism drives religion, not the other way around.” Religious, ethnic, and linguistical ties help bind the nation together and help build a national identity.22 Friedland and Moss argue that “religious nationalism exists where the nation-state itself becomes invested with religious meaning,” where the nation-state (1) embodies the religious and ontological beliefs of its people; (2) serves a divine purpose; (3) establishes its authority and laws that express divine will; and (4) is understood as a divine creation along with its body politic. Thus, religious concerns influence the nation-state and nationalist agendas.23 The religious nationalism of the Islamic caliphates threatened the newly emerging Catholic state-church and its religious hegemony in Europe. Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the Umayyad caliphate established political and religious control over the Byzantine territories in the eastern Mediterranean, including Syria and Jerusalem, and spread westward toward Egypt, the Maghrib, and finally to Hispania (Spain and Portugal) in 711. Unlike previous explanations ranging from population pressure to military tactics, Donner argues that the Prophet Muhammad and his Islamic doctrines revolutionized the pre-Islamic Arabian tribal societies by providing a religious and ontological foundation for building a state. After Muhammad’s death, the Umayyad caliphate focused this religious belief into mobilizing Islamic believers into an effective, motivated fighting force that swept across the Middle East and North Africa, defeating older empires and challenging Europe with the invasion of Hispania in 711.24 To preserve the Catholic state-church’s religious monopoly and political influence, the bishop of Rome persuaded the European kingdoms and citystates to join with his monk-knights in rolling back Islamic forces and to convert the “heathen barbarians” in the northern European and Baltic states. 21

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Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 194; Rogers Brubaker, “Religion and Nationalism: Four Approaches,” Nations and Nationalism, 18/1 (2012), 2–20; Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 56. Neophytos G. Loizides, “Religious Nationalism and Adaptation in Southeast Europe,” Nationalities Papers, 37/2 (2015), 205. Friedland and Moss, “Thinking through Religious Nationalism,” 445–447; see also Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Worldwide Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Journal of International Affairs, 50/1 (1996), 1–20; Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), xii.

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After Leo III crowned Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor, Christians engaged Islamic forces, beginning with Alexander II’s call to lay siege to the Spanish city of Barbastro in 1064.25 Hoping to reunite the eastern and western Christian churches, at the Council of Clermont of 1095 Urban II launched the first of seven major crusades against Islamic expansionism in the Mediterranean area. In 1147, Eugenius III approved the northern crusades, in which the Teutonic Knights joined with the northern Christian kingdoms to convert or eliminate the pagan Slavs living east of the duchy of Saxony.26 Franciscans, Dominicans, Cistercians, and Augustinians converted nonChristian believers and Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the contemporary states of northern and western parts of Germany, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.27 During the next 500 years, the bishop of Rome emerged as the temporal ruler of the Papal States and the ecclesiastical ruler of the European Catholic State-Church, which established the moral, legal, and economic norms throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.28 The state-church erected cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries, representing the church’s power that rivaled the local kingdoms and city-states. The Spanish and Portuguese monarchies achieved the “Reconquista” of the Iberian peninsula by 1492 and implemented the infamous Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions,29 and the northern crusades expanded the Christian population in Scandinavia and the Holy Roman Empire. By the early 1500s, the state-church reached the apex of religious, political, and economic power in Europe as demonstrated by its ambitious artistic commissions. (See Figure 17.1.) However, the European Catholic state-church’s military response to religious nationalism was only partially successful in dealing with Islamic expansion. Urban II’s long-term strategy of using the crusades to reunite with the Eastern Orthodox Church and to gain control of the Holy Lands completely 25

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Jonathan P. Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (London: Penguin, 1997), 48–69; Rasa Mažeika, “Of Cabbages and Knights: Trade and Trade Treaties with the Infidel on the Northern Frontier, 1200–1390,” Journal of Medieval History, 20/1 (1994), 64; William L. Urban, The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (Barnsley: Greenhill, 2003). Richard A. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Berkeley: California University Press, 1999), 483–507. For instance, see Brooks B. Hull and Frederick Bold, “Towards an Economic Theory of the Church,” International Journal of Social Economics, 16/7 (1999), 5–15; Harold J. Berman, “The Religious Foundations of Western Law,” Catholic University Law Review, 24 (1999), 490–508. Helen E. Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

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Figure 17.1 Michelangelo, “The Creation of Adam,” Sistine Chapel. (Jupiterimages via Getty Images.)

failed.30 Western crusaders prolonged the life of the Byzantine Empire, which continued to lose ground to the Ottoman Empire. During the last major crusade, the Ottoman Empire defeated European forces at Nicopolis in 1396, which led to the takeover of Constantinople in 1453. As the Ottomans’ armies continued their westward expansion into the Balkans and their navies gained power in the Mediterranean, Pius II failed to inspire his European allies to initiate another crusade as they became preoccupied with internal wars and the cost of mounting any further crusade. Finally, Innocent XI’s Holy League of 1684 – composed of the Papal States, the Habsburgs, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Venetian Republic, and Peter the Great’s army – had already defeated the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Vienna (1683), resulting in the Treaty of Karlowitz and the partial return of Balkan lands to the Holy League powers.31 The European Catholic state-church also failed to contain the religious nationalism of northern European countries and their embrace of Martin 30

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H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade,” History, 55/184 (1970), 177–188. Kelly DeVries, “The Lack of a Western European Military Response to the Ottoman Invasions of Eastern Europe from Nicopolis (1396) to Mohács (1526),” Journal of Military History, 63 (1999), 539–560.

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Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses of 1517. A century after Jan Hus (1378–1430) was burnt alive at the stake,32 Martin Luther (1438–1546) repeated the Hussites’ criticisms of the sale of indulgences to finance rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.33 Normally, the state-church responded to such doctrinal heresy by issuing council and synod edicts, papal bulls, and encyclicals, or initiating religious and political inquisitions involving trials, torture, and execution. However, Paul III launched the CounterReformation, which redefined the state-church “in light of the evolving culture and society.”34 Adopting the new Tridentine Mass and the official Latin translation of the Bible (The Vulgate), the Catholic Church continued to emphasize transubstantiation and the veneration of the Virgin Mary and the saints. The Tridentine Creed became the primary profession of faith in which officeholders and new converts pledged their allegiance to the teachings of the Roman pontiff and the College of Bishops, who taught that “individuals contributed to their own salvation through participation in the sacraments and good works.”35 Yet, this did not staunch the Protestant rebellion. Northern Europeans’ embrace of Martin Luther was indicative of a growing sense of national consciousness that had been evolving decades before the Hundred Years War.36 The Edict of Worms (1521) and its denunciation of Martin Luther divided not just the European religious world, but also its political actors, as the Catholic Habsburg allies (the Holy Roman Empire, the Catholic League, the Spanish Empire, and Hungary) opposed the Protestant “heretics” in the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, the Dutch Republic, England, Scotland, and the various northern German states.37 This growing religious nationalism created a schism between Northern and Southern European Christians, resulting in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and related conflicts in which 10 million Protestants and Catholics died on European battlefields.38 Ringmar

32 33

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Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation (Rockville: Wildside, 1999), 38–40. Timothy J. Wengert, “Martin Luther’s Peaching an Indulgence in January 1517,” Lutheran Quarterly, 29 (2015), 62–75. Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 2. Brent F. Nelsen and James L. Guth, Religion and the Struggle for European Union: Confessional Culture and the Limits of Integration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015), 71. J. C. D. Clark, “Protestantism, Nationalism, and National Identity, 1660–1832,” Historical Journal, 43/1 (2000), 265–274. For a broader perspective, see Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Georges Pagès, The Thirty Years War, 1618–1648 (New York: Harper, 1970).

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describes this emerging religious nationalism in the context of the Swedish decision to enter the war: The defense of Protestantism understood simply as a religious doctrine was never an issue; religion was always talked about in political terms, just as politics always had a religious dimension. What the Swedish leaders wanted to defend was not a particular religion, but their religion, the religion of the independent, sovereign, Swedes. To fight for Protestantism was always to fight for Sweden.39

The religious nationalism of northern Europe now embraced the Protestant movement as the new religious and ontological embodiment of their nationstate. Northern European Protestants were thus fulfilling a divine purpose to eliminate Rome’s excesses and establish a new secular and theocratic authority that truly reflected divine will. Having lost European religious hegemony, the bishop of Rome could no longer proclaim himself Europe’s most powerful leader.40 The Protestant Reformation established multiple Protestant churches, including the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia, the Anglican Church of England, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the Calvinist Reformed Church of France, the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church, etc. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) guaranteed the continuation of this more competitive European religious market and ushered in a new European era of the nationstate system.41 The decline of Rome’s political influence in Europe coincided with the gradual decline of the Holy Roman Empire, the independence of the Protestant Netherlands from Spain, and the Habsburg Empire’s loss of influence in Central Europe. The state-church now played a diminished religious, political, and economic role in Europe. However, the Latin state-church adapted by expanding its influence in the newly established colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The 39

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Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 140. Matthew E. Harris, “The Idea of Paradigm in Church History: The Notion of Papal Monarchy in the Thirteenth Century, from Innocent III to Boniface VIII,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2008. Leo Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948,” American Journal of International Law, 42/1 (January 1948), 25–46; Stephen D. Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (eds.), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 235–264; Derek Croxton, “The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty,” International History Review, 21/3 (1999), 569–591; Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” Public Culture, 10 (1998), 397–416.

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Protestant Reformation coincided with the introduction of new maritime technologies that allowed Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Dutch merchants and military to establish global maritime colonial empires. Starting with the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Alexander VI drew up an arbitrary Papal Line of Demarcation:42 the Spanish monarchs gained colonial control over the Americas and the Philippines, while the Portuguese controlled Brazil, Africa, and Asia. Large armies of Catholic and Protestant missionaries spread Christianity among the “heathen,” and built spectacular cathedrals, hospitals, and schools while engaged in profitable trade that enriched their home countries and the Christian churches. While religious oligopolistic competition occurred, the European Catholic state-church maintained a monopoly in the Spanish and Portuguese maritime colonies that compensated for the loss of the state-church religious monopoly in northern Europe.

Economic Nationalism and the European Catholic State-Church Pickel and Helleiner argue that economic nationalism is not a reactionary economic doctrine or mercantilist ideology, but a “complex set of relationships between nation and the economy,” where economic policies are an expression of national identity.43 As the primary goal of leaders pursuing a nationalist agenda is to guarantee sovereignty and strengthen a distinct and strong national identity, nationalist leaders adopt policies that preserve and strengthen their national political institutions and economic structures, which could be as diverse as protectionist mercantilism or free trade liberalism depending on which approach best expressed their national identity. The Protestant revolt against Rome’s religious monopoly also was an expression of economic nationalism, as the northern European economies asserted control over the Catholic European state-church’s economic holdings within their country. “Before the year A D 900, the Church directly owned 42

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Samuel E. Dawson, The Lines of Demarcation of Pope Alexander VI and the Treaty of Tordesillas, A D 1493 and 1494 (Carol Stream: Hope and Sons, 1899), 498. Andreas Pickel, “Introduction: False Oppositions: Reconceptualizing Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World,” in Eric Helleiner and Andreas Pickel (eds.), Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 13; Eric Helleiner, “Conclusion: The Meaning and Contemporary Significance of Economic Nationalism,” in Helleiner and Pickel, Economic Nationalism, 220–234. See also Eric Helleiner, “Economic Nationalism as a Challenge to Economic Liberalism? Lessons from the 19th Century,” International Studies Quarterly, 46/3 (2012), 307–329.

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approximately one-third of all cultivated land in western Europe, including 31 percent of such land in Italy, 35 percent in Germany, and 44 percent in northern France.”44 By the sixteenth century, the Latin state-church enjoyed considerable economic control. Bishops dominated the urban economy of large cities from their impressive Romanesque and Gothic cathedral bastions, while in the cities and countryside, the monasteries and nunneries dominated the domestic economy.45 The Protestant Reformation broke this monopoly, including the Latin state-church’s economic power. Henry VIII of England (1509–1547) directly challenged Rome’s political and economic monopoly and initiated a new era of English economic nationalism. Eight years after he ascended the English throne, the reformation movement spread throughout northern Europe. When Cardinal Thomas Wolsey failed to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII challenged the power of the Roman pope and the English Catholic Church, which was Britain’s most powerful political, economic, and social institution.46 Since the appointment of the first archbishop of Canterbury, Augustine, in 597 C E,47 the English church had gained control of one-third of all English lands, establishing a sophisticated network of 900 religious monasteries that housed more than half a million monks, nuns, and friars, with substantial amounts of lands, buildings, and wealth scattered throughout the kingdom, producing more than £130,000 a year.48 The English church also appointed all church leaders, collected a variety of taxes, and was exclusively governed by canon law. The English Reformation Parliament subsequently declared England as a sovereign nation no longer dependent politically, financially, and spiritually on Rome. The English monarch assumed full political control over the English Catholic Church, the clergy of which were denied their medieval legal privileges and thereafter tried in secular courts under English law.49 The Act of Supremacy and the Act Respecting the Oath to Succession (1534) 44

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Robert B. Ekelund, Robert D. Tollison, Gary M. Anderson, Robert F. Hébert, and Audrey B. Davidson, Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8. Ibid., 8–9. Peter J. Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (New York: Random House, 2011), 501–598. Saint Bede, The History of the English Church and People (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005). George W. Bernard, “The Dissolution of the Monasteries,” History, 96/324 (2011), 390–392. Jay Wishingrad, “The Plea Bargain in Historical Perspective,” Buffalo Law Review, 23 (1973), 509–512.

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required Henry’s subjects to renounce the pope, to swear allegiance to the “Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England,” and to recognize Henry’s annulment of his marriage to Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Corresponding to Pickel and Helleiner’s argument, Henry imposed a new English national identity, in which the monarch was the powerful God-given ruler of England. James I (1603–1625) expanded this theory of absolute monarch and divine right, in which God had approved the selection of the monarch, who was not subject to earthly laws or customs.50 To guarantee sovereignty and this new national identity, Henry instituted a comprehensive economic nationalist strategy to transform the English Catholic Church. The parliament prohibited financial payments to the Vatican, which amounted to £160,000 during the second year of Henry VII’s reign, and revoked the payment of Peter’s pence, which had been levied for 500 years on every English household.51 Parliament ended all payments to Rome and ensured Henry’s ability to appoint bishops. With the Act of First Fruits and Tenths (1534), Henry seized the right to collect a traditional papal tax on new appointments and imposed a new tax on clerical incomes.52 Finally, the English parliament passed the Suppression of Religious Houses Act (1535), which closed the Catholic monasteries, convents, and friaries in England, Ireland, and Wales, and transferred their wealth to the monarchy and the exchequer. Following the backlash under Mary I, Elizabeth I enacted the Elizabethan Religious Settlement that reestablished the independence of the Church of England with the English monarch as titular head and reintroduced the Book of Common Prayer.53 During the ensuing centuries, the weakened European Catholic statechurch was unable to prevent both Catholic and Protestant states from confiscating church property. However, the Southern European countries, especially Spain and Portugal, also underwent a transformation of national identity, as they became Catholic colonial empires. Missionaries from the 50

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John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 192; Kevin M. Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in SixteenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); David Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (Cambridge: Hackett, 2003), 29–31. Oscar A. Marti, “Revolt of the Reformation Parliament against Ecclesiastical Exactions in England, 1529–36,” Journal of Religion, 9/2 (1929), 278; John J. Scarisbrick, “Clerical Taxation in England, 1485 to 1547,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11/1 (1960), 41–54. Michael L. Bush, “‘Up for the Commonweal’: The Significance of Tax Grievances in the English Rebellions of 1536,” English Historical Review, 106/419 (1991), 301. Henry N. Birt, The Elizabethan Religious Settlement: A Study of Contemporary Documents (London: G. Bell, 1907).

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European Catholic state-church accompanied Spaniards and Portuguese colonialists to the New World and Asia to build new cathedrals, monasteries, schools, and hospitals, which were financed with tithes, rental income, and the issuance of interest-based loans, as well as directly profiting from international trade, such as the nanban trade between China, Macao, and Japan.54 While adapting to its loss of European religious hegemony by expanding globally, the Catholic state-church was yet to confront its greatest threat to its European state-church identity . . . the loss of the Papal States.

Political Nationalism and the European Catholic State-Church The northern European revolt against Rome’s theocratic, political, and economic hegemony created a new model of Protestant national identity characterized by a stronger monarchy, a more active parliament with an expanding code of laws, and a more professional bureaucracy. Yet, an even greater sense of European national identities arose from the post-1648 Westphalian system of sovereign states that eclipsed the monarchial absolutism of Henry VIII, James VI of Scotland, and Louis XIV of France.55 The Age of Enlightenment and the nationalist renewal of the French Revolution and the European revolutions of 1848 also prompted the transformation of the Catholic state-church into a church-state, in which the bishop of Rome lost most of his temporal authority.56 Among Southern European countries, Italy was most affected by this nationalist renewal. After the fall of the western empire in 476, the Italian peninsula became a hodgepodge of city-states, the kingdom of Sicily, and the Papal States. The pope adopted the Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ (Constitutions of the Holy Mother Church) in 1357, establishing a series of 54

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Jan Bazant, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1856–1875, vol. X I, ed. and trans. Michael P. Costeloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–13; Margaret Chowning, “The Management of Church Wealth in Michoacán, Mexico, 1810–1856: Economic Motivations and Political Implications,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 22/3 (1990), 459–496; Mihoko Oka, “The Nanban and Shuinsen Trade in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Japan,” in Manuel Perez Garcia and Lucio de Sousa (eds.), Global History and New Polycentric Approaches: Europe, Asia and the Americas in a World Network System (Berlin: Springer, 2017), 172; George Bryan Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). James Daly, “The Idea of Absolute Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Journal, 21/2 (1978), 227–250. John W. O’Malley, Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 23–54.

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laws to govern the Papal States, which stretched from the northern province of Emilia-Romagna to Lazio and Rome in the south. As European monarchs reduced their financial contributions to Rome after the 1500s, the Papal States became an important source of revenue.57 The bishop of Rome lost this revenue source and its remaining temporal powers in September 1870, when Victor Emmanuel II achieved the Risorgimento (Resurgence) and gained complete control over the Papal States to complete the unification of Italy.58 Despite the First Vatican Council’s approval in 1868 of papal infallibility and papal supremacy, Pius IX failed to overcome Italian political nationalism, which forced the pope to become the prigioniero del Vaticano, or the prisoner of the Vatican.59 Sixty years later, Pius XI brokered a Faustian bargain with Mussolini to resolve the Roman Question. Mussolini recognized that the Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful political, economic, and social institution in the Italian state.60 To maintain and strengthen his fascist control, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaties on 11 February 1929. To compensate for the loss of the Papal States, he agreed to pay the Holy See $82.6 million in indemnity.61 He also transferred sovereignty of the 110-acre State of Vatican City, recognized the Holy See’s territorial inviolability and diplomatic immunity, guaranteed unimpeded access to all public services, and allowed the Holy See to establish its own diplomatic relations. The Italian state also agreed to make Roman Catholicism the state’s only official religion, to outlaw all “offences and public insults” against the pope, and to pay a monthly salary to the Catholic clergy.62 For his part of the Faustian bargain, Pius XI recognized the legitimacy of Victor Emmanuel II as king of Italy. On 12 February 1929, the pope delivered his papal blessings to 200,000 people in St. Peter’s Square and reassumed his 57

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Peter Partner, “The Papacy and the Papal States,” in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1999), 359–380; Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1959). Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 124. O’Malley, Vatican I, 64; David I. Kertzer, Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004). Richard Drake, “Julius Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” Catholic Historical Review, 74/3 (1988), 405–415. “Vatican and Mussolini Sign Peace Agreement,” 11 February 1929, www.upi.com/Arc hives/1929/02/11/Vatican-and-Mussolini-sign-peace-agreement/1881517975205/ (accessed 1 September 2020). “Treaty between the Holy See and Italy,” 1929, www.Vaticanstate.Va/Content/Dam/ Vaticanstate/Documenti/Leggi-E-Decreti/Normative-Penali-E-Amministrative/Later antreaty.pdf (accessed 1 September 2020); Flavia Marisi, “Towards or Against Group Cohesion and State Unity: The Relationship between Church and State in the Italian Peninsula,” Revista Crítica de Derecho Canónico Pluriconfesional, 3 (2016), 103–117.

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temporal duties as bishop of Rome. Pius XI supported Mussolini by praising profascist groups and condemning all antifascist movements, including the socialists, communists, and the Italian People’s Party, which was Italy’s largest political party and led by a Catholic priest.63 Three years later, Pius XI signed the Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany, under which bishops swore their loyalty to the Nazi German Reich. While the opening of the Vatican archives from 2020 offers the opportunity to clarify Pius XI’s and Pius XII’s relationship with Mussolini and Hitler,64 it is clear that the state-church openly compromised with Mussolini and Hitler to preserve church autonomy. John XXIII recognized that the church was facing a crisis, as Constantine’s 1,600-year-old European Catholic State-Church paradigm had succumbed to the European nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Eurocentric church could not use traditional means to overcome secularism, communism, and authoritarianism as well as to expand the postcolonial church in the developing world. To confront this crisis, John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council on 11 October 1962, which completed the shift from the European Catholic State-Church paradigm, emphasizing temporal power, to a new Global Catholic Church-State paradigm emphasizing spiritual evangelization and political neutrality.65 The Global Catholic Church-State thus adopted an ecumenical approach of embracing all religious and political beliefs in order to work toward the betterment of humankind, equality, and nuclear non-proliferation.66 The most noticeable evidence of this change was the reform of the 400-year-old Tridentine Latin Mass, in which priests used the vernacular language to celebrate mass facing the congregation, thus allowing non-Latin speakers to understand the religious service. A larger percentage of prelates coming from non-European countries also joined the College of Cardinals,67 which since 1978 has voted for one Latin American and two Central European popes.

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Charles F. Delzell, “Remembering Mussolini,” Wilson Quarterly, 12/2 (1998), 126; Kevin J. Madigan, “How the Vatican Aided Mussolini: A New Account of a Grievous Historical Record,” Commentary 4/32 (2014), www.commentarymagazine.com/art icles/kevin-madigan/how-the-vatican-aided-mussolini/ (accessed 1 September 2020). Elisabetta Povoledo, “Pope Francis to Allow Access to Holocaust-Era Documents of Pius XII,” New York Times, 4 May 2019; David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Paul VI, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” Documents of Vatican Council II (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1965), 76. O’Malley, Vatican I, 242–248; Paul VI, “Pastoral Constitution,” 28. John F. Broderick, “The Sacred College of Cardinals: Size and Geographical Composition (1099–1986),” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae (1987), 11–13, 66–69.

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While the Global Catholic Church-State continued to promote evangelization and the ecumenical spirit of Vatican II, John XXIII’s successors continue to deal with complicated issues of nationalism, such as the Rwandan genocide that mixed ethnicity, religion, and nationalism.68 Communist nationalism and Marxism-Leninism also pose formidable obstacles, especially in the context of Sino-Vatican relations.

Communist Nationalism and the Global Catholic Church-State While European nationalism reduced the temporal power of the European Catholic State-Church, Marxism-Leninism threatened to eradicate all religious beliefs. According to communist nationalism, the communist party defines the nation’s culture, its history, its institutions, its ruling principles, and its religion. The communist state thus determines its distinctive nationalist agenda, and regards organized religion, especially organizations with foreign linkages, as reactionary institutions supporting the former ruling classes and foreign enemies. As the “opium of the people,” all religious institutions and “superstitious” beliefs must be fully coopted or eliminated by the communist state. Lenin and Stalin implemented a policy of militant “scientific atheism” in 1918, which entailed the imprisonment and execution of church leaders, destruction or conversion of churches, the melting down of church bells, etc.69 The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after the Second World War and the communist victory in China in 1949 severely limited the autonomy and capacity of all religions, including the Roman Catholic Church. The East German state controlled the official churches but prevented their participation in civil society, and dissolved religious orders, arrested bishops and priests, closed monasteries, seminaries and churches, hindered and monitored communication among the clergy, tried to corrupt church officials, hampered and damaged community life of congregations and parishes, and prevented religious education in the church . . . Individual believers and religious communities reacted by spontaneously reorganizing the church. Base communities, non-official study groups, grassroots movements for promoting religious socialization, 68

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J. J. Carney, Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). V. K. Tancher, “A New Phase in the Development of Scientific Atheism,” Soviet Studies in Philosophy, 3/2 (1964), 43–51.

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a clergy not admitted to services in the officially acknowledged church, clandestine publications, and so forth constituted an underground church.70

Following the imprisonment and torture of the primate of Hungary, Cardinal József Mindszenty, by the Hungarian Working People’s Party, Rome decided to cooperate with the communist states after 1963, while a separate group of Catholics formed “basis groups,” which were underground religious gatherings that refused to cooperate with the state.71 Poland was an exception. The Catholic Church was for centuries considered an integral element of Polish identity and civil society; the communist government thus allowed the church to be autonomous of the party.72 By the late 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allowed only five religions to be practiced officially and maintained strict controls over Buddhism, Daoism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. CCP General-Secretary Xi Jinping announced at the nineteenth National Party Congress in 2017 that all religions should be “Sinicized,” in order to “uphold the principle that religions in China must be Chinese in orientation, and provide active guidance to religions so that they can adapt themselves to socialist society.”73 Sinicization is the current Chinese version of communist nationalism, in which the state is requiring all five official religions to submit five-year plans that will surrender complete control over religious ideas and practices to prevent foreign concepts and ideas from polluting the “harmonious and healthy development of the church.”74 As for the Chinese Catholic Church, There is a need to increase the perception and recognition of Sinicization of Catholicism within the Church in order to push forward mutual adaptation between the Catholic Church and the socialist society. Clerics and Catholics must be led to implement the core values of socialism as well as to strengthen their own base to push forward with evangelization and pastoral work.75 70

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Miklós Tomka, “Coping with Persecution: Religious Change in Communism and in Post-Communist Reconstruction in Central Europe,” International Sociology, 13/2 (1998), 233. Steven Polgar, “A Summary of the Situation of the Hungarian Catholic Church,” Religion in Communist Lands, 12/1 (1984), 11–41. Adam Michnik, The Church and the Left (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). Xi Jinping, “Full Text of Xi Jinping’s Report at the 19th CPC National Congress” (18 October 2017), www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-11/04 /content_34115212.htm (accessed 1 September 2020). UCANews, “Protestant Five-Year Plan for Chinese Christianity,” 20 April 2018, www .ucanews.com/news/protestant-five-year-plan-for-chinese-christianity/82107 (accessed 1 September 2020). UCANews, “Sinicization of China Church: The Plan in Full,” 31 July 2018, www .ucanews.com/news/sinicization-of-china-church-the-plan-in-full/82931 (accessed 1 September 2020).

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Catholicism shared its fate with the other official religions. The state subsequently closed and bulldozed Chinese Catholic churches, toppled crosses from church steeples, and detained and imprisoned underground priests and pastors, as Xi Jinping strengthened control over all religious activities, be they official or unofficial. This communist nationalist strategy of Sinicization is not unique but has been implemented since 1949. Foreign Catholic and Protestant missionaries had established churches, schools, hospitals, and seminaries as a result of treaties that opened China following the First Opium War (1839–1842). After China entered into the Korean conflict in 1950, the state carried out mobilization campaigns against foreign agents of imperialism. The Chinese state imprisoned and expelled 5,500 foreign missionaries, including the Apostolic nuncio,76 nationalized missionary-run hospitals, colleges, and schools,77 and severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Answering to the CCP’s United Front Work Department, the Religious Affairs Bureau managed all religious activities through newly established religious patriotic associations. The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association supplanted Rome by assuming direct responsibility for Chinese personnel appointments, religious policies, and Catholic-related organizations. While Mao Zedong closed all religious institutions during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Deng Xiaoping revived the religious patriotic associations in the early 1980s but continued to follow the communist nationalism policy of complete religious control. The Roman Catholic Church directly responded to the threat of communist nationalism by establishing underground churches. Pius XI described the communist system as concealing “a false messianic idea.”78 Pius XII excommunicated all Catholics who supported communism, denounced Chinese communist interference in the Catholic Church, and excommunicated any CCP-appointed bishops.79 Having gained experience dealing with the communist parties in Eastern Europe, John Paul II advocated engaging with the 76

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John Craig William Keating, A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 98–101; Angelo S. Lazzarotto, “The Chinese Church at the Second Vatican Council,” trans. Betty Ann Maheu, Tripod, 17/100 (July–August 1999), 49. Edmond Tang and Jean-Paul Wiest (eds.), The Catholic Church in Modern China: Perspectives (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013). Pius XI, “Divini Redemptories: Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Atheistic Communism,” in The Papal Encyclicals (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1937). Pius XII, “Ad Anpostolorum Principis: Encyclical of Pope Pius XII on Communism and the Church in China,” The Vatican Encyclicals (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1958); Peter C. Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and the Division of Europe, 1943–1950 (Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

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official church, but also using the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples to support the underground church to promote Chinese social transformation.80 Many Chinese chose to attend the underground church that was managed by “unofficial” priests and bishops directly sanctioned by the pope. While the Polish Catholic Church was a major catalyst for the overthrow of the Polish communist government, the activism of the Chinese Catholic underground church divided the Chinese Catholic community.81 Eventually recognizing that the Polish and Chinese situations were different, John Paul II apologized in 2001 for “errors and limits of the past,” and appointed Pietro Parolin as the new under-secretary of state for relations with states, who sought to improve bilateral relations with the Vietnamese and Chinese communist states.82 In May 2007, Benedict XVI recognized the legitimacy of the PRC government and called for the reconciliation of all Chinese Catholics by reuniting the official and unofficial communities.83 In September 2018, Pope Francis and the Chinese state concluded a two-year provisional agreement concerning the legitimacy of official and unofficial bishops and priests, the first step in reconciling the Greater Chinese Church that includes Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao, which the Vatican proposed to extend in 2020 ad experimentum (on an experimental basis).84 While the global Roman Catholic Church has yet to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC, the church-state has learned that previous solutions for resolving communist nationalism were not appropriate to the Chinese case. While populist nationalists like Steve Bannon and Catholic nationalists like Cardinal Joseph Zen Zi-kiun of Hong Kong object to the compromise, 80

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Richard Madsen, China’s Catholics (Berkeley: California University Press, 1998); Timothy A. Byrnes, “The Polish Church: Catholic Hierarchy and Polish Politics,” in Paul Christopher Manuel, Lawrence C. Reardon, and Clyde Wilcox (eds.), The Catholic Church and the Nation State (Washington, DC: Georgetown, 2006), 103–116. Fleur Cowan, “Vatican Looks towards China without Compromise,” 1 December 2005, US Department of State Cable, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05VATICAN543_a .html (accessed 1 September 2020). Melinda Henneberger, “The Pope Apologizes for the Catholic Church’s ‘Errors’ in China,” New York Times, 25 October 2001. Benedict XVI, “Letter of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to the Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of the Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of China,” 27 May 2007, https://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/letters/2007/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_let_20070527_china.pdf. Andrea Tornielli, “Santa Sede e Cina le ragione di un Accordo sulla nomina dei vescovi” [The Holy See and China, the Reasons for an Accord on Bishopric Nominations], L’Osservatore Romano, 29 September 2020.

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Francis and his secretary of state, Cardinal Parolin, believe this is the best approach to deal with Chinese communist nationalism . . . at this moment.

Whither the Global Catholic Church-State? Of the political and religious challenges facing Francis and the Global Catholic Church-State today, none is more important than combating the sexual abuse of minors. Previous popes and bishops treated such abuse as a sin, from which the perpetrators could be rehabilitated.85 However, newspaper exposés and legal lawsuits revealed the church’s failure of accountability, which has forced leaders to reassert national sovereignty over the church’s transnational religious activities. Governments in Europe, the Americas, and Australia thus have opened extensive investigations, issued official reports, and convicted priests, including the former prefect of the Holy See’s Secretariat for the Economy, Cardinal George Pell. How has the global Catholic Church dealt with the political nationalism stirred up by the sexual abuse crisis? After decades of inaction, Francis strengthened church accountability. He appointed Boston’s Cardinal Archbishop Sean O’Malley to oversee the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, required all Chilean bishops accused of covering up sexual abuse to submit resignation letters, and laicized former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of the United States. After discussing the situation with his Council of Cardinal Advisors, Francis required each bishops’ conference president to attend the first ever global summit on the protection of minors in February 2019. He called for an “all-out battle” against sexual abuse, and subsequently issued guidelines and laws protecting minors and vulnerable people in Vatican City, which will act as a template for the global Catholic Church.86 Francis is also formulating a new apostolic constitution that will promote a dramatic reform of the Roman Curia, which will include greater power being given to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors and a renewed emphasis on evangelization.87

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Jo-Renee Formicola, “The Politics of Clerical Sexual Abuse,” Religions, 7/1 (2016), 9. See www.protectionofminors.va/content/tuteladeiminori/it.html (accessed 1 September 2020). Carol Glatz, “Curia Reforms Put Priority on Evangelization, Synodality, Cardinals Say,” National Catholic Reporter, 23 April 2019.

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During the Jewish Christian Church Era, the European Catholic StateChurch Era, and the current Global Catholic Church-State Era, Catholic leaders adapted their strategies to achieve their long-term goal of global evangelization. The universalistic teachings of Peter and Paul expanded Christianity beyond its Jewish roots to attract the polytheistic peoples of the Roman Empire. The bishop of Rome adapted the “gift of Constantine” to transform the Latin state-church into the most influential political, economic, and religious power of medieval Europe. John XXIII and his successors transformed the Eurocentric church into one of the world’s most important transnational religious institutions, the 1.3 billion adherents of which span the globe. Part of the church’s success also has been its ability to adapt to nationalist pressures. While failing to reunite the western and eastern churches during the crusades and maintain a Christian monopoly over the Mediterranean basin, the medieval church successfully learned to unify disparate European powers to contain Islamic religious nationalism. While failing to maintain a religious monopoly over northern Europe and to retain temporal control over the Papal States, the bishop of Rome learned to cooperate with democratic and authoritarian governments as well as fascist dictators and communist autocrats. In this current crisis, leaders of the Global Catholic Church-State are responding by strengthening accountability and ensuring the safety of the church’s most vulnerable believers. While many of the crimes against the latter have been known for decades,88 the pope, the Curia, and the bishops have been forced to confront the perpetrators in order to contain nationalist calls to sanction the church, incarcerate its priests, and confiscate its wealth. Time will tell whether Pope Francis will succeed in achieving accountability and global evangelization.

Further Reading Bireley, Robert, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999). Cambridge History of Christianity, 9 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006– 2010). Cameron, Euan, The European Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Carney, J. J., Rwanda before the Genocide: Catholic Politics and Ethnic Discourse in the Late Colonial Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 88

Tom Roberts, “Bishops Were Warned of Abusive Priests,” National Catholic Reporter, 30 March 2009.

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lawrence c. reardon Helleiner, Eric, and Andreas Pickel (eds.), Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Madsen, Richard, China’s Catholics (Berkeley: California University Press 1998). Michnik, Adam, The Church and the Left (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). O’Malley, John W., Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Phillips, Jonathan P., The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Snyder, Jack L., From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

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. . . in their spirit and in their aims Islam and nationalism are diametrically opposed to each other. Abu-l-ʻAla’ Mawdudi (1941)1 . . . there is no contradiction between Arab nationalism and Islam. Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz (1952)2

Introduction Is nationalism compatible with Islamic belief and practice? Debates on this question began with the rise of modern nationalism in the Muslim world during the nineteenth century and continue in varying forms in the twentyfirst century. The middle of the twentieth century marked an important moment in the evolution of these debates. Muslim leaders and activists worked to define the political and cultural identity of the Muslim countries that were becoming independent from European imperialism. They were also defining the possible relationships between Islam and nationalism. The broad spectrum of their views reflects the fundamental issues involved in deciding whether nationalism is compatible with Islam. Was nationalism to be the central element in defining the newly independent countries? Some influential Muslim intellectuals like the South Asian activist Abu-l-‘Ala’ Mawdudi (1903–1979) argued that “Islam and nationalism are diametrically opposed to each other,” but others, like Abd al-Rahman alBazzaz (1913–1973), an Arab nationalist activist and later prime minister of Iraq, saw “no contradiction between Arab nationalism and Islam.” He argued 1

2

Sayyid Abulala Maudoodi [Abu-l-‘Ala’ Mawdudi], Nationalism and India, trans. Qamar-ud -din Khan (Lahore: Tarjuman-ul-Quran, 1941), 9. ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-Bazzaz, “Islam and Arab Nationalism,” trans. Sylvia G. Haim, Die Welt des Islams, new series, 3/3–4 (1954), 204.

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that although Islam “is a universal religion suitable for all peoples [it] is undoubtedly a religion revealed first to the Arabs themselves; in this sense it is their own special religion.”3 At the same time, other leaders were advocating ideological syntheses. In Indonesia in 1945, for example, the nationalist leader Sukarno defined the Five Principles (Pancasila) of the new state to include both nationalism and religion, affirming that “the state of free Indonesia shall be founded upon belief in God.”4 This synthesis continues as the framework for politics in Indonesia in the twenty-first century. These diverse positions from the middle of the twentieth century reflect the broad spectrum of views that characterize two centuries of deliberations, ranging from rejection of nationalism as a form of unbelief to viewing Islam as an integral part of nationalist identities. Islam and nationalism provide foundations for modern collective identities that are sometimes competing and sometimes complementary. Nationalism provides the identity narratives for what many people view as the basic modern state structure, the nation-state. However, although by the 1920s the nation-state was seen by many as “the legitimate international norm” for states,5 alternative definitions of modern state structures also existed. Islam provides one of the significant alternative polity visions, competing initially with imperialist and nationalist models and then with communist and other radical visions. By the end of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of radical nationalist-socialist regimes in the Muslim world reflected the new ideological realities of twenty-first-century globalized politics. It is possible to argue, as Arjun Appadurai has, that in this new context, “the very epoch of the nation-state is near its end.”6 In these contexts of changing global affairs, Islam continues to provide definitions of collective identity that are effective in twenty-first-century political-cultural affairs. Islamic historical experience provides a cumulative tradition of collective identity. The group of the first believers around Muhammad was already identified in the Qur’an as an “ummah,” the Arabic term for “community.” As this community of believers – ummah – expanded over fourteen centuries, its institutions evolved and provided a cosmopolitan base for local and regional Muslim identifications. This sense of identity was sometimes 3 4

5

6

Al-Bazzaz, “Islam and Arab Nationalism,” 206. Lahirnja Pantjasila (The Birth of Pantjasila): President Soekarno’s Speech, 2nd edition (Djakarta: Ministry of Information, Republic of Indonesia, 1952), 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), 113. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 19.

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associated with particular political institutions like the medieval caliphate, but it is primarily associated with transregional and local networks of believers. In the era of modern nationalism, the ummah has been seen by some as a base for a nationalistic type of pan-Islamism, while others view the ummah as the authentically Islamic alternative to a nation-based identity. However, although the concept may be defined in many different ways, all Muslims accept the concept of Muslims as members of an ummah. This historic sense of community shapes how Muslims view modern nationalism and its relationships with Islamic faith and practice. Modern nationalism also has historic roots and has evolved in the past two centuries. As nationalism has changed, Muslim participation in and opposition to nationalist movements have also changed. The interactions between emerging nationalisms and Islamic non-nationalist alternatives shape the sociopolitical dynamics of global Muslim life. As the debates in the middle of the twentieth century show, three general alternatives developed in the interactions between Islam and nationalism: primarily nationalist rather than religious definitions of modern Muslim nation-states (like Algeria), development of Islamically legitimated non-nation-state polities (like Saudi Arabia and Iran), and creation of nationalist–Islamic syntheses as the foundation for political authority (like Indonesia). These frameworks created by the responses of Muslims to modern nationalism evolved over the past two centuries. In this process, Muslims were not simply choosing between religion and modernity, since modernization did not result in the end of religion (as some theorists had predicted). Instead, the alternatives created by Muslims are part of the processes of the emergence of what S. N. Eisenstadt calls “multiple modernities.”7 In many ways, even the most traditional or conservative Muslim responses to modern nationalism are more modern than medieval in their approaches and perspectives. The evolution of Muslim interactions with modern nationalism is shaped by both Islamic awareness and the changing nature of global modernity. In the two centuries of interactions, five phases or eras might be noted. The first is the century before the First World War, followed by the era of global imperialism and rising nationalism from that war through the Second World War. A third is the era of postcolonial independence during the 1950s and 1960s, leading to the era of the rise of political Islam in the 1970s–1990s. Finally, the twenty-first century is the frame for the fifth era, a time of global transformations of politics and religion. 7

S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Reconstruction of Religious Arenas in the Framework of ‘Multiple Modernities,’” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 29/3 (2000), 591–611.

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The Beginnings of Modern Nationalism in the Muslim World During the century before the First World War, modern nationalism was a new and sometimes revolutionary vision of communal identity in Europe. It was often viewed as a threat to the established political order, but by the end of the nineteenth century, national identity became the major legitimizing foundation for political society. Muslims observed this transformation and some included nationalism in their visions of modernizing reform. Early in the nineteenth century, this vision tended to be a recognition that patriotism – loyalty to the geographic homeland – gave strength to modernizing countries. Rifa’a Badawi Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) was possibly the first to advocate “love of the homeland” in this way. He used the Arabic term watan for homeland or fatherland, and wataniyya became a common translation of “nationalism.” Al-Tahtawi was educated at al-Azhar, the historic Islamic university in Cairo, and became the imam for a group of students sent to Paris (1826–1831) as a part of the Egyptian modernizing reform program. On his return to Egypt he became influential as a translator of European books. His territorial concept of nation was inclusive, viewing “son of the fatherland” as including someone “native born or a refugee who has been naturalized,” and he argued that “God disposed men to work together for the improvement of their fatherland and willed that they relate to one another as members of one family.”8 Territory-based nationalism was not explicitly Islamic but, as in the conceptualization of al-Tahtawi, it could be incorporated into an Islamic political perspective, creating a synthesis of nationalism and Islam. It was, however, identified by geographic location rather than by religious affiliation or ethnic identity. An Egyptian “son of the fatherland” could be non-Muslim. Nationalism based on geographic region became an important communal identity as nationalism developed in places like Syria and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Nationalism based on ethnic identity, usually built on a common language, became an important mode of nationalism in Europe and then globally during the nineteenth century. Non-Muslim minorities within the Ottoman Empire like the Greeks and the Serbs were among the early ethnic nationalist groups within the Muslim world. Arab Christians in Lebanon and Syria were 8

Rifa’a Badawi Rafi al-Tahtawi, “Fatherland and Patriotism,” in John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito (eds.), Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9.

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among the leaders in an Arabic literary and linguistic revival in the middle of the century in the Ottoman Arab provinces. This literary renaissance involved recognition, by both Muslims and Christians, of the importance of Islam in the Arab national identity. However, the emphasis was on the shared Arabic culture, making the movement more secular than religious. This growing sense of Arab communal identity late in the nineteenth century included ethnic and other minorities. As nationalist and liberal constitutionalist movements grew stronger in the Ottoman Empire in general, central government responses resulted in policies of political repression, especially during the reign of Sultan Abd alHamid II (r. 1876–1909). Small Arab activist groups developed, especially in Syria and Lebanon, advocating somewhat nationalist-style goals. However, the Arab communal identity movement was not yet calling for the creation of an Arab nation-state and independence. The major opposition group that emerged in the Ottoman Empire by the beginning of the twentieth century was the Young Turk movement organized around the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The CUP was a movement calling for Ottoman reform and was not explicitly nationalist. In fact, Arab activists were involved in the CUP as well as in a number of small, more explicitly Arab organizations. The CUP succeeded in overthrowing Abd al-Hamid II in a coup empowered by military support in 1908 and the new Ottoman regime was initially less repressive. The CUP in power became more Turkish nationalist in its orientation and Arab nationalists were less supportive of CUP policies. The Arab movement became more directly political by 1913, when the most active groups organized a congress in Paris. Participants in the congress included both Muslims and Christians and, although there were factional divisions, the congress called for decentralization of Ottoman administration and greater recognition of Arab rights. The 1913 Arab Congress in Paris reflected the broader nationalist trends in the Muslim world at that time. Nationalism continued to be primarily affirmation of cultural identity rather than a call for the creation of sovereign nation-states. However, as the Paris Congress showed, nationalist programs began to call for political rights and recognition. Similar developments of nationalism took place across the Muslim world. In the Balkans, where non-Muslim nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire had gained independence, Muslim activists tended not to seek independent nation-states. In Bosnia, for example, even after the occupation of the country by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878, politically active Muslims, representing a minority in the empire, worked for autonomy 399

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not independence. This can be seen in the policies of the Muslim National Organization, the political party formed by Muslim leaders in 1906, advocating Bosnian cultural and religious autonomy. In the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), there were militant movements opposing Dutch control during the nineteenth century, but they were Islamically identified movements rather than nationalist. The first effective political party was Sarekat Islam, formed in 1912. Initially, it cooperated with an Islamic modernist reform movement and worked for political reforms within the framework of Dutch rule. However, with these movements across the Muslim world, the foundations were laid for later, more European-style nationalist movements in which Islam was important in the cultural definitions of the emerging nationalist identities. Muslim territorial and ethnic nationalisms developed in the age of European imperialist expansion in the nineteenth century. However, the major Muslim movements opposing this expansion were Islamic in identification rather than nationalist. The social organizations with longstanding traditions of devotional practices – the Sufi brotherhoods – provided the structural basis for much of this opposition. The military opposition to French expansion in Algeria led by the Amir Abd alQadir al-Jaza’iri (1808–1883) and in West Africa by al-Hajj Umar Tal (c. 1794–1864), and the opposition to Russian expansion in the Caucasus led by Imam Shamil (1797–1871) provide important examples. A millennialist-Mahdist movement overthrew the Turco-Egyptian imperial regime in Sudan and established an independent state (1881– 1898), but it was based on Islamic rule, not nationalism. During the twentieth century, such movements were often viewed as protonationalist and were sometimes claimed by later nationalist movements as historical antecedents, giving Islamic legitimacy to more Europeanstyle nationalisms. However, in themselves, they were not seeking to establish independent nation-states. While most of the relationships between Islam and nationalism were pragmatic and operational, by the late nineteenth century, more ideological responses to European imperialism and nationalism began to be articulated. A leading figure in this was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–1897), who was born in Iran and traveled widely in the Muslim world. As a charismatic teacher, he developed a following among the political and intellectual elites from Egypt and Istanbul to India and beyond. Especially through his work with his follower Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), he shaped a whole generation of Muslim modernist thinkers. 400

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Al-Afghani’s main theme was the call for transnational Muslim unity. While he supported anti-imperialist nationalism in Egypt and elsewhere, he insisted that local nationalisms be placed in the broader context of the whole ummah. The goal was the creation of an ummah-wide coalition of Muslim peoples. Nationalism was not rejected but it was subordinated to the broader pan-Islamic unity. Journals associated with al-Afghani and then Abduh, like al-Manar, spread these ideas throughout the Muslim world. The core of a sense of pan-Islamic political modernity transcending but not eliminating local and regional identities became established as a foundation for modern Muslim politics. The Ottoman sultan, Abd al-Hamid II, initiated a set of pan-Islamic policies, self-identifying as the caliph of all Muslims and providing support for Muslims under European rule. Many of these policies were continued after his overthrow. The ineffectiveness of this formal Ottoman pan-Islamic approach was shown during the First World War. The Ottoman sultan declared jihad against the Allied forces, but few Muslims in territories controlled by Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia responded. Although a sense of Islamic unity was shared among Muslims, pan-Islam did not provide an alternative to emerging Muslim nationalisms. This difference between sentiment and formal policy with regard to ummah unity complicates the relationships between Islam and nationalism throughout the modern era. By the beginning of the twentieth century, some European-style nationalist movements began to be more than small elite groups of intellectuals, establishing organizations and political parties advocating independence from European control. For example, the British occupied Egypt in 1882, and in the 1890s, some groups among Western-educated Egyptians began to call for British withdrawal and Egyptian independence, possibly still within the Ottoman Empire. The leading figure was Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908). In the late nineteenth century, newspapers developed as major vehicles for presenting political views and Kamil founded a newspaper, al-Liwa, for presentation of the emerging sense of Egyptian nationalism. Although he had a Western education, with limited formal education in Islam, and is often described as a secular nationalist, he supported ideas of pan-Islamic opposition to European imperialism. He viewed nationalism and Islam as compatible, stating, “I believe that religion and nationalism are inseparable twins, and that he whose heart is possessed by religion would love his fatherland.”9 9

Quoted in Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 87.

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By 1907, growing anti-British public opinion opened the way for establishing formal political parties calling for some form of Egyptian independence. A group in the intellectual tradition of Abduh formed the Ummah Party, advocating a more gradualist approach, and Kamil established the National Party (al-Hizb al-Watani), which became the voice for activist nationalism. However, the National Party fragmented following Kamil’s death in 1908. Nevertheless, nationalist political parties advocating “national” independence had become a part of Egyptian (and Muslim) political life. The development of Muslim nationalist groups calling for independence from European rule took diverse forms in the early twentieth century. Most, like the National Party in Egypt, included Islam in their conceptualization of national identity, but they did not define themselves in Islamically theological terms. This pragmatic synthesis of nationalism and Islam can be seen in the Young Tunisian movement and in the emergence of nationalist attitudes in the Sarekat Islam in Indonesia. In British India, Muslims were a large minority but heirs to the Muslim rule of India by the Mughal Empire. After the formal dissolution of the Mughal state following a major revolt against the British in 1857, Muslim communal leaders tended to work with the British. Major movements involved religious reformism rather than nationalism. However, with the emergence of Hindu-led nationalism and the founding of the Indian National Congress, Muslim leaders called for recognition of Muslim rights within India. In 1906, the All-India Muslim League was established. It initially worked to secure appropriate Muslim participation in representative government and later in the century became the major advocate for creating a Muslim-majority state in parts of South Asia. By the First World War, throughout the Muslim world European-style nationalist movements developed, calling for independent nation-states, along with continuing movements based on territorial, ethnic, or religious identities. The global transformations involved in the First World War changed the relationships between Islam and nationalism. However, nineteenth-century developments provided an important foundation for how twentieth-century nationalism related to Islam.

Global Imperialism and Rising Nationalism in the Interwar Period In the period from the First World War through the Second, nationalism in the Muslim world developed in important ways. Nationalism took many different forms but three general themes – populism, anti-imperialism, and 402

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national identity creation or affirmation – are involved in these changes. The old nationalist organizations which had been largely associations of the modern, educated elite increasingly gained mass followings. In this process, nationalism became more explicitly anti-imperialist, calling for independence (or at least self-determination) in the global context of the First World War and the subsequent consolidation of European imperialist domination. New and explicitly national identities were defined as the basis for the societies having the rights of sovereign self-determination. In all of these themes, Islam was an important element. The evolution of Arab nationalism during and after the First World War provides a significant example of these trends. Early in the war, Ottoman governors in the Arab provinces of the empire began to suppress the Arab nationalists. Those people were in communication with a prominent Islamic official, the Grand Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, who, with his sons Faisal and Abdullah, was actively negotiating with the British regarding a revolt against the Ottomans. With British promises to support the establishment of an Arab state under the Grand Sharif’s leadership, the Arab Revolt began in 1916, and ended with the conquest of Syria and Lebanon in 1918. Sharif Hussein became king of the Hejaz (western Arabia) and Faisal was proclaimed king of Syria. This family, the Hashimites, became an important political force in the region. However, the British and French had also secretly negotiated a division of Ottoman Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. As a result, in the peace agreements following the war, France gained control of Syria and Lebanon, and brought an end to the new Arab state in 1920. The British controlled what became the League of Nations mandates of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, establishing Faisal as king of Iraq and Abdullah as ruler of Transjordan – both under British imperial control. The triumph of European imperialism meant that Arab nationalism focused on anti-imperialist visions of independence. Calls for independence involved a blending of diverse visions – Arab unity, Islamic unity, and local territorial sovereignty. However, the separate states based on the Sykes–Picot Agreement became the political framework for nationalist activities. Despite the appeal of broader visions of unity, when the Arabs of southwest Asia became independent following the Second World War, it was in the states defined by imperialist negotiations, and the most effective political organizations had local-national bases in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. Religious and ethnic diversity in each of these states made defining a distinctively national identity difficult, and nationalist politics was shaped by factionalism. 403

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Islam provided an important but changing element in evolving Arab nationalist ideologies. In the interwar period, the changes are reflected in the ideas of two intellectual activists influential in shaping Arab nationalist visions. Shakib Arslan (1869–1946), a Lebanese Druze, was active in Ottoman politics and then, after the First World War, was an effective advocate of Arab nationalism. He spent much of his life in exile in Europe. He was in the tradition of Abduh, emphasizing that nationalism must be a part of the broader Islamic unity of the ummah. However, by the 1930s, the new generation of Arab nationalist ideologues shifted the emphasis, as antiimperialist advocacy involved giving greater attention to territorial and regional-cultural identities. Sati’ al-Husri (1880–1964), a Syrian Arab who worked in British-controlled Iraq following the First World War, emphasized the importance of language in shaping national identity and became an influential theorist of pan-Arab nationalism. He gave Arab unity priority over Muslim unity, arguing that “Muslim unity . . . is not capable of realization . . . except through Arab unity,” because of the central role of Arabs in Islam.10 Although ideologies were being clearly developed, Arab nationalist political parties tended to be small and competing. Parties tended to be defined territorially and to operate within the existing state boundaries. When a panArab organization was created at the end of the Second World War, it was the Arab League, an association of independent and separate Arab-majority states, not a united Arab union. The Arab League reflected the long history of the difference between the general sense of shared heritage and the actual policies of states. In this, as in the past, Islam provided an element in that shared heritage, but the states and the League did not explicitly call for the formal Islamization of state or society. Nationalist political parties were more effectively organized in other parts of the Muslim world. They reflected the broad trends of populism, antiimperialism, and national-identity affirmation, and represented the activism of a new generation of leaders of nationalism. In Egypt at the end of the First World War, Sa’d Zaghlul (1857–1927), a prominent political leader, led an effort to send a delegation (wafd) to present the case for Egyptian independence in the peace negotiations. The British refused, and arrested and exiled Zaghlul. Mass protests took place throughout the country, leading to what became identified as the “Revolution of 1919.” When Zaghlul was allowed 10

Sati’ al-Husri, “Muslim Unity and Arab Unity,” in Donohue and Esposito, Islam in Transition, 50.

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back in Egypt, he organized the Wafd Party, which replaced the National Party as the major nationalist voice. The party called for British withdrawal and Egyptian independence, and was able to win parliamentary elections in the interwar period. By the end of the Second World War, it was the largest political party in Egypt, competing with the monarchy for political dominance within a formally independent Egypt (which was still militarily occupied by Britain). The Wafd was an Egyptian territorial nationalist party in which Muslim and Christian Egyptians worked together. Zaghlul as well as Wafd leaders following his death in 1927 were modernist in their understanding of Islam but did not propose either secularist or Islamizing policies in defining Egyptian nationalism. The major Islamic organization to emerge in the interwar period, the Muslim Brotherhood, also advocated Egyptian nationalism, but placed it within the framework of broader Islamic unity, arguing that “when we act for Egypt, we act for Arabism, the East, and for Islam.”11 This spectrum reflects similar developments elsewhere in the Muslim world. The major competition in defining nationalism was not between antireligious secularism and fundamentalist Islam, it was between territorial or cultural or ethnic nationalism and religious national communalism, with non-religious nationalisms being the most influential in the years immediately following the Second World War. In Tunisia, at the end of the First World War, the heirs to the Young Tunisians created the Destour Party, which called for an elected parliament. However, the new generation of political activists led by Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000) established the Neo-Destour Party in 1934, calling for independence. The new party attracted popular support and adopted activist opposition to French control. It gave little attention to Islam in defining its goals. In Indonesia, the old nationalist group, Sarekat Islam, continued to have support in the 1920s, but a new generation established more activist nationalist organizations, with a broader populist base. In 1927 the new activists established the Persikatan Nasional Indonesia (PNI) and Sukarno (1901–1970), then a young student activist, became a key leader. He argued for a united Indonesian identity reflecting a synthesis of nationalism, Islam, and Marxism (which was advocated by activist communists in the new generation). This effort provided the basis for Pancasila (Five Principles), which 11

Quoted in Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 264.

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became the guiding vision for the independent Indonesian state after the Second World War. Although the goal of creating sovereign nation-states inspired nationalist movements in the interwar period, Islam was important in defining alternative state identities in state-based religious nationalisms. The establishment of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, creating a state formally identified with the Wahhabi tradition of Islamic revivalism, involved definition of a Saudi identity that was state-based, transtribal, and explicitly self-defined as Islamic. In Sudan, the son of the founder of the nineteenth-century Mahdist movement reorganized the mass following into a nationalist movement calling for “Sudan for the Sudanese” and opposed to the nationalists calling for unity with Egypt. This populist religious movement supported the state-based “national” Sudanese identity and became one of the major political parties after the Second World War. The diversity of how Islam shaped state-defined nationalisms can be seen in Turkey and South Asia. The First World War brought an end to the Ottoman Empire and it was replaced by the nationalist Turkish Republic, led by Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), who later adopted the name Atatürk. The nationalists rejected the idea of reestablishing the caliphate and the republic was shaped in important ways by the efforts to restrict conservative religious institutions. Secularism (laiklik) became one of the constitutional principles of Kemalism, but it meant control of religious institutions by the state rather than a rejection of Islam or religion in general. This approach accepted Islam as an element in the Turkish cultural-national identity. In South Asia, the evolution of communal politics led some South Asian Muslim leaders in the Muslim League and other groups to think of Indian Muslims as a “national” community. This nation came to be called Pakistan, using an acronym from Muslim-majority areas in India. Muhammad Iqbal, a leading Muslim intellectual, called for a separate Muslim state during the 1930s and the president of the All-India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), argued in an address in 1940, that Muslims “are a nation . . . and they must have their homelands, their territory and their state.”12 This identification of the South Asian Muslim community as a nation was viewed by important Muslim ideologues like Mawdudi as a rejection of the transnational identity of the ummah. 12

“Jinnah: Presidential Address at the All-India Muslim League Lahore Session, March 1940,” in William H. McNeill and Marilyn Robinson Waldman (eds.), The Islamic World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 460.

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Islam and Nationalism in the Postcolonial Era after the Second World War By the end of the Second World War, it appeared that imperialist control was ending in Muslim countries. In the postcolonial world of the 1950s and 1960s, diverse nationalist movements emerged as responsible for political leadership in most Muslim countries. Even non-nation-state monarchies adopted many policies that were generally “nation-building” in character. Again, a new generation of activists reshaped the nature of nationalism and redefined the political role of Islam. The new debates were between old-style, usually middle-class nationalists and new nationalists advocating revolutionary transformations of society. Independence created the challenge of defining the identity of the new nation-states. The old battles of fighting foreign rule were replaced by the competitions within the newly independent political elites. Across the Muslim world, intellectuals and activists defined competing visions of the hoped-for new society and nationalism provided the framework and vocabulary for most of these programs. In many countries, the actual programs involved various forms of populist-nationalist authoritarianism, often implemented by idealistic (and ambitious) young military officers who took control from the old-style nationalists by military coups. From the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, military rulers in many places became important definers of the new self-identified revolutionary nationalism. The global context of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union created a situation within which radical movements could be defined in terms of non-alignment with superpower blocs as a part of the new style of nationalism. Nasser in Egypt (Jamal Abd al-Nasir, 1918–1970) led the group of Free Officers that took control of Egypt in 1952, replacing the old nationalist Wafd Party and the monarchy. Nasserism called for Arab unity and created the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria in 1958–1961. It also involved programs of land reform and economic development. Military coups in Syria and Iraq brought to power groups with similar aspirations. Sometimes military leaders in these countries utilized the ideology of the Ba’ath Party, which advocated pan-Arabism and a form of radical socialism. In the 1960s, in Indonesia and Algeria, the nationalist parties that had won independence were overthrown and replaced by military regimes. Whether or not the programs were actually radical, “revolution” became a major theme in the developing political ideologies. Some of the older nationalist movements survived the transition to independence, but they did so by

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persuasively becoming advocates of revolution. Habib Bourguiba, who continued to lead Tunisia until being overthrown in 1987 in a different political era, competed with Nasserism, arguing that “to maintain and develop our independence it is essential to raise the living standard of the great masses of the people . . . Nationalism implies social action – a revolutionary change in the condition of the people.”13 Even conservative monarchs adapted revolutionary slogans. The reform program of the Shah of Iran in the 1960s, for example, was proclaimed as the White Revolution. In this era of postindependence nationalism, Islam was not significantly visible in the visions and programs. A well-informed analyst of ideological developments in the Middle East, Albert Hourani, writing in the 1960s, described the situation, noting that the “idea of a specifically Islamic government is put forward more rarely . . . The idea of an Islamic society, moreover, seems to have lost its hold on most educated people.”14 The new nationalism was not explicitly anti-Islamic, but Islam was viewed only as a part of the revolutionary vision. Nasser, for example, in defining the socialism of the revolutionary Arab nationalism, argued that “our socialism is scientific socialism . . . but we do not say that we have left religion. On the contrary, we say that the religion that belongs to us is a socialist religion, and Islam in the Middle Ages put into effect the first socialist experiment in the world.”15 Ba’ath Party ideologues, both Muslim and Christian, presented similar arguments, identifying Islam as an integral part of socialist pan-Arabism. One of the most radical leftist nationalists, Ahmed Sékou Touré (1922–1984), who led Guinea in West Africa to independence, said that Islam and the revolution were “at one in their opposition . . . to the exploitation of man by man.”16 Suharto (1921–2008), the military ruler who replaced Sukarno as leader of Indonesia, maintained the Pancasila with its inclusion of religion. Nationalism in the Muslim world in the era of independence, even in its radical leftist formats, was not secular, although it defined Islam within contemporary radical frameworks. Islamic organizations and institutions that might represent alternative political power centers were suppressed or controlled, continuing policies 13

14

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Habib Bourguiba, “Nationalism: Antidote to Communism,” Foreign Affairs, 35/4 (1957), 647. Albert Hourani, “Near Eastern Nationalism Yesterday and Today,” Foreign Affairs, 42/1 (1963), 132–133. “322. Khita¯b al-Ra’ı¯s Jama¯l Abd al-Na¯sir fı¯ Majlis al-Ummah, Cairo, 1964/11/12,” alWatha¯’iq al-Arabiyyah, 1964 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, n.d.), 554. Ahmed Sékou Touré, L’Islam au service du peuple (Conakry: Révolution Démocratique Africaine No. 100, October 1977), 9.

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similar to those imposed earlier in Turkey by Atatürk. Although the Islamically authoritative al-Azhar University in Cairo had criticized the nationalist “heresy” in the interwar era, it became a strong institutional voice supporting Nasserism, adopting a view similar to that of al-Bazzaz in the “identification of Islam with Arab nationalism.”17 More radical organizations did present Islamic critiques of the new nationalism but they were suppressed. The Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed in Egypt and an influential Brotherhood radical, Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), was executed. A prominent religious scholar in Iran, Ayatullah Khumayni (1902–1989), was forced into exile for his opposition to the Shah’s White Revolution, but major movements of opposition to these repressive policies did not emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. The critique of nationalism from an Islamic perspective by people like Khumayni and Qutb, however, became basic to the political Islam that emerged in the 1970s. Khumayni argued that nationalism “that results in the creation of enmity between Muslims and splits the ranks of the believers is against Islam”18 and he thought that monarchy – national or dynastic – was anti-Islamic in principle. Qutb asserted that the Prophet Muhammad could have united the Arabs, freeing them from foreign control and tribal warfare, but God did not lead him along the path of Arab unity. He argued that the “way is not to free the earth from the hand of the Roman tyrannical demon or the Persian tyrannical demon, replacing it with the hand of an Arab tyrannical demon . . . There is no sovereignty except God’s and no legal path except from God.”19 Influenced by the analysis of Mawdudi, Qutb argued that Muslim authoritarian nationalists were a return to the ways of the tribalism of pre-Islamic ignorance or Jahilyyah, and it was therefore legitimate to engage them in jihad.

Political Islam and Nationalism in the Late Twentieth Century By the 1970s, the radical nationalist regimes and reformist monarchies had not fulfilled their visions and their repressive policies began to stimulate populist opposition. Although there were well-organized communist parties 17

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Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 117–119. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, translated and annotated by Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981), 302. Sayyid Qutb, Ma’a¯lim fı¯ al-Tarı¯q (Cairo: Dar al-Sharuq, [1970]), 24–25.

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and leftist factions in the opposition in most Muslim countries, their influence was primarily among the educated and professional elites. It was movements identified with Islam, like the Muslim Brotherhood and the followers of Khumayni, which had the ability to mobilize mass support. The 1970s and 1980s became an era of new political dynamics in the Muslim world. The former ideological dominance of nationalism noted in the 1960s was replaced by the “movement of Islam-as-an-ideology [political Islam],” identified by a well-informed analyst of Muslim politics in the early 1990s, As’ad Abu Khalil, as “the single most popular movement in the Arab world,”20 and this tended to be true in the rest of the Muslim world as well. The new dynamics of political Islam, from the 1970s to the 1990s, involve transitions in the relationships between Islam and evolving nationalism. The careers of influential leaders in the rise of political Islam reflect these important changes. Rashid Ghannouchi (b. 1941) was one of the organizers of the Islamic Tendency Movement (MTI) in Tunisia in the 1980s and then, by the 1990s, became the leader of the Islamist political party, an-Nahdah. He began his political career as a student activist supporting Arab nationalism, but he later became convinced that nationalism was an ideological foreign import, and he found Qutb’s vision persuasive. However, in 1978–1979 he saw the need to go beyond conceptual advocacy and to create an organization dealing with the concrete problems of Tunisian society. In that context, the movement he led was pragmatic and not militant in its methodology. However, it represented a shift from nationalist activism to a politicization of an Islamically defined vision. In Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim (b. 1947) followed a similar path. As a student, he was an activist in supporting Malay rights and development in the pluralist Malaysian society. However, he later recalled that “we were impatient and angry about the plight of the Malays, their education, rural development, rural health . . . There seemed to be no moral foundation and no spiritual guidance [from the government]. We turned to Islam to fill this vacuum.”21 The organization that he helped to create in 1971, Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM), shifted the emphasis from Malay identity issues to Islamicbased sociopolitical reform. ABIM became an important manifestation of political Islam in Southeast Asia. 20

21

As’ad Abu Khalil, “A New Arab Ideology? The Rejuvenation of Arab Nationalism,” Middle East Journal, 46/1 (Winter 1992), 32. Quoted in John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Makers of Contemporary Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 179.

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This transition also is visible in the policies of authoritarian nationalist military rulers. In Sudan, for example, a young officer, Ja’far al-Numayri (1930–2009), took control of the state in a coup in 1969. He began as a strong advocate of Arab unity and social reforms following the Nasserite model. However, his policies became more Islamically oriented as he interacted politically with Hasan al-Turabi (1932–2016), a significant Islamist ideologue and leader of the Sudan Muslim Brotherhood. In 1983, Numayri ordered the implementation of a conservative version of Shari’ah. Turabi objected to certain aspects of this policy, but, although he was globally known for his advocacy of activist Islamic renewal, he also operated as an important actor in local Sudanese politics and accepted the 1983 laws. Political Islam gained global attention during 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah in Iran and the establishment of the Islamic Republic under Khumayni’s leadership. Also in that year, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created the occasion for a jihad that attracted volunteers from throughout the ummah. The support for political Islam in the 1980s also involved the creation of a number of organizations actively advocating Islamism and often supporting militant jihads. These include Hizbullah, a Shi’ite organization in Lebanon, and the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas. The emergence of political Islam in these different forms took place within the framework of “national” boundaries. Ghannouchi is Tunisian as well as an Islamist, Khumayni established the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various branches of the Muslim Brotherhood were nationally identified. Political Islam was often local in its approach – creating an important relationship between Islam and nationalism in what Olivier Roy calls Islamonationalism: “Islamist parties themselves are the product of a given political culture and society. Despite their claim to be supranational, most Islamist movements have been shaped by national particularities.”22 By the 1990s, more globally oriented political Islamic movements developed in the contexts of globalization and the growing significance of new means of electronic communication. The evolution of al-Qa’ida reflects this trend and helped to shape it. The organization has roots in the informal transnational networks of fighters coming to Afghanistan to join the antiSoviet jihad. Usama bin Ladin (1957–2011) created an administrative structure for assisting the fighters and developed an associated jihadist ideology. The 22

Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 62.

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first generation of jihadis were fighting for the liberation of Afghanistan and were themselves relatively national in their identity. However, after the defeat of the Soviet army, Bin Ladin developed al-Qa’ida as a more globally oriented jihadist organization during the 1990s. This globalist approach was supported by the second generation of al-Qa’ida recruits – new-style militants who “had few links (if any) to any particular Muslim country, and moved around the world, traveling from jihad to jihad. The flying jihadi was born, the jihadi jet set.”23 In the development of political Islam, the alternatives of local and global or national and Islamic are not mutually exclusive. Most major Islamists worked within political and conceptual frameworks that viewed Islam and nationalism as complementary parts of Muslim politics and government. By the 1990s, in the global context of the end of the Cold War and the rise of democratic movements opposing authoritarian regimes, lines of political debate shifted from the question of the compatibility of Islam and nationalism to debates about whether or not Islam and democracy are compatible. An Iranian journal presenting a strict constructionist Islamist perspective, for example, argued in 1995 that “Democracy is reactionary; it is a return to jahiliyya, paganism, and disbelief,” while Ghannouchi in Tunisia argued that “Islamic rule is by nature democratic.”24 However, both positions were presented within the framework of the modern-style national boundaries which shaped their policy advocacy. Movements of reformist opposition to authoritarian regimes at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, like the reformasi movements in Indonesia and Malaysia, usually called for democratic reform, not Islamization. They were not opposed to religion but, rather, Islamic values were simply a part of the reform ideology. Anwar Ibrahim was an activist supporter of reformasi, as were important Islamic intellectuals in Indonesia. Such movements represent one form of the longstanding tradition of syntheses between Islam and nationalism.

Islam and Nationalism in a Politically “Glocal” World Early in the twenty-first century, new generations of Muslim activists shaped a new era in the relationships between Islam and nationalism. The 23 24

Roy, Globalized Islam, 302. Quoted in Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 4, 114.

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destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City by al-Qa’ida in 2001 dramatically showed the globalization of militant political Islam, in both ideology (the global jihad) and organization. However, globalized al-Qa’ida was not monolithically organized, although its ideology emphasized the global nature of the movement. Instead, as al-Qa’ida expanded into different regions, it became identified with local militant groups, creating an interactive global–local identity and mode of operation. Distinctive groups emerged, identified by names like al-Qa’ida in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Some analysts have identified this new Islamism as “glocal” in nature, using a term developed by Roland Robertson for global–local syntheses.25 Although the “local” dimension could have overtones of nationalism, most militant groups were not identified with a specific nation-state. AQIM, for example, combined “both the local specifics and goals – to create a Maghrebian caliphate, and global operational methods.”26 Some militant groups were explicitly antinationalist in ideology. In 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the creation of the Islamic State as the caliphate, he announced that the Islamic State represented the end of the Middle East created by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. However, even Islamist groups tended to present positions that blended Islam and nationalism. In Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr (b. 1973) is a major Shi’ite leader whose sectarian militia was one of the most effective groups opposing American forces following the 2003 invasion. Since that time his position as a sectarian militant has changed, and in the 2018 parliamentary elections, for example, it was reported that he “cast himself as an ardent nationalist” and criticized sectarian divisions,27 as well as opposing foreign involvement in Iraqi affairs. In Iran, there had long been a sense of Iranian (Persian) cultural identity embedded in its Islamic identity. An informed analyst noted in 2017, “Although nationalistic sentiments were evident in cultural production in the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and 1990s, what is now evident is an effort in many sectors of the regime to promote ‘Iranian-ness’ above and beyond mere ‘Islamic-ness.’”28 25

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Emmanuel Karagiannis, The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Jean-Luc Marret, “Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb: A ‘Glocal’ Organization,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 31 (2008), 541–552. Marret, “Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb,” 549. Margaret Coker and Rick Gladstone, “Iraqi Voters Strengthen Hand of Militia Leader Who Battled US,” New York Times, 14 May 2018. Narges Bajoghli, “The Genesis of a New Iranian Nationalism,” al-Monitor, 14 December 2017, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/archives/originals/2017/12/iran-newnationalism-religion-politics-trump-saudi-isis.html.

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In Muslim politics in general, some strict constructionist religious scholars reject nationalism, just as some leftist critics oppose religious influences in shaping politics. However, in mainstream politics throughout the Muslim world, the longstanding syntheses of Islam and nationalism predominate. In the early twenty-first century, this was visible in political trends from Indonesia to Senegal. Observers frequently identified what many called “new nationalism,” which combined what had previously been viewed as secular nationalism with Islamic identity themes. In Indonesian elections in 2014 and 2017, for example, Joko Widodo, who was elected president in 2014, was viewed as “combining Islam and nationalism into a single, powerful force for national unity” in the tradition of Sukarno.29 In Senegal, historically “Sufism and secular politics were closely linked” through cooperation of Sufi brotherhoods with the state, but state leaders in the twenty-first century worked “to incorporate Sufi ideas into new forms of state-nationalism.”30 Even in Saudi Arabia, where state identity is based on conservative Islamism, observers note that under King Abdullah (r. 2005–2015) “the kingdom introduced policies designed to build a new strain of Saudi nationalism . . . emphasizing Saudi-specific history, symbols and rituals rather than purely Islamic ones.”31 The old tensions perceived between secular nationalisms and religious groups in the political public arena were being transformed into competitions between groups, each of which combined religious and secular identifiers. In the most prominent case of Tunisia, Al-Nahda formally ceased to be an Islamist party, and identified itself as a party of Muslim democrats. Ghannouchi argued that “the question is no longer one of secularism versus religion . . . Tunisians are less concerned about the role of religion than about building a governance system that is democratic and inclusive.”32 The blending together of Islam and nationalism in the twenty-first century reflected the merging of secular and religious themes in the public sphere. Although there were vigorous Islamist critiques of secular nationalism and strong secularist opposition to “theocracy,” the broader trend throughout 29

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Endy Bayuni, “Jokowi Turns to Islam-Nationalism to Preserve Indonesia’s Diversity,” Straits Times, 15 April 2017, www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/jokowi-turns-to-islamnationalism-to-preserve-indonesias-diversity. Ed Van Hoven, “The Nation Turbaned? The Construction of Nationalist Muslim Identities in Senegal,” Journal of Religion in Africa, 30/2 (May 2000), 227. “Why Saudi Arabia Is Embracing a New Nationalism,” Stratfor Worldview, 4 January 2019, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/why-saudi-arabia-embracingnew-nationalism. Rached Ghannouchi, “From Political Islam to Muslim Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, 95/5 (September–October 2016), 58–59.

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modern Muslim history has been to see nationalism and Islam as complementary. “Religionized secularism and a secularly conscious religious discourse” creates what some have called “seculigious” or “seculareligious” politics.33 One could be both a nationalist and a believer participating in the ummah. The relationship between Islam and nationalism has generally been glocal in nature since the days of Tahtawi. That relationship has also involved secular–religious syntheses in which religious and secular elements are complementary rather than competitive.

Conclusion Is nationalism compatible with Islamic belief and practice? Muslims have answered this question in many different ways. While some, both secularists and religious activists, see Islam and nationalism as being opposites, most view both Islam and nationalism as being dimensions of their whole sociopolitical identity. In this framework, the basic issue is not choosing either Islam or nationalism, it is defining how those two elements together shaped the community’s political identities. Over the past two centuries, the nature of nationalism has evolved. Islamic belief and practice have been significant elements in shaping the evolution of nationalism in the Muslim world and globally. In the twenty-first century, as the nature of the nation-state changes and as many see the emergence of “new nationalisms,” the nature of the relationships between Islam and nationalism continues to be a significant aspect of modern political history.

Further Reading Al-Ahsan, Abdullah, Ummah or Nation? Identity Crisis in Contemporary Muslim Society (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 1992). Donohue, John J., and John L. Esposito, Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Enayat, Hamid, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Haim, Sylvia (ed.), Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

33

John O. Voll, “Review of Voice of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Middle East Journal, 72/2 (Spring 2018), 341; see also Bayat, Making Islam, 173, 198.

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john o. voll Karagiannis, Emmanuel, The New Political Islam: Human Rights, Democracy, and Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Mandaville, Peter, Global Political Islam (London: Routledge, 2007). Roy, Olivier, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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On Jewish Nationhood and Nationalism: A Historical Survey from Antiquity to the Establishment of the State of Israel allon gal

My homeland, land of beauty and poverty, The queen has no home, the king has no crown, There are seven holy days in the year, And hunger and toil all the rest. Leah Goldberg, From the Songs of My Beloved Land

Genuine, refined, and updated scholarship in recent decades has gradually refuted the view of nationalism as a strictly modern phenomenon. That view in general had tended to interconnect nationalism with the industrial revolution and capitalism. According to this approach, the objective emergence of national markets combined with subjective manipulations by interested capitalists served to mold, often invent, nationalism; the conspicuous political expressions of this modern process are – per the modernists – the national states of western Europe. By contrast, my approach criticizes this dogmatic, often Marxist and Eurocentric, view, and is closely related to the new keen scholarship, which explores nationalism and nationhood, also beyond Europe, deep into antiquity, and aspires to avoid dogmas which ignore the rich, variegated, and eventful history of ethnopolitical identities. The Jewish nationalist case, as we shall see, conspicuously fits into the meaningfully nuanced long history category.1

1

For critical and productive discussions of the subject, see Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Anthony D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds.), Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Allon Gal, “National Restoration and Moral Renewal: The Dialectic of the Past in the Emergence of Modern Israel,” in Susana Carvalho and François Gemenne (eds.), Nations

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The tribes of Israel gradually became a nation in the Canaan area (later Eretz Israel or Palestine) during the late Bronze Age (c. 1300–1200 B C E ) and the Iron Age (c. 1200–586 B C E). This emerging nation (which eventually came to be known as the Jewish nation) may be considered in a way as “a part” of the region (wherein Mesopotamia was prominent and today known as the Middle East). However, singular traits of the small nation should be observed: shared elements of religion, a reference to a specific group of ancestors, and epic history; an attachment to a (roughly) defined piece of land; a common language; and some common social-economic patterns of collective life.2 Crucial to our survey are the egalitarian and humanistic values as reflected in the Hebrew Bible. Steven Grosby’s in-depth endeavor focuses on the transmission of life, the freedom of life, and the order of life (the last is realized in law) as the three fundamental orientations that designated the nationality “Israel.” These and related values, central to the early national existence, Grosby thoughtfully argues, have enabled the ancient nation to survive into the modern era. Yet, in this token, the sense of nationhood has not been historically static; rather, it has dynamically evolved in various ways.3 With regards to the aforementioned social-economic structure, Avraham Faust and Shlomo Bunimovitz – pioneers of social archeology – have explored the phenomenon of a relatively simple and moderately polarized society having a rather limited hierarchal structure. They also observed that in this particular society, even in its post-pastoral-nomadic stage, an ethos of egalitarianism distinctively prevailed.4 The special features of Israeli society are distinctive when compared with the characteristics of the empires of Mesopotamia and especially those of Egypt. Here I partly follow the penetrating insights of Henri Frankfort, Lenn E. Goodman, and Laurence C. Smith, who consider the major impact of the climatic-geographic factor: the social-economy of those empires was based on huge, life-giving rivers at their hearts. Those empires (again, especially

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and Their Histories: Constructions and Representations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 172–188. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–75. Steven Grosby, “The Chosen People of Ancient Israel and the Occident: Why Does Nationality Exist and Survive?,” in Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbraus, 2002), 92–119, see esp. 112–113. Avraham Faust, Israel’s Ethnogenesis: Settlement, Interaction, Expansion, and Resistance (London: Equinox, 2006), 92–107, 227–36; Avraham Faust, The Archeology of Israelite Society in Iron Age II (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 219–229, and passim.

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Egypt) were conspicuously centralist, authoritarian cultures. In contrast, Eretz Israel’s livelihood was permanently dependent on seasonal rain, which was seen as provided or denied by the will of God, based on the deeds or misdeeds of “God’s chosen people” (Deuteronomy 11:10–17). Of course, the climatic-geographic factor is just one element among a multifactor explanation of the singularity of Israeli society and of the prevalent ethos; the challenge of a comprehensive explanation is beyond the scope of this short chapter.5 In line with the above-mentioned social archeological findings, the more realistic parts of the Bible tell us of a gradual process of settlement, entailing toil and battle to occupy increasingly larger parts of Eretz Israel. The agriculture of the settlers was mainly family run, i.e. consisting of relatively small plantations of a variety of fruits, vineyards, grains, sheep and goats, and cattle.6 After a long period of influential tribal judges’ leadership – mainly against the omnipresent threat of the Philistines – a state was gradually formed. The prevalent scholarly understanding of its birth is as a “secondary state formation” rather than a “pristine state formation.” Indeed, the Israeli type of kingship was a concrete alignment versus a specific threat; it was a covenant of monarchy between the king and the people; and, pointedly, it was the king’s duty to observe the law of God. It was the role of the prophets to articulate and uphold this call for accountability, and to call monarchic leadership to task accordingly.7 The Israelites undoubtedly were in close contact with “Pharaonic Egypt” – a relationship arising both from migration patterns and from the Nile 5

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Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948): Book I is extensively devoted to Egypt, 15–212, Book I I to Mesopotamia, 215–231, while the Epilogue discusses “The Hebrews,” 337–344; Lenn E. Goodman, On Justice: An Essay in Jewish Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 133–155; Laurence C. Smith, Rivers of Power: How a Natural Force Raised Kingdoms, Destroyed Civilizations, and Shapes Our World (New York: Little, Brown, 2020), 3–44, 316–28, and passim. Frankfort’s pioneering endeavor tends to emphasize the climatic-geographical factor as causative to the Israeli (“Hebrew”) singularity, while Goodman’s work tends to interweave the said factor into a comprehensive Jewish culture; see also Novak’s contributions listed under my Further Reading. J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah, 2nd edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 12–29, 84–118; Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 85–200. Miller and Hayes, History, 269–70; Grosby, Biblical Ideas, 9; Frank S. Frick, The Formation of the State in Ancient Israel (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1985). For an in-depth historical sketch, see Jacob Liver and S. David Sperling, “King, Kingship,” in Fred Skolnik (gen. ed.), Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edition, 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), vol. X I I, 163–169.

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empire’s repeated (partly successful) invasions in order to dominate Palestine – and tended to perceive it as standing in stark contrast to their own economy and social makeup. Egypt was often labeled in the Hebrew scriptures as “a house of slaves” (beit avadim) that was oppressively ruled by omnipotent kings; indeed, in line with our above-reference, the pharaohs regarded themselves as God-like organs, as cosmos-ruling kings, and “perfectly” dominating entities. In Mesopotamia the king variant was more “moderate” as he ruled “just” in the context of divinely ordained political order. In contrast to Pharaonic Egypt, the Israeli egalitarian ethos considered the king as dependent on God, and obliged to various social factors, among them the Prophetic one. The early rise of written vernacular and the intensive making of Israelite national literature are interrelated to this egalitarian ethos.8 The canonization of the Pentateuch took place in the Babylonian Exile (sixth century B C E), yet the Bible’s roots and fundamentals originated in the First Temple period. Already in that period there had gradually emerged in Israel and Judah a prominent – though variegated and multifaceted – egalitarian ethos and related values of justice (tzedek, mishpat). This ethos was registered also by the (aforementioned) social archeologists who revealed and explained the singular typical pattern of unhierarchical dwelling – the “four-room house” – and the “city’s gate as a [popular] urban community element” – during the period of the First Temple.9 The vitality of both Jewish nationalism and its egalitarian bent were conspicuously reflected in the nature of the return of the “dynamic elements” of the exilic community in Babylon to Eretz Israel (the Shivat Tzion – Return to Zion – process, 538–428 B C E). As Sara Japhet has keenly illuminated, this process was associated with social reform and multidimensional proto-democratic courses of development.10

8

9

10

Goodman, On Justice, 133–155; Victor H. Matthews, The Hebrew Prophets and Their Social World: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 17–36; A. Demsky, Literacy in Ancient Israel (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012), esp. 31–68, 213–278, 294–310, 373–374 [in Hebrew]. Moshe Weinfeld, Justice and Righteousness in Israel and the Nations: Equality and Freedom in Ancient Israel in Light of Social Justice in the Ancient Near East (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995), 2–25; Faust, The Archeology, 100–110, 213–229. For the egalitarian ethos, see also the discussion in Yosef Garfinkel, Saar Ganor, and Michael G. Hasel, In the Footsteps of King David: Revelations from an Ancient Biblical City (London: Thames and Hudson, 2018), 115–127. Sara Japhet, “People and Land in the Restoration Period,” in Daniel R. Schwartz (ed.), Studies in Jewish History of the Second Temple Period (Jerusalem: Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1996), 127–145 [in Hebrew]; Sara Japhet, Collected Studies on the Restoration

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The relatively progressive social laws of the Pentateuch alone include goodwill toward the poor, protection of the widow and orphan, protection of the stranger, respect for the wage earner, the relatively humanistic regard for slaves, the Sabbath, the year of jubilee, shmittah (remission of debts), and more.11 Significantly, the pursuit of social justice was interwoven with the conception of the equality of all Jews and of the relevance for their wellbeing of their actual ethical conduct. (The canonization of the Prophets section of the Bible took place in the fourth century B C E . )12 During the Second Temple period, these conceptions came to be interconnected also with charity (tzedakah), often oriented toward the concepts of “mercy and loving-kindness.”13 The Maccabees’ anti-Syrian-Hellenistic resistance and victorious rebellion (begun in 167 B C E), which eventually set up a Judaic kingdom that ruled for close to a century, demonstrated shortly after its beginning not only a nationalist-religious zeal, but also some facets of acculturation. Indeed, the Hasmonean dynasty itself became quite Hellenized. Toward the end of this period of independence, the Jewish rulers themselves disregarded socially autonomous structures. On the other hand, the dynasty never enjoyed uncontested power. Popular traditions as well as public institutions were in place to reject a “pharaoh-like despotism.” The more commercial society (than that of the First Temple) developed genuine non-royal institutions, keeping society rather diffused. In any case, a significant degree of pluralism clearly characterized the Jewish religious sphere – as in the well-known differences between the popular traditionalist Pharisees, the elite dogmatic Sadducees, the ascetic Essenes, and more. Slavery was marginal in Jewish society, and Jewish nationalism’s inner ingredients worked against the adoption of slave-holding culture and practices. The exception was “Rome’s

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Period, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2017), see especially the in-depth survey, vol. I I, 389–397 [in Hebrew]; see also Miller and Hayes, History, 528–539. Leon Epzstein, Social Justice in the Ancient Near East and the People of the Bible (London: SCM Press, 1986), 104–140. Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15–49; Yair Lorberbaum, Image of God: Halakhah and Aggada (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Martin Goodman’s comprehensive A History of Judaism concentrates on the humanistic mark of Judaism through biblical times, 71–86; Anita Shapira, Democratic Values in the Hebrew Bible (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009), 123–42 [in Hebrew]; see also Steven T. Katz, “Man, Sin and Redemption in Rabbinic Judaism,” in Steven T. Katz (ed.), Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. I V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 925–945. See the comprehensive Benjamin Porat, Justice for the Poor: The Principles of Welfare Regulations from Biblical Law to Rabbinic Literature (Jerusalem: Hebrew University and Israel Democracy Institute, 2019), 59–196 [in Hebrew].

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servant” King Herod (37–4 B C E), who was not actually of the Hasmonean family nor of any authentic Jewish tradition.14 David Goodblatt’s extensive research demonstrates two major aspects prominent in the post-Persian period of Jewish society. The first is the vitality (at times even zeal) of Jewish nationalism, and the second is the questioning of the idea of kingship as well as of the principal role of the priestly component (exacerbated by the Hasmoneans’ arrogation of the high priesthood to themselves). And there was yet, per Goodblatt, a whole pertinent set of values, including “Family structure . . . concepts of justice, honesty, love, patriotism and taste in art,” which characterized Jewish nationalism of the time.15 This nationalist vigor was also later reflected in tenacious, “empireshaking” armed rebellions against Roman imperialism (which took place in 66, 115, and 132 C E), interwoven as they were with Judaic social-ethical values ingrained in the sacred canon. (See Figure 19.1.) It was this nationalist synthesis with social-ethical-religious values that caused historian Martin Goodman to denote the Jewish insurrections against Rome as clashes of civilizations. And similarly the noted scholar of Greek and Roman history Frank W. Walbank concludes his discussion of the subject with the following characterization: Palestine provides an example of a movement perhaps unique in the history of the Empire. The excavations at Masada and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls have recently aroused popular interest in the Jewish movement, in which the combination of social struggle and national resistance was charged with the powerful currents that are generated by fanaticism . . . I can recall no example in Roman history where Roman methods proved in the long run so unavailing as they did in the case of the Jews; and it seems to reflect the peculiar union of elements in the Jewish movement. [emphases added]16

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Menahem Stern, “Judaism and Hellenism in Eretz Israel during the Third and the Second Centuries B C,” in Schwartz (ed.), Studies in Jewish History of the Second Temple Period, 111–180 [in Hebrew]; Eyal Regev, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archeology, Identity (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck, 2013); Eyal Regev, The Sadducees and Their Halakhah: On Religion and Society in the Second Temple Era (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2005) [in Hebrew]; Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1997). David Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 209. Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Allen Lane, 2007); citing Frank W. Walbank, Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History and Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 73.

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Figure 19.1 Detail from the arch of Titus in Rome, portraying sacred artifacts from the destroyed Jewish Temple in the hands of Roman soldiers during the triumphal march held in Rome in 71 C E to celebrate Titus’s success in suppressing the Jewish Revolt. (Photo taken c. 1860 by Robert Macpherson; from the Royal Photographic Society Collection/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London via Getty Images.)

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The Mishnah, the major and comprehensive interpretation of the Torah, was edited and redacted at the beginning of the third century by a leadership whose approach was marked by circumspection toward Rome’s domination. Yet, composed in the land of Israel (and written in a “Mishnaic Hebrew”), it reflected the Bible’s, especially the Torah’s, genuine egalitarian and humanistic values.17 In parallel to, and especially in consequence of, the devastating failures of the expression of nationalism in the throes of rebellion, the Jewish people during the Middle Ages hardly gave birth to conspicuous nationalist phenomena, fostering – as elaborated below – a long period of nationhood rather bereft of nationalism. During the Second Temple period an extensive Jewish diaspora developed. It sustained its cohesion, though, through meaningful links with Eretz Israel: pilgrimage to the Temple, immigration of study groups, material support, and occasional political encouragement. However, in the new era that followed the Second Temple’s destruction, the Jewish ethos gradually transformed. The greater the degradation and the more intense the feelings of national rejection, the stronger became the need for national consolation and the assurance that God still cared. In this long period the universalistic tendencies in Judaism became obscured by the particular, and the study of the Torah came to be the prevalent concept of life.18 Yet, during the early Middle Ages, several Jewish revolts occurred in the Mesopotamian area. Famously, probably in order to enable a fully religious life, a Jewish revolt against Persia – for an independent state in Mesopotamia – took place at the end of the fifth century. The seven-year revolt was heroically conducted by the exilarch Mar Zutra. It was crushed, and Mar Zutra executed; his son migrated to the Land of Israel and there became a leader in the Sanhedrin, the highest community organ.19 At about the same time as the defeat of Mar Zutra’s revolt, the Babylonian Talmud was completed. This legal and ethical grand manifestation effectively served Jewish nationhood into the early modern period and beyond. The 17

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For the continuity and creativity of the Jewish constituency in Eretz Israel between the defeats of the anti-Roman rebellions and the Muslim conquest in the seventh century, see Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70–640 C E ) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). For a concise conceptual analysis, see Louis Jacobs, “Judaism,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. X I, 511–520; for the Middle Ages, 516–517. Hayim H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 380–382.

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Jewish people lacked sovereignty and did not pursue any obvious alignment for gaining it; yet the nation did not “change into a congregation.” Rather, the Jewish people now expressed its nationhood by means of the community and the synagogue; this nationhood, though, was at times activated for national, intercommunal political and economic causes. A concept of galut (exile) characteristic of the Middle Ages was that it was God’s will that a period of suffering would uplift the spirit, that a penance was due for sins in this world, and that there was a need to prepare for mystic redemption. Hence, exile, along with its horrors, manifested the majesty of God’s purpose and the greatness of the Jewish heritage, and reinforced the faith of fellow Jews. This and related concepts notwithstanding, national elements were constantly at work – commemorating the “golden past” through perpetual expressions in tradition and literature, through customs of mourning for Jerusalem, and through symbols sustaining the memory of the destruction of the Temple. The seminal work of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor (Remember!), about the explicit and persistent religious instructions to remember and internalize the people’s history-shaping events, illuminates indeed two elements persistent in the national collective mind – the fundamental role of expulsion from the homeland, and the yearning to return some day.20 Jews during the Middle Ages were immersed in learning and teaching the Talmud. Yet, the foundation on which this and many other creative interpretations were built is the Bible, with its intense stories related to antique sovereignty, to Zion, and to Jerusalem; thus, via the Bible’s endurance, generation after generation, though ignoring national rebellions, constantly absorbed multiple “passive national” elements throughout the Middle Ages.21 Significantly, starting during the late Second Temple period, the yearning for a king or a leader of the house of David developed along messianic lines. In later centuries, there came to exist differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi messianism; however, the common denominator was that the messiah would assert Jewish independence and bring about the people’s 20

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Moshe Hallamish and Aviezer Ravitzky, The Land of Israel in Medieval Jewish Thought (Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1991), 1–192 [in Hebrew]; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianisn, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 207–234. Alon Goshen-Gottstein (Haaretz, 10 January 2020) articulates that almost all the Talmud’s tractates, whatever their themes are, begin by mentioning the Temple. Daniel J. Lasker, “The Sources,” in Robert Chazan (ed.), The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. V I: The Middle Ages: The Christian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 465–484.

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return to Eretz Israel, creating a societal model for a cooperative and better humankind. Messianic speculations and attempts to find appropriate dates were a constant component in Jewish culture and psyche during the Middle Ages and beyond. And yet, Jewish eschatology during that long era mostly focused on personal – rather than on the collective-national – redemption.22 The Hebrew language never died, and this is not incidental. Though not used in the everyday lives of the communities scattered throughout the world, it was kept alive in prayers and in essential works of thought and literature. Written in Hebrew script, both Yiddish and Ladino, used by the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities respectively, contained meaningful parts of the Hebrew vocabulary as well as major terms and concepts from the Hebrew language.23 Also, the aforementioned immigration of Mar Zutra’s son to Palestine was not a unique phenomenon. Throughout the Middle Ages small sporadic “traditional aliyot” (immigrations to Eretz Israel, literally “ascendancies”) continually occurred. The destinations were chiefly Jerusalem and other “holy cities” in the “promised land.” The nature of the immigrations was at times subtly related to messianic beliefs and often to acute personal religious circumstances and yearnings . A famous aliyah at the time was of the prominent Hebrew poet and philosopher of al-Andalus, Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141). Aliyot during the Middle Ages were relatively intensive in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries; the aliyot of the thirteenth century happened against the background of the crusader–Muslim battles, and those of the sixteenth century largely resulted from the massive expulsions from Spain and Portugal. At least since the fourteenth century, all major communities had a special budget item designated for supporting Eretz Israel’s Jewry. Quite often the migrants (olim) were sustained by the respective communities in the galut (exile); thus, generally, thanks to animated public discussions, emissaries, and economic connections, the move left a considerable imprint on a community.24 22

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David Berger, Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011), 289–311; Ben-Sasson, A History, s.v. messianism; Gershom Scholem, in his The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1995 [1971]), emphasizes the nationalist potential; Moshe Idel, in his later Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. 101–182, illuminates the complexity of the whole theme and the dominance of the personal redemptive concept as early as the thirteenth century; and see Moshe Idel “Messianic Ideas and Zionist Ideas,” in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Moshe Lissak (eds.), Zionism and the Return to History: An Appraisal (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1999), 73–81 [in Hebrew]. David M. Bunis and James T. Robinson, “Languages and Translations,” in Chazan, Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. V I, 485–487. Benjamin Z. Kedar, “To the History of the Jews and Eretz Israel in the Middle Ages,” in Benjamin Z. Kedar, Studies in World, Jewish and Local History (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2019), 131–395 [in Hebrew]; on various dimensions of Middle Ages aliyot, see

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A late famous manifestation of the messianic phenomenon erupted in the seventeenth century. The “false messiah” Shabbetai Zvi (whose “prophetic messenger” was Nathan of Gaza, a resident of the Land of Israel) indirectly aroused a considerable public galut-rejecting mood; however, Shabbetai Zvi – deeply disappointing quite large Jewish audiences – eventually betrayed his mission. Yet, various messianic undercurrents elusively continued into modern times. Instructively, Jewish folklore, orally as well as literally, encompassed a variety of fiercely held beliefs in the lot of the ten lost tribes of Israel. These beliefs were often associated with both obvious and obscure yearnings for the “old golden days” of the now defeated national kingdom. To conclude, the long Rabbinic and modified oligarchic-led medieval Jewish collectivity was persistently national, yet generally passive. The egalitarian and the humanistic motifs of antiquity subtly persisted; still, mutatis mutandis, they were quite obscured as a consequence of the oppressive circumstances of the Jewish people – in both the Christian and the Muslim spheres in the Middle Ages.25 Mainly after the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, major social factors gradually worked to essentially change European Jewry’s nationhood; David Ruderman has explored the major ones.26 First is an accelerated mobility leading to enhanced contacts, traditions, and even languages, shared between Jews and non-Jews. However, the powerful phenomenon of “Jews on the move,” so to speak, during the long period since the sixteenth century reconnected and reshaped the scattered Jewish groupings into a more intensive, meaningful nationhood. Jewish solidarity – reflected in consciousness and organizationally – gradually evolved to become a tangible, at times even potent, factor. During the above-mentioned centuries the nature of the various communities changed: the Rabbinic leadership declined while lay leaders often took over. Importantly, the communities developed new functions on virtually all major economic and social fronts. The new kehillah (organized community), now a much more professionalized and formal entity, adapted

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Avraham Grossman, Transformations in Medieval Jewish Society (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2017), 19–93 [in Hebrew]; Ben-Sasson, A History, s.v. Aliyot. Shlomo Avineri illuminates elective quasi-democratic patterns of the medieval community, in “Judaism,” in Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Democracy, vol. I I (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1995), 676–679. David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 23–189.

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itself to the new mercantilism and to various forms of centralist governments. Another new and significant factor was the impact of the print book. Books, by Jews and non-Jews, had now become easily available. Consequently, education – traditional as well as modern – infused wide strata of the Jewish constituency. A related transformation was the emergence of Hebrew printing houses. Also, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic libraries became much closer to each other and mutually influencing. A further consequence was that itinerant preachers, teachers, scribes, cantors, and other secondary elites discovered a forum for disseminating their own views. Yiddish, common among the Ashkenazi groupings, as well as Ladino and other dialects in use among the Sephardim, joined the sphere of written languages. Alongside the publication of Jewish books in Yiddish and Ladino was a steady accretion of books written in Western languages and authored by Jews. Also, Christian Hebraism, the history of which began before the early modern period, worked now, while indirectly diminishing the role of the rabbis, to effectively disseminate Hebraica. Print not only refashioned traditional modes of Jewish study, but also helped modify the notion of what constituted appropriate Jewish knowledge. The print revolution made Jewish intellectuals (in centers such as Prague and Kraków) more aware of the multiple sources of human knowledge and experience. This was especially true regarding a keen interest in the natural world and medicine. The conspicuous presence of a Jewish medical elite often brought intellectuals and businessmen scattered throughout the European continent closer together.27 All the above-discussed factors powerfully worked toward the development, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of a rich and diverse intellectual-cultural Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement. The Haskalah, influential especially in Central and Eastern Europe, pursued two complementary aims: it strove for an integration of the Jews in the surrounding modern societies, including the study of the native vernacular, and the adoption of modern values, culture, and appearance. The Haskalah promoted rationalism, liberalism, freedom of thought, and inquiry, and it also emphatically stood for “economic productivization” of the Jews. Simultaneously, the major trends of the Haskalah sought to preserve the Jews as a separate, unique collective in postfeudalistic emancipating Europe; it thus worked for a cultural and moral Jewish renewal, especially a revival of 27

Ibid.

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Hebrew and biblical studies for secular purposes, pioneering the modern press and literature in the language. The maskilim (Haskalah activists) exhorted and implemented a wide range of communal, educational, and cultural reforms. Owing to the Haskalah’s dualistic nature, the maskilim often clashed both with the traditionalist rabbinic elite and with those assimilationists who aspired to minimize or eliminate the existence of the Jews as a defined nationhood.28 The Enlightenment impact spread well beyond the “defined” Haskalah movement’s spheres. Indeed, the bulk of the new processes – social, cultural, and legal – that were operative between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries reshaped Jewish collectivity along two new courses: Judaism was transmuted from passive national (à la nationhood style) into chiefly modern nationalist existence; and it gradually rejected the religious rabbinic dominance while being interwoven with the development of democratic electorates. In other words, Enlightenment molded Jewish nationhood of the time in ways that served the emergence of modern democratic-nationalist trends.29 The bulk of the Jewish people lived then in Eastern Europe; historian Israel Bartal profoundly and systematically analyzed this huge community over the course of the century or so following the first partition of Poland (i.e. 1772–1881). Caught between the oppressive Russian Empire, on the one hand, and emerging nationalisms, on the other – all “sides” embedded in anti-Semitism – the ethnic Jewish community had a horizon for survival and development mainly along nationalist lines. As we shall concretely see below, the Jews of Eastern Europe thus emphatically, by and large, stepped on the road to nationalism characterized by enlightened qualities.30

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David B. Ruderman, “Looking Backward and Forward: Rethinking Jewish Modernity in the Light of Early Modernity,” in Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (eds.), Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. V I I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1089–1101; Israel Bartal, To Redeem a People: Jewish Nationalism and Enlightenment in Eastern Europe (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2013), 201–346 [in Hebrew]. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Shmuel Feiner, A Cultural War: The Jewish Haskalah Movement in the 19th Century (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2010) [in Hebrew]. For an analytical and concise discussion of the ideological dimension, see Shmuel Feiner, “The Haskalah: The Call of Jewish Enlightenment for the Great Awakening,” in Gadi Taub (ed.), The History of Ideas: The Enlightenment (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2016), 236–261 [in Hebrew]. See also Shmuel Feiner and Israel Bartal (eds.), The Varieties of Haskalah (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005) [in Hebrew]. Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 47–57, 90–101, 112–123, 143–156.

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Many factors worked, especially from the eighteenth century, to transmute the roughly two-millennia-long course of nationhood into an active nationalism: disintegration of Jewish traditional order; Jewish emancipation – through failures, semi-failures, and paradoxically even successes; the Enlightenment; cultural renaissance; the awakening of other nationalisms; and “modern” – social, nationalist, and racial – anti-Semitism. The expressions of modern Jewish nationalism – autonomism, territorialism, and Zionism – were in general enlightened. The democratic-socialist parties figured prominently, especially in eastern Europe. Famously, one such party was the General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia (also known as the “Bund” in Yiddish), which was founded in Russia in 1897. Its ideology was devotion to Yiddish, within-country autonomy (“autonomism”) and a nationalism confined to secular socialist culture, envisaging Jewish life as one lived in eastern Europe. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century it counted tens of thousands of members; the activity and ideas of the Bund also had influence on Jewish socialism in Argentina, Bulgaria, and Salonika (Greece). But, in the totalitarian Soviet Union, the Bund was systematically persecuted and eventually liquidated. In 1939 the Polish Bund comprised about 100,000 members, most of whom, like most of Polish Jewry, were murdered by the Nazis. After the Second World War, the surviving members of the Bund desperately renewed their activities, but their organization efforts were destroyed in 1948, with the communists’ liquidation of free political life in the country. In parallel to Bundism, another kind of modern Jewish nationalism developed – territorialism. This current aimed to establish an autonomous settlement of Jews in a sufficiently large territory in which the great majority of the population would be Jewish. Territorialism in general regarded Eretz Israel as just one of these territories. Its social ideology tended in general to be liberal or progressive. The main territorialist organizations were the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO, 1905–1925), the Allgemeine Jüdische Kolonisations-Organisation (AIKO, 1908–1920), and the Freeland League (1935–1957). These organizations were in general largely confined to an elite milieu.31 However, neither populist organizations (such as the Bund) nor arduous territorialist projects “seeking a homeland” led to lasting, concrete achievements. It was the genuine national cultural renaissance that developed in central 31

Gur Alroey, Seeking Homeland: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Struggle with the Zionist Movement, 1905–1925 (Sede Boqer: Ben-Gurion University, 2011), 199–294 [in Hebrew].

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and eastern Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century – reflected mainly in literature, poetry, and drama – that indeed made “lasting Jewish history.” This rich and vital stream incorporated themes drawn both from the legacy of ancient periods of sovereignty and from modern Jewish life. It touted values of national pride and at the same time lamented painful situations and shameful weaknesses. This powerful spiritual current both reflected and extensively evoked assertive Jewish identity. Significantly, by the same token, this current sensitively reflected compassion and humanity; thus, it was ready-made to be interwoven into modern democratic civilization. The national cultural renaissance developed mainly in Hebrew but did not overlook the literary endeavors in Yiddish and Ladino. In fact, in its early stages, it was heavily interwoven with Yiddish contributions. This renaissance – embracing both old roots and ethical values echoing and open to postfeudalistic Europe – was a fundamental element of the modern Zionist movement. Some of the prominent personalities – among whom towered thinker Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg), author Shai Agnon, poet Saul Tschernichowsky, and particularly the poet and cultural leader Haim Nahman Bialik – “made aliyah” to Palestine and molded the cultural-ethical makeup of the Yishuv (the Jewish population in the Land of Israel). Actually, the whole Zionist endeavor was interwoven with this cultural renaissance and its humanistic dimension.32 The cultural renaissance and the proto-Zionist settlements in Palestine during the nineteenth century paved the way to political Zionism. Its Hungarian-born founder, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), aimed to achieve first a political entity recognized by the international community. Herzl envisioned a free progressive society. He published the epoch-making treatise The Jewish State in 1896, and subsequently founded the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1897. The organization was open to every Jew for a symbolic contribution (shekel). At the third Zionist Congress, in 1899, women gained equal voting rights; they gradually rose to positions of leadership in the movement. Internationally, the WZO eventually 32

Shachar Pinsker, “Hebrew Literature,” in Michell B. Hart and Tony Michels (eds.), Cambridge History of Judiasm, vol. V I I I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 755–770; Allon Gal, “Historical Ethno-symbols in the Emergence of the State of Israel,” in Athena S. Leoussi and Steven Grosby (eds.), Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 221–230. The more “Nietzsche-like culture,” represented by Micha Berdyczewski, actually was a sort of “complaining” minority phenomenon: Revital Amiran-Sappir, “Zionism between Eros and Power: On Micha Yosef Berdyczewski’s Approach to the Jewish Political Revolution,” in Dan Avnon and David M. Feuchtwanger (eds.), JewishIsraeli Political Thought (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 2016), 233–255 [in Hebrew].

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progressed thanks to “useful conflicts” within variegated British imperialism, and inwardly it built up a range of institutions that ventured to buy and cultivate land in Eretz Israel, which at the time was populated mainly by Arabs. Herzl personally envisioned a flag for the movement that would depict seven stars for seven work hours a day on a white background that stood for a new humanistic society. Eventually, the official Zionist flag had the white background, light blue bands representing the traditional prayer shawl, and the legendary Star of David that stood for sovereignty. In 1902, Herzl published his highly inspiring and challenging utopian-humanist treatise Old-New Land. Chaim Weizmann (1872–1952), a social-liberal “general Zionist,” emerged as the key Zionist leader in Britain during the First World War. Weizmann, immersed in both British liberalism and Jewish culture, was a crucial player in the diplomacy culminating in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain committed itself to support the creation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine (rather than Palestine as a Jewish national home) following the war (and the occupation of formerly Ottoman Palestine by British forces). Weizmann went on to become president of the World Zionist Organization in 1920 and made a tireless effort to achieve a peaceful cooperation with the Middle East’s Arabs.33 The Zionist labor movement similarly, and often more strongly, evoked a national historic linkage between an antique egalitarian-ethical ethos and modern socialist democratic society. Important personalities of this line were Moses Hess (1812–1875, born in Bonn) and Nahman Syrkin (1868–1924, born in Belarus). In Eretz Israel’s labor Zionism influential personalities were Aharon David Gordon (1856–1922), Berl Katznelson (1887–1944), and David BenGurion (1886–1973). When the beloved, highly revered “Berl” passed away, the entire Yishuv mourned his untimely death. At his wake emerged his close partner and friend, Ben-Gurion, who thoughtfully presented democratichumanistic socialism as deeply connected with the First Temple period, especially the prophets’ heritage of justice, human dignity, and peace (see above). Essentially, Ben-Gurion continued Weizmann’s democratic ideological tradition, though he diplomatically chose to pursue – as the 33

For Herzl and Zionism in general, see Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1995), 85–126; for Herzl’s utopian treatise as well as other humanist utopias typical to Zionism, see Rachel Elboim-Dror, Yesterday’s Tomorrow, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1993) [in Hebrew]; Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Zionist Leader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Norman Rose, Chaim Weizmann: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1986).

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international Zionist leverage – the mass mobilization of American grassroots Jewry. It was indeed North American Jewry that became then – as the tragic consequence of the Holocaust – the only Zionist lever outside Eretz Israel. In light of its socialist-liberal ideology, labor Zionism developed – in theory and in praxis – a “constructive course” of building up a whole range of cooperative social enterprises, including the kibbutz endeavor.34 Zionism was also partly nourished by the Second Commonwealth’s spiritual and moral legacy. This value-oriented historical dimension was “added” to the biblical one thanks to, e.g., the very popular literary volume Agaddah (a compilation of selected fables and narratives drawn from Talmudic and other early biblical commentaries and interpretations), which was initiated by Bialik and coedited by him and Y. Ravnitzky. Assertively nationalist, this heritage, amply diffused through the educational system, has nevertheless been characterized by a call for humanism, moderation, and peace.35 The Yishuv gradually built up its defensive power in the spirit of democracy and egalitarianism. It was largely a militia-like pattern that enabled the small social democratic Jewish collectivity to overcome – during 1947–1949 – both violent local Arab objections and invasion by the surrounding Arab countries in the wake of the United Nations’ 1947 partition resolution with its legitimizing of Jewish sovereignty in part of Palestine.36 The Zionist movement, however, was not homogeneous. The main threat to its democratichumanistic backbone was embedded in two “rightist” circles. First was the Revisionist movement that seceded from the World Zionist Organization in 1923. Its leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940), was faithful, in principle, to egalitarian and pluralistic tenets. At the same time, though, he fantasized that Zionism would gain the “whole of Eretz Israel” by military force; hence, military values and flavors came to largely characterize Revisionism, 34

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Anita Shapira, Berl: The Biography of a Socialist Zionist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Allon Gal, David Ben-Gurion and the American Alignment for a Jewish State (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 15–217; Shlomo Aronson, David BenGurion and the Jewish Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. 1–190. Tali Tadmor-Shimoni, National Education and the Formation of State in Israel (Sede Boqer: Ben-Gurion University, 2010) [in Hebrew]; Yael Zerubavel’s Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) creatively throws light just on the heroic facets of the tradition. According to Shlomo Avineri the democratic pattern of Zionism greatly derived from the elective quasi-democratic characteristics of the medieval Jewish community; “Judaism,” in Lipset, Encyclopedia, vol. I I, 676–679. Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), parts I and I I analyze the “Defensive Ethos” during 1881–1936, while part I I I discusses the shift to activist ethos during 1936–1948; Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab–Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1–36, 392–420.

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especially its youth movement (Betar). When Israel was established, the Revisionist factor was decisively marginalized.37 Religious Zionism incorporated ideological elements of a messianic and fundamentalist nature. Internally, it aspired to a Torah state and externally, it rejected any partition of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Yet, this trend, from its joining the World Zionist Organization (1902), generally yielded to the secular-democratic majority. The messianic mysticism advanced by rabbi and seminal thinker Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook (1865–1935) was quite confined at the time. It was only after the Six-Day War (1967) that Kook’s legacy gradually affected the main Zionist course.38 Tragically, the Zionist endeavor from the 1940s was advanced against the background of the Holocaust. Thus the Zionist movement lost the millions who were expected to settle the bulk of the Land of Israel. Instead, history maneuvered Zionism – against the onslaught of fascism and Nazism – to be by the same token a haven for Jewry’s surviving remnants as well as a principled political foe of racial anti-Semitism and chauvinism. Zionism thus was conceived by important elements of the “enlightened world” – especially in the English-speaking, Protestant regions – as a historic symbol of humanistic civilization versus barbarism.39 The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (May 1948) hence explicitly advocated the spiritual values associated with its humanistic core in contraposition to Nazism and barbarism. The declaration also notably 37

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Arye Naor, “Introduction,” in Arye Naor (ed.), Ze’ev Jabotinsky: Ideological Writings, vol. I: Liberal Nationalism (Jerusalem: Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, 2013), 11–56 [in Hebrew]; Amir Goldstein, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Thought and Action of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (Sede Boqer and Jerusalem: Ben-Gurion Research Institute of Israel and Zionism, Ben-Gurion University, and Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, 2015), 1–119, 237–266, 295–320, 456–464 [in Hebrew]. Dov Schwartz, Religious-Zionism: History and Ideology (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 1–94. For an in-depth historical analysis, see Dov Schwartz, The Shift in Religious Zionism: From Unity to Plurality (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2018) [in Hebrew]; Aviezer Ravitzky, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 79–144; Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), esp. 190–196. Alon Confino, A World without Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1–55; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 119–166, 269–173; Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), vii–xii, 369–519, and passim; Allon Gal, Gershon Bacon, Moshe Lissak, and Pnina Morag-Talmon (eds.), In the Democratic Way: On the Historical Sources of the Israeli Democracy (Sede Boqer: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2012), 15–130 [in Hebrew].

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On Jewish Nationhood and Nationalism

connected Jewish history with the values of the biblical prophets and the historically associated humanistic tenets: The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

Significantly, this document later served as the basis for Israel’s democraticconstitutional Basic Laws. Indeed, the founders of the democratic State of Israel genuinely believed that it would consistently intertwine humanistic and egalitarian values variously embedded in Judaism since antiquity.40 The Second World War’s largest surviving Jewish constituency (numbering about 6 million) lived in North America. Its increasingly prevalent Zionist orientation sustained the Yishuv and the nascent state and was also oriented toward the idea of an enlightened universal mission. This American Jewish attitude persistently worked to influence Israel to progress in the light of democratic values.41 Just a few minutes after its declaration of independence, the State of Israel was publicly recognized by the United States. Instructively, President Harry Truman boasted that he was like the Persian king Cyrus, who had enabled the Return to Zion in antiquity. Indeed, he touched upon Jewish historic collective memory, and he enjoyed Jewish support not merely for political reasons, but also because of the commitment to social democratic values shared by the bulk of the American Jewish community, the dominant circles in the Democratic Party, and the leading trends in the Zionist movement of the time.42 40

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Itzhak Galnoor and Dana Blander, The Handbook of Israel’s Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–34; Aronson, Ben-Gurion, 22–48; Erhud Luz, Wrestling with an Angel Power: Morality and Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 165–197, 274–282; for the quotation, see “Israeli Declaration of Independence (May 14, 1948),” in Lipset, Encyclopedia, vol. I V, 1481. Allon Gal (ed.), World Regional Zionism: Geo-cultural Dimensions, 3 vols. (Jerusalem and Sede Boqer: Shazar Center and Ben-Gurion University Press, 2010), vol. I, 91–133, 181– 226; vol. I I, 71–440; vol. I I I, 111–215 [in Hebrew]; Allon Gal, “The Mission Motif in American Zionism, 1898–1948,” American Jewish History, 75/4 (June 1986), 363–385; Allon Gal, “Independence and Universal Mission in Modern Jewish Nationalism: A Comparative Analysis of European and American Zionism (1897–1948),” Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual (1989), 242–255. Zvi Ganin, Truman, American Jewry, and Israel, 1945–1948 (New York: Holmes and Meir, 1979), 143–146, 182–189; Gal, David Ben-Gurion, 186–217; Michael Berenbaum, After

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Dialectically, it was during 1947–1949, when Israel was born in a costly and intensively experienced war for independence (about 1 per cent of the population was killed), that the universalist factor of its ethos became prominent. This ethos retrospectively defined the long confined course of Jewish experience of the Middle Ages as parenthetical, while harking back to the First Temple period as one characterized by eloquent prophetic legacy. For the leading Zionists of the time, this conceptual reframing was crucial if the “new-old state” was to become a full member of the democratic “family of nations.”43

Further Reading Bar-Levav, Avriel (ed.), Peace and War in Jewish Culture (Jerusalem and Haifa: Shazar Center and University of Haifa, 2006) [in Hebrew]. Barak-Erez,Daphne, Reading Law in the Bible: On Biblical Justice and Israeli Law (Rishon LeZion: Miskal, 2019) [in Hebrew]. Gal, Allon, Athena S. Leoussi, and Anthony D. Smith (eds.), The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Hellinger, Moshe (ed.), Jewish Political Tradition throughout the Ages (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2010) [in Hebrew]. Novak, David, Jewish Justice: The Contested Limits of Nature, Law and Covenant (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2017). Novak, David, Jewish Social Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Sands, Philippe, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes against Humanity” (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2016). Scott, James C., Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Tamir, Yael, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Walzer, Michael, Menachem Lorberbaum, and Noam J. Zohar (gen. eds.), The Jewish Political Tradition, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000–2018). Zakovitch, Yair, The Bible: A Divine Revolution (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 2019) [in Hebrew]. Zipperstein, Steven J., Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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Tragedy and Triumph: Essays in Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 156–172; Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 333–338. Heller, The Birth of Israel, 113–160, 282–293. Zerubavel’s Recovered Roots illustrates just heroic points of the tradition; for fuller surveys which elaborate also on the social and humanistic factors, see Tadmor-Shimoni, National Education; Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2009), 12–64, 83–96, 192–199.

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