Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe: Myths, Elitism and Transnational Connections (Palgrave Studies in Political History) 3030926753, 9783030926755

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN POLITICAL HISTORY

Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe Myths, Elitism and Transnational Connections

Edited by Jan Záhořík Antonio M. Morone

Palgrave Studies in Political History

Series Editors Henk te Velde, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Maartje Janse, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Hagen Schulz-Forberg, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

The contested nature of legitimacy lies at the heart of modern politics. A continuous tension can be found between the public, demanding to be properly represented, and their representatives, who have their own responsibilities along with their own rules and culture. Political history needs to address this contestation by looking at politics as a broad and yet entangled field rather than as something confined to institutions and politicians only. As political history thus widens into a more integrated study of politics in general, historians are investigating democracy, ideology, civil society, the welfare state, the diverse expressions of opposition, and many other key elements of modern political legitimacy from fresh perspectives. Parliamentary history has begun to study the way rhetoric, culture and media shape representation, while a new social history of politics is uncovering the strategies of popular meetings and political organizations to influence the political system. Palgrave Studies in Political History analyzes the changing forms and functions of political institutions, movements and actors, as well as the normative orders within which they navigate. Its ambition is to publish monographs, edited volumes and Pivots exploring both political institutions and political life at large, and the interaction between the two. The premise of the series is that the two mutually define each other on local, national, transnational, and even global levels.

Jan Záhoˇrík · Antonio M. Morone Editors

Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe Myths, Elitism and Transnational Connections

Editors Jan Záhoˇrík Department of Middle Eastern Studies University of West Bohemia Pilsen, Czech Republic

Antonio M. Morone Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Pavia Pavia, Italy

Palgrave Studies in Political History ISBN 978-3-030-92675-5 ISBN 978-3-030-92676-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: theendup/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

Introduction Jan Záhoˇrík and Antonio M. Morone

2

Swedish and Norwegian Nationalism on Display in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa Lars Folke Berge

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Antoun Saadeh and the Concept of the Syrian Nation Péter Ákos Ferwagner

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On the Shores of Phoenicia: Phoenicianism, Political Maronitism, and Christian Nationalism in Lebanon Francesco Mazzucotelli

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Nationalism Without Nation: Sudanese Decolonization and Its Aftermath Moritz A. Mihatsch

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Multiple Layers of Competing Nationalisms in Contemporary Ethiopia Jan Záhoˇrík and Ameyu Godesso

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Somali and Libyan Transition Towards Independence Compared: The Struggle Between New and Former Elites Antonio M. Morone

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Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Birth of Mexican Nationalism Reflection on Religious Symbol of Mexican Nation Radoslav Hlúšek

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The History and Present of Japanese Nationalism: Was Alive Yesterday, Is Alive Today Axel Berkofsky

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Lars Folke Berge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Dalarna University, Sweden. He has written on the 1906 uprising in KwaZulu-Natal: The Bambatha Watershed (Uppsala, 2000) for which he was Awarded the Westin Prize by the Royal Society of the Humanities at Uppsala. He has published on Church Life and Christian-Muslim Relations in Nigeria, and on Indian Church Life after Ayodhya. With Prof. Gunnel Cederlof, he is the co-editor of Political Visions and Social Realities in Contemporary South India (Dalarna University, 2003), and, with Prof. Irma Taddia, University of Bologna, Themes in modern African history and culture: festschrift for Tekeste Negash (Padova, 2013). He is currently researching the Swedish Evangelical Mission, Popular Mobilization for Schooling and Egalitarian ideals in Ethiopia, 1868–1935. Axel Berkofsky is Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Pavia. He is also Co-Head of the Asia Work Programme at the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale (ISPI) in Milan, Executive Committee Board Member at the Stockholm-based European Japan Advanced Research Network and Executive Committee member of the Canon Foundation in Europe. Previously, he was Senior Policy Analyst and Associate Policy Analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre (EPC) and Research Fellow at the Brussels-based European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS). He has published books, numerous papers, articles and essays in journals, newspapers and magazines and has lectured and taught at numerous think tanks, research vii

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institutes and universities in Europe and Asia. His research interests are among other Chinese history, Japanese and Chinese foreign and security policies, Chinese history, Asian security, and EU–Asia relations. Péter Ákos Ferwagner (1973) graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in history and French in 1996. In 2003, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the history of colonial Algeria. Since 2005, he has been a Lecturer in the Department of Modern History and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Szeged. His research interests include the political history of the modern Arab world, the relationship between the Mediterranean and Europe, and the history of colonization. Ameyu Godesso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Jimma University, in Oromia, Ethiopia. His research interests include peace and conflict studies, displacement, and migration in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Radoslav Hlúšek, Ph.D. (1976) is Associate Professor working in the Department of Ethnology and World Studies at the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia, and in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. He specializes in Mesoamerican cultures, especially in Nahua culture of Central Mexico where he realized several field researches aimed at the native form of the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe and at the ritual landscape and sacred mountains. He is principal organizer of international conference Search for Indian America, editor in chief of the journal Ethnologia Actualis, and associate editor of the journal Reviews in Anthropology. In 2020, he worked as the Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyoming, USA (Fulbright scholarship). Francesco Mazzucotelli is currently teaching History and Culture of the Middle East in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia. His topics of interest are ethnic and sectarian identities, and the history of urban spaces in the modern Middle East. He has published in journals such as “Oriente Moderno,” “Storia Urbana,” and “Il Politico.” He is the co-author of Guida alla politica mediorientale (Milano: Mondadori, 2021).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Moritz A. Mihatsch is a global historian interested in nationalism, selfdetermination, and sovereignty. He wrote his D.Phil. dissertation at the University of Oxford on political parties and the concept of nation in Sudan in the 1950s and 1960s. He taught for multiple years in Egypt (2014–2017) and then spent two years between Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen, and Madrid (2017–2019) before returning to the British University in Egypt in February 2020. Antonio M. Morone (Ph.D. in History 2007) is Associate Professor in Contemporary African History and Coordinator of the Master Degree in African and Asian Studies in the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Pavia. He extensively published on colonial and postcolonial history of North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Jan Záhoˇrík is Associate Professor of Modern History, currently in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Pavia and closely collaborates with Jimma University in Ethiopia. His research focuses on the modern history and politics of the Horn of Africa, and conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Jan Záhoˇrík and Antonio M. Morone

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, nationalistic language and actions stood behind an endless number of conflicts, both latent and real. While in Europe nationalism was usually related to nation-states, nationalisms in some other parts of the world are not, especially in areas with significantly post-colonial and multi-ethnic environment, such as Asia, Middle East, and Africa. Moreover, nationalist movements have been in many cases challenged by other processes, such as Pan-Africanism, PanSlavism, and Pan-Germanism, or, for instance, by the establishment of macro-regional units such as the European Union. Despite its historically central role in shaping the modern and contemporary world, after

J. Záhoˇrík (B) Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] A. M. Morone Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_1

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the end of the Cold War, there have been many predictions that downplayed the future role of nationalism or even expected this phenomenon to disappear. However, recent turbulent developments in some parts of the Middle East, Africa, Caucasus, or even Europe show that these were mostly mistaken. Nationalism is a term with multiple meanings and definitions that includes ethnic, civic, imperial, expansionist, anti-colonial, state/non-state, or religious nationalism. Socially and politically speaking, the idea of nation is of course closely related to the concept of identity that shapes and re-shapes the borders of the nation. Looking at the world history of the European colonialism during the twentieth century, the national identities can be considered as an achievement along the path toward independence of the colonial subjects. The European empires conquered African and Asian societies and reduced them at the dimension of ethnic identities and, potentially, subnational groups. Nationalists clamored for reversing the colonial order and achieving the rank of fullyflagged nations for their societies through the independence. However, in the post-colonial era, anti-establishment elites easily recovered former ethnic or parochial identities for promoting their own national identity and power. Nationalism as such is not a phenomenon that belongs to the past, but it is something that shapes and re-shapes our present as well as our future depending on changing sociopolitical, economic, or international contexts. As this collective volume attempts to show, nationalism(s) are very complex and hardly definable, or better to say comparable phenomena, because the root causes of the rise of nationalist movements in Europe were simply different than those in Asia, Africa, or Latin America (Behar 2005). Another division can be categorizing nationalism(s) into civic, liberal, anti-colonial, expansionist, ethnic, etc. This volume does not tend to become another piece of contributing to theoretical debates over the nature of nationalism as has been done by Gellner, Hobsbawm, Smith, and many others. However, we follow two major concepts as discussed in the following chapters. We see, together with Anderson (1983), nation as an imagined community from an historical perspective. Basically, all communities are imagined in this sense and all of them are limited and sovereign, meaning that beyond boundaries of one nation lies another nation, or another imagined community. Nationalism is focused, unlike monotheistic religions, on this world, which it presents as ultimately meaningful and not dependent on grander transcendental forces. However, just like we distinguish between great religions such as Islam,

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Christianity, and Judaism, there are also differences among imagined communities based on the definition of the nation either as composite or unitary entity, and the nature of membership criteria which can be civic or ethnic (Greenfield and Eastwood 2005). What we attempt to achieve in this volume is to put together various nationalist movements or cases of nationalisms which show different aspects of imagined communities. The volume is centered around three major aspects which include the public use of the history and its misinterpretation for contemporary political purposes, the role of (political or religious) elites in shaping the imagined communities, and transnational connections and links. While we take the feeling of belonging to a nation as one of the major criteria, we also acknowledge that “it is hard to find a single criterion that all nations share” (Jayet 2019: 154). Both ethnic and civic nationalisms can be liberal or dominance-oriented although it is generally thought that ethnic nationalism tends to be more exclusionary. As seen on the example of Japan (Berkofsky in this volume), for instance, there can be exclusionary aspect of civic nationalism as well. Nationalism is, beside other aspects, about loyalties, and modern nationalism is based on a notion that “nations constitute the only legitimate basis of sovereign states” (Smith 2004: 236). On the other hand, nationalism, as well as other concepts, identities, and loyalties, can be very fluid and change over time and space, and tend to be influenced by a set of factors that may (and may not) include socioeconomic environment, politics, religion, international context, and many others. Geographers also put an emphasis on territory as a significant aspect of nationalism (Penrose 2002). Nationalism may also mean, for some, the right of one group over another group who is denied the prestigious status. Nation can also be put into an opposition to other collectives, ethnicities, nationalities, peoples, tribes, clans, etc. (Maxwell et al. 2021). For example, one of the major aspects of nationalism(s) is the role of historical myths and generally translation of the past into the present. Typically, historical myths may serve territorial purposes, claiming that a certain nation has lived on a particular territory longer than some other nation. Or, historical myths can serve to revitalize ancient, imagined, era of greatness, be it the concept of Phoenicianism (chapter by Mazzucotelli) as an instrument of narrative legitimization of political Maronitism, and its morphing into a discourse of Christian isolationism and even an embryonal form of Maronite ethno-nationalism, or a version of Ethiopianism claiming having its roots going back to ancient Axumite kingdom in

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contrast to recent ethno-nationalist movements challenging this concept (chapter by Záhoˇrík). In both cases, it is an imagined history based on myths that have little connection to contemporary political and social situation in both countries (Lebanon and Ethiopia). Elites usually play an important role in nationalism as they serve as representatives of the imagined community. Nationalism is simply not or cannot be seen as a monolith as it in each case is based in different socioeconomic, historical, cultural, and political setting (Stearns 1997: 58–59). However, the modern studies on nationalism usually play with the European settings and European nation-states as being different than their counterparts in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. By focusing on entanglements of historical symbolism (Záhoˇrík and Godesso, Mihatsch, Ferwagner, and Mazzucotelli in this volume), role of elites (particularly Berkofsky, Ferwagner, Morone, and Mihatsch), and transnational connections being it a Creole society in Mexico (Hlúšek in this volume), or the role of Swedish and Norwegian missionaries in South Africa (Berge), the volume wants to put the issue of nationalism into broader perspective going beyond Europe in order to inspire further research within this framework. The intention of having geographically diverse case studies in the volume is led by the premise that the nationalist movements and the rise of nationalism in practically all parts of the world share similar features as in Western Europe which is somehow taken by multiple scholars as the cradle of modern nationalism (in countries like France or Germany) rooted in modernist revolution against ancién regime (Larmer and Lecocq 2018: 898). We intentionally avoid debates concerning big nationalist movements in Western European countries and focus on nations which came to being as a result of either anti-imperial forces (Sudan and other African case studies) or transnational connectivities such as Mexico, Syria, and Lebanon. Why it is relevant to study nationalism beyond Europe? Despite the fact that there exists plenty of literature on various cases studies of nationbuilding, nationalism, and identities beyond Europe, there still exists enough space for further examination of various approaches to nationalism, the ways nationalism is born and exists in certain context, leave alone competing nationalisms within specific countries. Primarily in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Asia and Africa, we may find examples of nationalist movements that either go beyond state or are centered around states or in mutual competition.

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This collective volume tends to shed light on various shapes of nationalism in different regional and historical settings in order to show and analyze wide range of limits and challenges to nationalism. The monograph is composed of case studies dealing with different regions that include Far East, Middle East, Horn of Africa, and Latin America, and Europe. What makes this volume unique is not only a wide range of geographically different case studies but primarily a comparative approach that combines different perspectives on how nations are understood and how they come into being, and/or what factors stand behind the concept of nation—citizenship, ethnicity, national/state symbols, us vs. them concept, religious aspects, as well as specific historical circumstances. This also shows that nation and nationalism are understood in different contexts either through social constructivist or through primordialist lenses. The authors are mostly well-established scholars coming from different academic backgrounds (historians, anthropologists, and political scientists) and different regions (Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Sweden, and Germany). In the second chapter after this introduction, Lars Folke Berge examines social and political preconditions for the emerging nationalisms in what until 1905 was the United Kingdoms of Norway and Sweden. This chapter also goes deepest in history and is the only one which brings significant interconnectivity with Europe while still being beyond Europe. The author sets the chapter into the KwaZulu-Natal region in South Africa. Through an innovative methodology, Lars Folke Berge takes a deeper look into the impact of KwaZulu-Natal realities of the 1906 uprising on the contrasts between different types of the Swedish and Norwegian nationalism which was not so recognizable back home in Scandinavia. Juxtaposing Swedish and Norwegian encounters and local interactions is what makes this chapter unique in international comparison as it deals with transcultural influences, interconnectivity, and the issues of culture and identity in a distant context bringing the issues of nationalism back to faraway places in home countries of Norway and Sweden from South African cultural and social context. The third chapter written by Ákos Ferwagner moves us to the Middle East and gives a different story from a different sociopolitical context, namely Syria. Antoun Saadeh and the concept of the Syrian nation deals with the attempt to recreate Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) in the medieval sense of the term using historical symbols and rhetoric of greatness. Such an entity would have to connect all Arab lands between Iraq and the

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Mediterranean Sea. Assad’s regime, as the author analyzes, was particularly in the 1970s willing to restrain the war against the State of Israel in order to build the dream of Greater Syria according to which the Lebanese-Syrian border was not marked as an international border but only as a regional one. The concept of Greater Syria was based on historical nostalgia as part of Pan-Arab sentiments still occupying an important place in the Syrian consciousness. The following chapter, whose author is Francesco Mazzucotelli, stays in the same region and deals with the issue of competing nationalist concepts in Lebanon. The author examines the development of the different version of Phoenicianism as an instrument of narrative legitimization of political Maronitism, and its morphing into a discourse of Christian isolationism and even an embryonal form of Maronite ethnonationalism in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War and its aftermath. As there is already an extensive literature on competing projects of nationhood and nation-building in Lebanon during the French Mandate and immediately after the independence, this essay intends to provide an original contribution through a focus on two topics. This chapter focuses on the image of the homeland in political discourses and mass communication, with a specific reference to political posters, theatrical plays, songs, and postcards, and takes into account the aesthetics and the semantics of the nation as it was imagined in the circles linked to Phoenicianism and the idea of Lebanese exceptionalism. Moreover, as the author examines, another level of his analysis is an evaluation of the legacy and transformation, both at the discursive and practical level, of political Maronitism as a result of the political defeat of the Lebanese Front in the civil war and the establishment of Pax Syriana after 1990. The fifth chapter by Moritz Mihatsch moves us to Africa, Sudan in particular, where the author discusses what he calls Nationalism without Nation and the era of decolonization and its aftermath. The chapter argues that due to the weakness of the colonial state, the elite did not have to overcome its internal divisions or reach out to the periphery to form an effective nationalist movement. Being divided, they were unable to formulate a coherent vision for the nation post-independence, which would have been a prerequisite for effective nation-building. In essence, the division of the nationalist movement led to a divided nation which is reflected by the eventual independence of South Sudan and the ongoing armed conflict in Sudan. The author discusses the structure of the condominium and the process of decolonization before presenting the division

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within the nationalist movement in Khartoum. As Mihatsch explains further, the process of nation-building in the Sudan in its first stages basically excluded the peripheries whose engagement was minimal. The author is then responding to a question of why there was no successful project of nation-building after independence. Jan Záhoˇrík and Ameyu Godesso examine multiple layers and complexities of competing nationalisms in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a very specific case study not only in African context as the country has never been systematically colonized by an external power (with an exception of the short-lived Italian occupation in 1936–1941). While the phenomenon of nationalism in an African context is in many cases related to the European colonialism, and explained as a reaction to colonialism, in an Ethiopian social and political environment we cannot use this logic due to an obvious absence of such determinant. Throughout the Cold War and up until today, Ethiopia has been experimenting with different types of nationalism, such as a unitary nationalism imposed by the Imperial regime, socialist nationalism, as well as federal arrangement which helped to create and revitalize multiple ethno-nationalist movements. The authors shed light on various competing nationalisms in Ethiopia which make the country vulnerable to political instability and they discuss the relevance of such debates for our understanding of current turmoil in Ethiopia. The seventh chapter written by Antonio M. Morone compares the Somali and Libyan transition toward independence. The author takes a look at the issue of leadership, the role of elites in the process of transition, particularly the differences and divides between the former and new nationalist and conservative elites in both countries. The starting point of further analysis of nation-building and independence in these two former Italian colonies is the UN resolutions which in November 1949 paved the way to return of Italy to Somalia within the framework with the precise commitment to grant country independence by ten years term. To the contrary, independence of Libya was disposed by the end of 1951 under the crown of King Idr¯ıs al-San¯us¯ı, head of the Muslim brotherhood San¯ us¯ıyah, and a faithful British ally. Eritrea’s fate was sealed by another resolution which in December 1950 turned the country into an autonomous part of federation with Ethiopia, which later on was changed into a unitary state. The international solution for the former Italian colonies was put into the hands of conservative as well as colonially rooted elites and even anti-colonial elites, particularly when it comes to

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the newly independent countries like Libya and Ethiopian-Eritrean federation. In the case of Somalia, the situation was very different and aligned with the general African context in which decolonization came later than in the Middle East and North Africa. In Somalia, as Morone shows, the new and nationalist ruling class was established by the Italian trusteeship, which represented a clean break with pre-colonial history. Thus, the whole process of international decision making over the future settlement for former Italian colonies resulted not only in rising competition not only between Italy, Great Britain, France, and the nationalist leaders and supporters who usually established their associations or truly political parties during the early postwar period, but also between the latter and the African intermediaries of the former authorities. As the author claims, it would be too simplistic and definitely wrong to claim for the end of Italian colonialism during World War II and the nonexistence of a distinctive competition of colonialism versus nationalism in the postwar period. The eighth chapter brings us to Latin America where Radoslav Hlúšek gives an account on the birth of the Mexican nationalism through the perspective of religious symbols, in this case Our Lady of Guadeloupe. As the author examines, modern nations and nationalisms in Latin America, particularly in terms of their origin and development, show couple of different features compared to their counterparts in Europe. The author finds an answer to the origins of such situation which lie in colonial past of modern Latin American republics from which and in which all of these nations and nationalisms originated. Nationalism and nation-building were, on all these cases, a matter of Creole elites. However, what makes the case of Mexico unique is the role of a religious symbol embodied in the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe (or Virgin of Guadalupe) that was used and taken by the representatives of Mexican nationalism as crucial in the formative period of a nation. As Hlúšek states, Our Lady of Guadalupe was seen as an element of difference that was used for making distinction between so-called peninsulares (those from Pyrenean peninsula—Spaniards from Spain) and Creoles (those from New World—Spaniards from New Spain) who stopped identifying themselves as Europeans (Spaniards) and began to identify themselves as Americans (Mexicans). The last chapter, authored by Axel Berkofsky, analyzes the Japanese nationalism with a special focus in the role of elites. As the author discusses, the Japanese-style nationalism was for several decades after the

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World War II propagated by a rather small group of individuals and intellectuals who more often than not came across as a bunch of misguided group of regulars talking and living their nationalist and revisionist fantasy in closed-door meetings over (a lot of) Japanese sake. Their nationalism and revisionism were rather incoherent, and as Berkofsky claims, none of these small movements gained much and/or sustainable support from the country’s political mainstream. As he continues with the examination, the situation is different today. Revisionism became a part of repertoire of nationalists, including the use of militarist wartime propaganda, which in essence suggests that Japan fought the Asia-Pacific War in “self-defense” fighting against Western imperialists and colonialists occupying and dominating Asia. As Berkofsky shows, this is not only an absurd and nonsensical narrative, but it also ignores historical facts and general interpretation of history and turns Japan into victims of the Pacific War. The role of elites in this case leads to reshaping the historical interpretations and to ignoring the fact that the suffering of the Japanese people caused by, for instance, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came after the Japanese invasion and brutal occupation of China and many other countries in Asia. This last chapter of the volume puts this nationalist and revisionist discourse into a broader perspective. The volume, as the editors think, sheds new light on different paths toward nationalism in countries beyond Europe which, on the other hand, have a relevance to our understanding of political and social movements and affairs in the countries under examination. Furthermore, the case studies discussed and presented in this volume on nationalism beyond Europe are relevant to understand the truly reasons for so many political and even military European interventions in those same contexts. Looking at the history of nationalism beyond Europe, we have to conclude that nationalism is something that marked a significant historical turnover at the time of the independence, but, at the same time, represented and is still constituting a strong bind of the former colonies to their masters.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Behar, Moshe. 2005. Do Comparative and Regional Studies of Nationalism Intersect? International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37 (4): 587–612.

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Greenfield, Liah, and Jonathan Eastwood. 2005. Nationalism in Comparative Perspective. In The Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies and Globalization, ed. Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred Schwarts, 247–65. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jayet, Cyril. 2019. Is Nation One of the Most Puzzling and Tendentious Items in the Political Lexicon? Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 19 (2): 152–169. Larmer, Miles, and Baz Lecocq. 2018. Historicizing Nationalism in Africa. Nations and Nationalism 24 (4): 893–917. Maxwell, Alexander, Jan Záhoˇrík, and Molly Turner. 2021. The Nation Versus the ‘Not-Quite-Nation’: A Semantic Approach to Nationalism and Its Terminology. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. https://doi.org/10.1111/sena. 12349. Penrose, Jan. 2002. Nations, States and Homelands: Territory and Territoriality in Nationalist Thought. Nations and Nationalism 8 (3): 277–297. Smith, Helmut Walser. 2004. Nations and Nationalism. In Germany, 1800–1870, ed. Jonathan Sperber, 230–255. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stearns, Peter N. 1997. Nationalisms: An Invitation to Comparative Analysis. Journal of World History 8 (1): 57–74.

CHAPTER 2

Swedish and Norwegian Nationalism on Display in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa Lars Folke Berge

The short-lived 1906–1907 Zulu uprising in KwaZulu-Natal was a defining moment in South African history. To whites, the fear of a possible defeat led to the formation of the 1910 South African Union. To most blacks, it resulted in an increased labour migration to mines and white farms but also, among the minority of African Christians, in the formation of the non-ethnic ANC in 1912. To others, the Zulu royal family became a rallying point, later developed into the first Zulu nationalist Inkatha movement (Marks 1970, 1986; Cope 1993). With South Africa incorporated into the global economy, KwaZulu-Natal was subject to a number of cross-cultural and long-distance influences—the proliferation of knowledge, expertise, and ideas between regions and areas. Natal was one of the

L. F. Berge (B) Department of History, Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_2

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most heavily evangelised regions in the world and, as part of such global entanglements, Western missionaries served as entrance points for, what global historians Middell and Naumann would call, cultural transfer and global connectedness (Middell and Naumann 2010). Among them were the Lutherans who had a long history and a strong presence in the region and counted almost a third of African converts (Scriba with Lislerud 1997; Norenius 1925: 181–182). Particularly Swedes and Norwegians had much in common, being citizens of the same United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. In KwaZulu-Natal, they lived practically as neighbours. Still, in their responses to the uprising, there was a striking contrast between the Norwegians’ sympathies for the rebels’ struggle for independence and the dominant opinion of most Swedes, condemning the uprising as an act of defiance against the authorities ordained by God (Berge 2000: 343–356). How did this come about? This chapter analyses how the Swedish missionary attitudes—in both cultural and political matters—in comparison with those of their Norwegian colleagues can be understood in the light of the different nationalist discourses at home. The chapter begins by investigating social and political preconditions for the emerging nationalisms in what until 1905 was the United Kingdoms of Norway and Sweden. Then, how did the Swedish version of nationalism materialise in an agenda for a Zulu folk church in KwaZulu-Natal in the years leading up to the uprising? How did key concepts of territorial inclusiveness and cultural tolerance relate to the situation on the ground in KwaZulu-Natal and the issues of Zulu nationhood, culture, and history? Moreover, how did the agenda relate to the social institution of polygyny, condemned by practically all missionaries but indispensable for the survival of the Zulu homestead? Finally, how was the Swedish mission programme put to test in the contest between white settlers and rebels in the 1906 uprising? By making use of a contrasting methodology, I shall attempt to demonstrate that Swedes and Norwegians’ spatial and temporal proximity in KwaZulu-Natal and the acuteness of the uprising revealed differences in opinion as well as underlying contrasts between their different types of nationalisms, otherwise not recognisable in the Scandinavian environment. With the Church of Sweden Mission (CSM) being an extension of the State Church, the sources are rich and the archives are exemplary well organised. The Swedes were well educated and, in many cases, trained observers: all spoke Zulu fluently and knew the people in the affected areas. In comparison with the Norwegians, I shall primarily draw on

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secondary sources, most useful are those of the pathbreaking historicalsociological Trondheim school (Simensen 1986; Hernæs 1988). Recent studies (Hovland 2013; Roaldset 2020) contribute to new cultural, religious, and narrative perspectives but change little regarding the comparative aspect of the present study. In addition, I shall use articles in the Norwegian missionary journal for clarifying contrasts. The general interest in researching nationalism in the late twentieth century (Anderson 1991; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1992) encouraged similar studies also in Scandinavia. Key concepts like territory, language, culture and social institutions were parts of the discourses on national identity (Petterson 1999). Church historians investigated the relationship between nation and religion (Blückert 2000; Claesson 2004), including my own contribution of 2000 albeit located in KwaZulu-Natal (Berge 2000, see Marks 2002; Berge 2013). More recent is Henrik Berggren’s and Lars Trägårdh’s 2015 review of the impact of Martin Luther’s thinking on the Swedish welfare state (Berggren and Trägårdh 2015). On the Norwegian side, Dag Thorkildsen has analysed popular mobilisation and nationalism in the Lutheran Church in Norway (Thorkildsen 1998a, b). Pål Repstad has presented a more sociological-historical perspective, most recently in an article of 2009 (Repstad 1981, 2009). ØyvindØsterud’s study of 1997 is one of few comparative studies of organised religion in Sweden and Norway (Østerud 1997), still a major reference (Botvar 2009). Particularly relevant for the present study is Bo Stråth’s 2005 centennial history of the United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway where he observes the lack of research juxtaposing Swedish and Norwegian encounters and local interaction, especially evident in issues on culture and identity. Local history research, he says, has exclusively focused on the nation-state as something almost given by nature and without any transcultural analyses (Stråth 2005: 548–554, 571–572).

Part 1: Turn of the Century Nationalism in Sweden and Norway After the Napoleonic wars, Sweden and Norway were forged together when Denmark after 400 years had to cede Norway in 1814. Gradually, the two countries began to drift apart although it was not until 1905 that Norwegian nationalists unilaterally dissolved the union (Norborg and Sjöstedt 1996: 166, 168). For Sweden, the most important change was the mid-century industrial breakthrough (Magnusson 1996). With

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industrialisation and a popular mobilisation from below, Sweden gradually developed a modern political party system. In comparison with Norway, however, Sweden lagged behind and it was only by 1909 that all adult men received the right to vote and not until 1921 that also women could vote. The rapid social transformation inspired a search for a new, common image of the Swedish nation (Broberg 1993: 171). Essentially a counterproject, it aimed at replacing modernity and international class solidarity with the nation and its celebrated history, especially the great power era with heroic kings like Gustavus Adolphus (Jansson 1990: 351–352, 347– 350). The creation of a national identity, adjusting a cultural adherence to the larger political and economic unit of the national state, was, as in other countries, entrusted to the intellectual elite (Gellner 1983: 29– 34, 52, 60–61). A major motive was an inclusive understanding of the territory with cultural variations reaching from the Sami in the north to the flatlands in the south, but all under one roof. The idea is manifest in Arthur Hazelius’ Skansen of 1891, the Stockholm open-air museum with a pedagogical layout of the Swedish regions. It is similarly visible in novelist Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, published in 1906, with young Nils on a goose encircling the unified—but culturally diverse—Swedish territory (Jönses 1999: 130–135; 2008: 43–57). In Norway, the movement towards independence became a part of a larger modernisation project. Through the 1884 liberal victory, the country headed for a radical and democratic development with two fronts. It aimed both against Danish cultural dominance, with the intent of replacing it by a distinctively Norwegian culture, and, politically, against Sweden, the now ruling power. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the leftist liberals seized the initiative, Norwegian nationalism became a struggle for a new society, developed as a progressive, leftist force in favour of political independence, democracy, and modernisation (Østerud 1997: 46–47). In Norway, where the industrial breakthrough and labour class mobilisation occurred later than in Sweden, religious change was not as conflict ridden. The broad, Pietistic and lay movement within the Lutheran Church became a carrier of popular mobilisation (Repstad 1981: 57–58, 74–75). It was morally rigid, religiously intolerant, and certainly obedient to the authorities, but it was also a school in democracy and a vehicle for the democratic breakthrough. It both carried the liberal idea of equal opportunities for all and was hostile to cultural progress, emphasising

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the rural countryside in opposition to the urban, highbrow culture. The Norwegian missionary movement was very much a part of this process. In 1842, diverse missionary organisations had united in the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS), and in 1844, Hans Paludan Smith Schreuder (1817–1882) became its pioneering missionary to Zululand (Myklebust 1980). While Schreuder belonged to a more national-romantic faction, he was from the outset distanced from his Pietistic-Evangelical support. In 1873, this led to a split with Schreuder founding an independent mission body while the larger NMS developed into a lay and democratic movement within the Church of Norway (Scriba with Lislerud 1997: 177). In industrialising Sweden, the Lutheran State Church was challenged by a new individualism, a general secularisation, the popular mobilisation of the free churches, and the Socialist-inspired labour movement. As a counteroffensive, a neo-Lutheran school linked the Hegelian idea of a people, folk, with the idea of the nation and the established church. The Church was ascribed a unique position—the ultimate manifestation of the Swedish national character (Ekström 1963: 154–156). To challenge the Evangelical or Low Church popular mobilisation for foreign missions, the CSM was established in 1874 with one mission field in South India and another in South Africa. In 1876, it sent its first three missionaries to KwaZulu-Natal (Furberg 1962). Henry William Tottie (1846–1913), the leading CSM theologian at the time, was an exponent of a nationalism built on territorial inclusiveness and cultural tolerance manifest in the national church. In 1883, he became the CSM Home Board secretary. In 1886, he visited the British Colony of Natal and the recently conquered Kingdom of Zululand where he especially took notice of an African society in change. In Zululand, he met with the son of the last Zulu king, Dinuzulu kaCethswayo (1868– 1913), in the not yet annexed remnants of “old” Zululand and noticed his anguish over lost land (Furberg 1962). Much of Tottie’s thinking was mapped on the situation in Zululand. An ethnic folk church was to become a new consolidating “cement” in the face of a disintegrating Zulu culture, threatened by Western colonialism and greedy capitalism. It was however conditional that the general character of the people was not entirely dissolved. There had to be something to build on and Tottie judged Zulu society strong enough to provide such a fertile ground. Tottie’s outlook was decidedly coloured by his background in the Swedish folk church: being territorial rather

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than confessional. The envisaged folk church was to be inclusive within geographical and linguistic areas rather than defined by confessional borders. The folk included the family and the state as a whole and from which individuals were not to be detached. The mission should not subjugate people or its national identity and distinctive character but rather tolerate pre-capitalist, indigenous social institutions like polygyny in Africa and the caste system in India (Furberg 1962; Hallencreutz 1985: 124). As an associate professor at Uppsala University in the last decade of the nineteenth century, he came to influence a whole generation of missionaries. All male missionaries sent to KwaZulu-Natal in the 1890s were ordained clergy and all but one had studied for Tottie. The young missionaries were, however, soon without his intellectual leadership when Tottie in 1900 was appointed bishop in the south of Sweden. The administration was now in the hands of the Home Board secretary, Rev. Gudmar Hogner. He was an official with lower academic standing and without any specific ideological orientation but powerful as the liaison with the mission supporters, upon whom the whole project depended (Furberg 1962).

Part 2: The Swedish Mission in the South African Context After the establishment of British rule at the Cape in the early nineteenth century, several missionary organisations began to take interest in the “unreached” independent Zululand in the east, hopeful that a mass conversion of the formerly so powerful kingdom might lead other peoples to follow suit (Etherington 1978). Eventually, the Colony of Natal became one of the most heavily evangelised regions on earth. In spite of different creeds, the missions turned out remarkably similar as active agents also for social and economic change. In contrast to the massive investments made, accomplishments were nevertheless humble and it was only by the last decade of the century, in pace with the decline of Africans’ pre-capitalist economy, that conversions gained any momentum. To the north of Natal, however, the Zulu Kingdom remained closed with only a few exceptions, among them were the Lutherans (Etherington 1978).

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Lutherans Among the Zulu Schreuder arrived in 1844, before the South African mineral revolution, and his early entrance shaped his strategy and provided a model for missions arriving later. He was not intent on winning individuals but rather to win the Zulu people en masse with the aim of making Christianity reconciled with Zulu independence. After having gained the confidence of the king, he established a string of mission stations. For many years, the Norwegians made strikingly few converts which led Schreuder to a more imperialist strategy, beginning to rely on political pressure from the British and hoping for a replacement of the king (Hernæs 1986). The NMS missionaries went even further and, after the 1879 war, many claimed the Zulu defeat had been a necessary lesson in “humiliation” which they believed would benefit conversions (Simensen et al. 1986). In this, they resembled the second Lutheran mission to arrive in Zululand, the Saxonian Hermannsburg mission. They too shared the objective of a Lutheran Volkskirche but also made few converts. To them too, the war became a turning point, with calls for an “iron fist” that would make the Zulu more amenable to evangelisation (Hasselhorn 1988).1 The Swedish missionaries who first arrived in 1876 were an odd collection of individuals, and the establishment of the Swedish mission remained fragile for several years.2 It was only in the last decade of the century that the organisation became more structured and recruitment more professional. Among the leading missionaries who had arrived immediately before the turn of the century, only one had not studied for Tottie. Of an older generation was the staunchly Lutheran Fredrik

1 Unlike the Norwegians, the Saxonians gradually drew closer to the Boers in the north, especially since Germany began to appear as a colonial power. The Germans who arrived after 1884 were all imbued with the conviction of the supremacy of the white race in general and the German in particular. By adopting raw Social-Darwinist concepts, they legitimised the issue of race used by the white settlers and the Boer views of Africans as descendants of Ham. Hasselhorn (1988: 51, 139, 140–141). 2 One missionary had more of an Evangelical leaning, yet another criticised British “Negrophilism” but admired the Boers’ stalwart treatment of Africans. Two of them had more or less migrated to South Africa where they lived as well-to-do proprietors, yet another ventured into different business activities. Berge (2000: 185–188).

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Ljungquist (1847–1926), at the largest mission station, Appelbosch. He became the local leader trusted by the Home Board.3 The CSM in the Colonial Context In the decade before 1906, the white population in Natal had more than doubled, leading to the commercialisation of agriculture, a further alienation of Africans’ land and increased black labour migration. The policy of segregation of land and indirect rule through African chiefs in the so-called Native Reserves was now under local settlers’ administration since the 1893 British granting of “Responsible government” to the colony. To the north, however, Zululand still counted only around a thousand whites, mainly missionaries, traders, and government officials. Many whites still saw the conquered kingdom as a potential threat and Dinuzulu in particular. Against the will of the Natal settlers, the British government had allowed him to return to Zululand but only as a petty chief. The settlers’ government continuously discredited and suppressed the representatives of the old Zulu aristocracy. Many Africans, on the other hand, in both Natal and Zululand, saw Dinuzulu as a promise of a forthcoming restoration of the Zulu nation (Berge 2000). To the CSM, the balancing between black and white societies was most difficult in settler-dominated, northern Natal. Settlers accused the missionaries of “spoiling the natives”, producing useless labourers who not only had become “proud and idle” but who also demanded higher wages.4 The common saying among local settlers, as reported by resident missionary Hallendorff, was that South Africa had three national

3 At the turn of the century, the CSM and NMS were about equal in the number of

missionaries and church members, a couple of thousand, with the difference that NMS had the bulk of followers in Zululand. The CSM employed nine men and eight women at five major mission stations, three in Natal and two in Zululand. The Schreuder-mission was much smaller and the German larger with 22 missionaries and some 5000 members in KwaZulu-Natal and much larger in the Transvaal to the north. Berge (2000: 118, 120, 187, and 223). 4 Official report from the Oscarsberg mission station, July 1904 by K. Hallendorff, in Inspection of the Mission field 1904: A II: 11 b. and Hallendorff to Hogner, 24.5.04, cf. 6.5.03, Mission Director’s Correspondence, South Africa, 1903–1904, E I c: 3, Church of Sweden Mission Archives (CSMA). Hallendorff. 1902. Church of Sweden Mission Journal 27, 8: 131–139.

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scourges: poisonous snakes, locusts, and missionaries.5 Further to the south in Natal, most CSM converts lived in the impoverished Native Reserves, subordinate and often in conflict with non-Christian chiefs. Squeezed between their roles as government subordinates and leaders of their peoples, chiefs were losing prestige and authority in pace with an overcrowding of reserves and an inability to allocate land to their followers while most men left for migrant labour. The conflict was a struggle over the women, the last to remain at home and on whom the pre-capitalist economy ultimately depended. Many of them, however, had begun to show an interest in Christianity and the vast majority of CSM converts were women.6 The CSM Church-Nation Programme Put into Practice The CSM shared many features of a Protestant mission in South Africa, but it was their Lutheranism and Tottie’s principles on nation, culture, history, and social institutions that distinguished them from most of the others. Like Norwegian and German Lutherans before them, the Swedes too emphasised the importance of the vernacular language.7 When the settler government introduced new regulations for the teaching of English in mission schools, conditional for receiving its grant-in-aid, the CSM missionaries were gravely upset: “By no means” as put by Wennerqvist, “have I left my fatherland and all my dear ones to instruct the Zulu children in the reading and writing of English.”8 Learning the language was a crucial gateway to Zulu society but not language alone. Hallendorff defended several issues controversial among most other missionaries, for 5 Hallendorff to Hogner, 6.5.03, Mission Director’s Correspondence, South Africa, 1903–1904, E I c: 2, CSMA. 6 Most of them were married to polygynist husbands and one may caution against an overestimation of a purely religious “heathen”—Christian contrast. It was rather a coexistence between two worlds, made possible by the CSM not requiring divorce as a prerequisite for baptising wives in polygynous marriages. Berge (2000: 227–229, 243). 7 Cf. Sandström to Hogner, 13.12.05, The Mission director’s correspondence, South Africa, 1905–1906, E I c: 4, CSMA. 8 Wennerqvist to Hogner, 25.3.03, The Mission director’s correspondence, South Africa, 1903–1904, E I c: 3, CSMA (translation by the author). Cf. Hallendorff to Hogner, 6.5.03, The Mission director’s correspondence, South Africa, 1903–1904, E I c: 3, CSMA.

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instance by strongly refuting prejudices against the high-alcohol content Zulu beer, usually drunk from bowls big as footballs, describing it as a both natural and a necessary ingredient in the African diet.9 Tottie’s programme was similarly manifest in the CSM defence of Zulu personal names when arguing with other missions on the need for converts to take a new, Biblical or European, name when baptised.10 One of the clearest voices of Tottie’s ideology was Reinhold Kempe (1869–1941) in Zululand. “The missionary”, he said, “should not appear as a social reformer, trying to abolish all anomalies and introduce new regulations in accordance with his own way of thinking” cautioning against those who were inclined, “to condemn the heathen customs before they had understood their real origin and meaning”.11 Instead, he said: It is not at all likely or not even plausible that it is in keeping with His plan that these peoples should be totally changed in line with the pattern of European civilisation. To the contrary, it is probable that when they convert, [they] will mould our civilisation and some of our forms of Christianity independently in coherence with their individual talents.12

In the light of a CSM tolerance towards Zulu traditions and customs, it is interesting to compare with their NMS colleagues. To the Biblicist Norwegians, much was “heathendom”, especially in the early years this included clothing, food, beer, and medicine. It is only consistent that NMS followed the general praxis where converts were given or took a new personal name. The new name was to symbolise a rite de passage, the 9 Report from the Oscarsberg mission station, July 1904, in Inspection of the mission field, 1904, A II: 11 b, and Five-year Annual Report from Emtulwa, 1898–1902, Mission Board minutes, appendices 1903, A II: 10, CSMA, Uppsala. 10 Ljungquist to Hogner, 16.1.02 and 18.3.02, Mission Director’s Correspondence, South Africa, 1901–1902, E I c: 2, CSMA, Uppsala, and Baptismal roll for the Oscarsberg congregation 1903–1909, kept by Hallendorff (Födelse och dopbok för Oscarsberg församling åren 1903–1909), deposited in the vicarage at Oscarsberg, South Africa. J. E. Norenius to Hogner 27.2.03 Mission Director’s Correspondence, South Africa, 1903–1904, E I c: 2, CSMA. J. E. Norenius to Hogner 27.2.03 Mission Director’s Correspondence, South Africa, 1903–1904, E I c: 2, CSMA Ljungquist to Hogner 16.1.02, Mission Director’s Correspondence, South Africa, 1901–1902, E I c: 3, CSMA. 11 Kempe. 1906. Lunds Missionstidning (The Lund Mission Journal, LMJ ) 60, 2: 22, 27 (translation by the author). 12 Kempe. 1906. LMJ 60, 2: 22, 27 (translation by the author).

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new Christian individual born through the baptism, while the old names were seen as too much associated with the old heathen world and religion. Since the Norwegians received their ideals from the only “true” Christian society they knew, i.e., Norway, a great number of Zulu men and women came to live their lives not only as Sven, Hjalmar, Gudrun and Gunhild, Martin Luther and Mary Magdalene but also as Johannes Haugvaldstad and Henriette Jakobine Gislesen (Simensen et al. 1986: 210. See Roaldset 2020: 144–148). Zulu History The promotion of Zulu language and culture correlated with a zeal for the Zulu past. One of the most prominent translators and recorders of Zulu music and oral history was a Swedish missionary, Hedvig Posse (1861– 1927) (Sarja 2002: 70–74, Sarja 2003: 104–133). To her, the music project was an attempt to preserve traditional Zulu melodies in a period of increasing social change (Sarja 2003: 128, 131). In this, she not only echoed Tottie’s call for the strengthening of Zulu culture and history but also mirrored what contemporary folklorists, such as the abovementioned Hazelius in Stockholm, were busy doing at home: collecting items and artefacts to save them from the tidal wave of industrialisation and modernisation. Another missionary, Axel Liljestrand (1870–1908), published several articles and essays on Zulu history and culture in various journals.13 What distinguishes his contributions are their remarkably well-informed character and his exceptionally appreciative portrayal of the Zulu people, history, and culture (Liljestrand and Hallendorff 1907). As noted by historian Åke Holmberg, Liljestrand’s wider social framework and varied portrayals of Africans are remarkably different from the clichés generally presented by whites (Holmberg 1988: 465). The CSM enthusiasm for the Zulu past coincided with an emerging renaissance for Zulu history, part of proto-nationalist development where educated and politically conscious African Christians began to look to

13 Liljestrand, Axel. 1899. CSMJ 24, 1–2: 3–10; 24, 3: 39–44 and 24, 4: 53–62. Liljestrand, Axel. 1905. Julbok för Västerås stift utgiven af några bland dess präster 1: 128–135. Liljestrand, Axel. 1907. Varde Ljus, Nordisk missionskalender, 15: 69–80. Liljestrand, Axel. 1906. Sydafrikanskt folkmaterial och kristendomen. Nutida Missionsuppgifter. Uppsala: Church of Sweden Mission. Hallström (1938).

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Dinuzulu for leadership. Within the CSM, Daniel Magwaza (b. c. 1875), one of Posse’s co-workers, personified a process where educated Christians began to retain and preserve Zulu traditional life and religiosity. In 1905, when Magwaza had gathered a substantial amount of oral history with the purpose of spreading further knowledge about olden times under the Zulu kings, and asked the CSM for permission to publish a Zulu history book, this was very much in line with Tottie’s Church-Nation Programme (Berge 2000: 259, 279–284). Nevertheless, to a great many missionaries a non-pejorative account of the glorious but “heathen” days of Zulu kings Shaka, Dingane, and Mpande would have been horrendous. There was, however, another more serious contemporary issue: how to deal with polygyny. The Missionaries and Polygyny Practically, all missionaries condemned polygyny and barred polygynists from baptism and church membership (Du Plessis 1911: 356; Welsh 1971: 266).14 Different from controversies over language, customs, and history, the missionary ban on polygyny targeted the very heart of the pre-capitalist economy where a plurality of wives implied a more productive homestead (Berge 2000: 63–64). The missionaries condemned polygyny and so did the white monogamous farmers because it withheld the black labour they believed they were entitled to. For the survival of the Zulu economy, however, it is consistent that the missionaries’ claim that the men should divorce all but one, i.e., the first, wife was a main reason for their difficulties in reaching out to the male population (Gaitskell 1990: 254). Among the Lutherans, there was little room for compromises.15 The Saxonian Germans were from their very outset firm in their condemnations of polygyny (Hasselhorn 1988: 40, 212) and even Schreuder had

14 One exception was John William Colenso (1814–1883), the controversial first bishop of the Church of England in Natal. He did, however, have very few followers and many enemies. Colenso’s ideas on polygyny, education, and the entire concept of mission were rejected then and have, as said by his biographer, been ignored ever since (Guy 1983: 80). 15 Wolter, R. 1905. A Report from the First General Missionary Conference of South Africa. LMJ 59, 3: 33–42.

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regarded polygyny incompatible with Christianity (Myklebust 1980: 263– 265). To the NMS missionaries, as put by Roaldset: “The bottom line was that Christianity was incompatible with polygamy” (Roaldset 2020: 214). To many of them, African traditional religion was in totality “heathen” while the Christian faith only contained morality, social order, and technology. When the expected “humiliation” of the Zulu after the 1879 war had not produced the expected conversions, the NMS missionaries too opted for the destruction of the entire pre-capitalist economic and social system, now considered irreconcilable with Christian faith (Simensen et al. 1986: 198–201, 210, 225 and 229). In sum, also to the Lutherans, polygyny was out of question. Theological motivations had proven to be too light weighted. Within the CSM, the issue of polygyny first became pressing at a missionary conference in 1899, when women on a broad front began to take an interest in Christianity—while the men were still unreachable. Even if virtually all South African missions banned polygynists, three of the CSM missionaries argued, this should not prevent them from following their own heritage in Luther’s teachings and Tottie’s objective of an inclusively defined folk church. The discussion was both intense and emotional but, ultimately, the conference refuted the proposal with the argument that even a limited acceptance of polygyny severely could endanger relations with the mission’s indispensable financial supporters in Sweden. In 1904, it was again placed on the agenda. In a lengthy article, Hallendorff argued against polygynists having to divorce all but one wife, thereby bringing about a situation in which children and wives would live without support. In due time and in keeping with Tottie’s reasoning, he said, the Christian spirit would transform the minds of its followers and polygyny naturally fade away.16 At the end of the day and in spite of Tottie’s principles, the proposal was narrowly voted down, this time with the argument that it would cause tensions with the adverse Germans and Norwegians and thus endanger the common objective of a future Lutheran Zulu folk church (Berge 2000: 202–205).

16 Hallendorff. 1904. CSMJ 29, 24: 390–396.

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The CSM Put to Test: The 1906 Uprising The outbreak of violence in April 1906 brought to the surface issues that inevitably positioned the CSM missionaries between the settler society and the emerging Zulu nationalism and exposed the heritage of their Swedishversion nationalism as revealed in comparison with their Norwegian colleagues. Most of the Swedes, used to the privileged position of the State Church at home and comfortable with the Lutheran obedience to the authorities, maintained a silent consent or found no difficulties in siding with the government. Before 1906, the local CSM leader Ljungquist had been one of the major proponents for a tolerant view of Zulu culture and polygyny. During the uprising, however, he clearly sided with the white militia, tracing rebels, and handing over information about collaborators. Consequently, the rebels were enraged, threatening the families barricaded in the church: “That night all were prepared to be murdered”17 one of his colleagues wrote. Ljungquist himself, however, who was known by the name of Mjele, the rock, found solace in Swedish history: My thoughts went to my dear homeland in the North. Image after image from her history appeared before my inner sight. I saw the hero on the Lützen battlefield [the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, r. 1594-1632] and his Swedish people. I saw other images and clearer than ever our history illuminated the truth: that when our people was strong, it held on to its Bible and its Lutheran faith…18

When the war was over, Ljungquist received a medal by the settler government for his services to its militia (Sandström 1935: 34). In northern Natal, where the conflict was more of a class struggle between black workers and white farmers, the Swedish mission was at the centre of local settler hate. At the outbreak of violence, the rebels spared the church but, when the white settler troops arrived, they broke into the building and desecrated the church room. “Peaceful blacks were shot and killed and pleading for neutrals was,” Hallendorff wrote, “like talking to deaf ears or met by contemptuous smiles, the missionary was merely ‘a

17 Johansson, Nils. 1906. CSMJ 31, 19: 316 (translation by the author). 18 Ljungquist, Fredrik. 1907. Tillkomme ditt rike 24 (translation by the author).

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spoiler of the native’”. Later, at the entirely African-run Amoibie congregation, the church building was set on fire and burnt down: “they tolled the bell while our temple perished in the flames”, Hallendorff reported.19 Dinuzulu’s role in 1906 was controversial. While Tottie had regarded him as a key factor in reviving the kingdom, CSM references thereafter are few and vague.20 As demonstrated by Marks, it is not likely that Dinuzulu himself was involved, but it was in Zululand a resistance army had come into being and the rebels’ use of his name prompted the government to arrest him in late 1907 (Marks 1970: xvi). By that time, Ljungquist agreed with most whites: “The old system of Zulu kings and chiefs is rotten to the core and not until this leaven is purged will there be improvements for the Zulu.”21 The arrest of Dinuzulu, he continued, was a severe blow to the Zulu people at large, as they remained loyal to their king. To the spreading of the Gospel, however, his arrest would be most advantageous with one of the most critical obstacles now removed.22 The other missionaries seem to have maintained a similar position or at least been indifferent to the fate of Dinuzulu (Berge 2000: 347). The only exception was Kempe. After the uprising, he harshly condemned the government’s actions against Dinuzulu, describing its policy against its African subjects as entirely senseless.23 Kempe was, however, censored and silenced by Axel Ihrmark, the new secretary of the Home Board and the only editor of the CSM periodical, who wanted to keep “contemporary politics and social struggles” out.24 Severely hurt, Kempe replied that he would never become such a disengaged missionary that anything not immediately involving the mission would be alien to him.25 His controversies with Uppsala continued in June 1907 when he asked the Home Board to not persistently accuse him of being, “a rabid 19 Hallendorff. 1906. CSMJ 31, 15–16: 254–255 (translation by the author). 20 Ljungquist. 1906. Tillkomme ditt rike, 16. 21 Ljungquist to lhrmark 24.1.08, see also 6.2.08, Mission Director’s correspondence, South Africa, 1907–1908, E 1 c: 5, CSMA (translation by the author). 22 Ljungquist to lhrmark 24.1.08, Mission Director’s correspondence, South Africa, 1907–1908, E 1 c: 5, CSMA (translation by the author). 23 Kempe. 1906. CSMJ 31, 21: 349. Kempe. 1908. CSMJ 33, 13–14: 224–231. 24 Ihrmark to Kempe, 4.10.06, The Mission director’s outgoing letters, 1905–1907, B

II: 9, CSMA. 25 Kempe to Ihrmark, 6.11.06, The Mission director’s correspondence, South Africa, 1905–1906, E I c: 4, CSMA.

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radical” only because he, in certain issues, dared to have his own opinion and dared to voice these opinions.26 To the CSM missionaries, the 1906–1907 uprising became a moment of clarification. By late 1906, most of them agreed with Ljungquist that Africans bore the sole responsibility and that the whites were unjustly criticised for the cruelties (Berge 2000: 343–347). As the local leader of the CSM, Ljungquist was the main spokesperson before the Home Board and the mission supporters in Sweden. Accordingly, the Home Board declared Zulu sufferings instrumental for their salvation and hoped for the long-awaited harvest time.27 The CSM Home Board made it very clear: Ljungquist was their man as the leader of the mission in Africa (Berge 2000: 349–350). The Norwegians and 1906 By the turn of the century, the NMS had become one of the largest popular movements in Norway. To the missionaries, however, it had been difficult to equate the Norwegian struggle with that of the Zulu. There was an abyss between the civilised and Christian Norway, and the dark, uncivilised, and heathen Africa. Parallels to Norwegian development were therefore difficult to see (Simensen with Gynnild 1986).28 During the uprising, Hernæs emphasises the missionaries’ clear-cut loyalty to the Natal government, referring to the Lutheran concepts of the two kingdoms and the obedience to secular authorities (Hernæs 1988: 29–30, 35). It was only after the cruel subjugation and the post-1906 anti-black settler opinion that the NMS missionaries gradually came to turn their sympathies in favour of Africans (Hernæs 1988: 26). Interestingly, a comparative and careful reading of the sources shows that at least some of the Norwegians’ experiences even during the uprising came very close to those of especially Hallendorff. From the Eotimati mission station, missionary Tvedt criticised the white soldiers who looted 26 Kempe to Ihrmark, 26.6.07, The Mission director’s correspondence, South Africa,

1907–1908, E I c: 5, CSMA. 27 Hogner to Ihrmark, 17.5.06 and 3.8.06, The Mission director’s received homeland letters, 1906, E I a: 6, CSMA. 28 Apparently, this view endured and as late as in 1915 the leading NMS missionary and chronicler Ole Stavem assessed that the NMS was “chemically cleansed from politics” (Stavem 1915: 317).

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the NMS property and burnt all homesteads in the region where all black men later were killed or taken prisoners.29 Even more interesting is Thorkildsen’s assessment that the Norwegian struggle for independence had led to a new interpretation of the Lutheran obedience to secular authorities. Because of its considered inapplicability under Swedish authority, it was now instead generally understood to imply an allegiance to the emerging new and democratic rule in Norway (Thorkildsen 1998a: 154–155; 1998b: 291, 308). Accordingly, the most remarkable change is that which took place among the NMS missionaries. Contrary to what previous research has presented, there was also among them a great concern for the political events surrounding the 1905 dissolution of the SwedishNorwegian union. In 1905, Tvedt reported how some of the NMS black church members were impressed by the Norwegian independence struggle, having judged the Norwegian people very brave. By July, when Norwegian-Swedish relations reached a most critical stage, Tvedt gathered the Eshowe congregation in prayers for Norway. Many, particularly the men, attended. Tvedt had never before seen such an attentive audience among the Zulu: It was as if they absorbed every word.30 From Empangeni, missionary Peter Strømme urged supporters at home to not too harshly condemn those who had joined in resistance. A Zulu, he said, would always remain a Zulu at heart—like a Norwegian would always remain a Norwegian.31 Similarly, Lars Martin Titlestad at Ekombe mission station explained how national pride only was natural to the Zulu as well as their earnest wish to cast off the colonial yoke.32 To him the legitimacy of Zulu claims was obvious as he, although several years later, explained “For the people to follow their royalty is only national and natural. Nationalism is no sin, but to trample it down and ridicule over it remains a sin”.33

29 Eriksen, Sven. 1907. Norsk Missions-tidende 62, 13: 293–296, Tvedt, John Mikal. 1907. Norsk Missions-tidende 62, 7: 152–156, cf. Stavem, Ole. 1907. Norsk Missionstidende 62, 14: 314–319. 30 Tvedt, John Mikal. 1905. Norsk Missions-tidende 60, 24: 565. 31 Strømme, Peter A. R. 1907. Norsk Missions-tidende 62, 6: 128. 32 Titlestad, Lars Martin. 1907. Norsk Missions-tidende 62, 19: 436–439. 33 Titlestad, Lars Martin. 1914. Norsk Missions-tidende 69, 22: 523 (translation by the

author).

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Concluding Remarks An initiative by the intellectual elite, the formation of the Swedish nation emerged from a divided society searching for unity, embodying an inclusive understanding of the territory and a programmatic cultural tolerance. Translated into the context of the CSM by its leading intellectual, Tottie, the two themes offered an agenda for an ethnic folk church among the Zulu. The folk church was to provide a new “cement” in the face of a disintegrating Zulu culture threatened by the forces of colonialism and capitalism. In KwaZulu-Natal, the missionaries’ broad-mindedness on Zulu culture, customs, and history was very much in line with Tottie’s envisaged fostering of a distinctive ethnic character and national unity required for the building of the folk church. In this awakening of the Zulu past, the missionaries’ ambitions coincided with those of African Christian intellectuals and their history-inspired nationalism, looking at Dinuzulu and the defeated Zulu Kingdom for a potent ideal. If the Swedish nationalism was a movement from above, historicising, and essentially critical towards modernity, its Norwegian equivalent came from below and became a struggle for a new society. Both its cultural and political-liberal side corresponded to the Norwegian missionary movement’s hostility to worldly culture and emphasis on the individual, as in conversion. With the Norwegian missionaries’ alleged understanding of an abyss between Christian Norway and “heathen” Africa, it was, at least until the uprising, difficult to relate to the emerging history-inspired Zulu nationalism. A reliance on the folk church was most evident in the Tottie-educated missionaries’ stance on the most controversial of issues: polygyny. The social institution of polygyny was at heart of conflicts between on the one side Western Christianity and capitalism and, on the other, Zulu family values and pre-capitalist society. Polygyny was a turnstile where previous attempts by Norwegian and Saxonian missionaries to establish a Zulu church had failed. To the Tottie-educated Swedes, a folk church largely without men required a reconciliation with polygyny and the pre-capitalist economy. Although Tottie’s former students eventually had to surrender in the polygyny debate with the other Swedish missionaries, the mere fact that the discussion took place is next to incomparable in the South African missionary context. One cannot other than note its attribution to the folk church agenda and the relations to the tenets of Swedish nationalism.

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With the 1906–1907 uprising, however, most Swedish missionaries voiced and acted in accordance with the Lutheran concept of obedience to the authorities and the conservative aspect of Swedish nationalism, aiming at status quo against the forces of social change. This was particularly evident in relation to the Zulu nationalist alternative and the fate of the son of the last Zulu king, Dinuzulu. Back in 1879, Norwegians and Saxonians had called for the crushing of the Zulu Kingdom, including the dismantling of the pre-capitalist economy. After the 1906– 1907 uprising, most Swedish missionaries including the Home Board in Uppsala welcomed a defeat of Zulu nationalism, hoping it would lead to conversions on a mass scale. Not all the missionaries agreed and there were dissenters although neutralised or censured. The views most contrasting to those held by a majority of Swedish missionaries were those conveyed by the Norwegians. With the Lutheran concept of obedience to the authorities reframed to imply an allegiance to the new Norway and with a nationalist fervour lingering after the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian union the year before, in 1905, the Norwegians expressed a strikingly different and compassionate attitude towards Zulu nationalism and the aspired independence. It is evident that in 1906 and 1907, immediately after the intense nationalistic revival in Norway, the diverse versions of nationalism developed in the two countries may help to explain Norwegian and Swedish missionaries’ essentially opposing attitudes towards the uprising. Moving beyond the Scandinavian Peninsula may therefore shed light also on the Swedish and Norwegian different nationalisms as exposed in the KwaZulu-Natal context.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Berge, Lars. 2000. The Bambatha Watershed: Swedish Missionaries, African Christians and an Evolving Zulu Church in Rural Natal and Zululand 1902–1910. Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Missionary Research. Berge, Lars. 2013. Divided Loyalties: An African Christian Community During the 1906 Uprising in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In Themes in Modern African History and Culture. Festschrift for Tekeste Negash, ed. Lars Berge and Irma Taddia. Padova: Libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni. Berggren, Henrik, and Lars Trägårdh. 2015. Är svensken människa? Gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna Sverige. Stockholm: Norstedts.

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Blückert, Kjell. 2000. The Church as Nation: A Study in Ecclesiology and Nationhood. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Botvar, Pål Ketil. 2009. Scandinavian Folk Churches, Chauvinism and Xenophobia. In Holy Nations and Global Identities: Civil Religion, Nationalism, and Globalisation, ed. Annika Hvithamar, Margit Warburg, and Brian Arly Jacobsen, 183–198. Leiden: Brill. Broberg, Gunnar. 1993. När Svenskarna Uppfann Sverige. In Svensk Historia Underifrån (1). Tänka Tycka Tro, ed. G. Broberg, U. Wikander, and K. Åmark, 171–196. Stockholm: Ordfront. Claesson, Urban. 2004. Folkhemmets kyrka: Harald Hallén och folkkyrkans genombrott; en studie av socialdemokrati, kyrka och nationsbygge med särskild hänsyn till perioden 1905–1933. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Cope, Nicholas. 1993. To Bind the Nation. Solomon kaDinuzulu and Zulu Nationalism 1913–1933. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Du Plessis, J.A. 1911. History of Christian Missions in South Africa. London: C. Struik. Ekström, Ragnar. 1963. Gudsfolk och Folkkyrka. Lund: Gleerups förlag. Etherington, Norman. 1978. Preachers Peasants and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835–1880: African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland and Zululand. London: Royal Historical Society. Furberg, Tore. 1962. Kyrka och mission i Sverige 1868–1901. Uppsala: Svenska Institutet för Missionsforskning. Gaitskell, Debbie. 1990. Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa. In Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. C. Walker, 251–272. Cape Town and London: David Philip and James Currey. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Guy, Jeff. 1983. The Heretic. A Study of the Life of John William Colenso 1814– 1883. Braamfontein and Pietermaritzburg: Ravan Press and the University of Natal Press. Hallencreutz, Carl Fredrik. 1985. Till alla folk. Ur Svenska Kyrkans Missions historia. Stockholm: Proprius förlag. Hallström, C.A. 1938. Axel Liljestrand. Rhodesiamissionens grundläggare. Uppsala: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag. Hasselhorn, Fritz. 1988. Bauernmission in Südafrika. Die Hermannsburger Mission im Spannungsfeld der Kolonialpolitik 1890–1939. Erlangen: Verlag der Ev.-Luth. Mission Erlangen. Hernæs, Per. 1986. The Zulu Kingdom, Norwegian Missionaries, and British Imperialism, 1845–1879. In Norwegian Missions in African History. Vol. I South Africa 1845–1906, ed. Jarle Simensen, 103–186. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS.

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Hernæs, Per. 1988. Lydighet mot Øvrigheten – Norske Misjonærer i Syd Afrika under Bambatha-oppstanden i 1906. Working Papers 1988/2. Copenhagen: Center for Afrikastudier, Københavns Universitet. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1992. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmberg, Åke. 1988. Världen bortom Västerlandet. Svensk syn på fjärran länder och folk från 1700-talet till Första Världskriget. Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskapsoch Vitterhets Samhället. Hovland, Ingie. 2013. Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850–1890. Leiden: Brill. Jansson, Torkel. 1990. En historisk uppgörelse. När 1800-talsnationen avlöste 1600-talsstaten. Historisk Tidskrift 110 (3): 342–356. Jönses, Lars. 1999. Ett Sverige i smått eller ett Tyskland över allt? Nation och territorium genom upptäckt och försvar under 1800- och 1900-tal. In I nationens intresse. Ett och annat om territorier, romaner, röda stugor och statistik, ed. Lars Petterson, 101–141. Uppsala: Historiska institutionen. Jönses, Lars. 2008. Samerna i den kulturella konstruktionen av territoriet. In För Sápmi i tiden [Fataburen 2008], ed. Christina Westergren and Eva Silvén, 43–58. Stockholm: Nordiska museets förlag. Kjöllerström, S. 1961. Begreppen statsreligion, statskyrka och folkkyrka. In Festskrift till Arthur Thomson den 6 november 1961. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Liljestrand, Axel, and Knut Hallendorff. 1907. Zulufolket och Zulumissionen (Från Svenska Kyrkans Missionsfält 25). Uppsala: Svenska Kyrkans Mission. Magnusson, Lars. 1996. Sveriges Ekonomiska Historia. Stockholm: Rabén Prisma. Marks, Shula. 1970. Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–8 Disturbances in Natal. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marks, Shula. 1986. The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth Century Natal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marks, Shula. 2002. Zulu Christians and the Bambatha Rebellion. Swedish Missiological Themes 90 (2): 245–265. Middell, Matthias, and Katja Naumann. 2010. Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization. Journal of Global History 5: 149–170. Myklebust, Olav Guttorm. 1980. H.P.S. Schreuder: Kirke og misjon. Kragerø: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. Norborg, Lars-Arne, and Lennart Sjöstedt. 1996. Grannländernas historia. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Norenius, J.E. 1925. Bland Zuluer och Karanger, femtio års missionshistoria på Svenska kyrkans fält i Sydafrika, vol. II. Uppsala: Svenska Diakonistyrelsens Bokförlag.

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Østerud, Øyvind. 1997. Vad är nationalism? Stockholm: Universitetsforl. Petterson, Lars. 1999. ed. I nationens intresse. Ett och annat om territorier, romaner, röda stugor och statistik. Uppsala: Historiska institutionen. Repstad, Pål. 1981. Mellom himmel og jord: en innføring i religionssosiologi. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. Repstad, Pål. 2009. Civil Religion in an Age of Changing Churches and Societies. A Look at the Nordic Situation. In Holy Nations and Global Identities: Civil Religion, Nationalism, and Globalisation, ed. Annika Hvithamar, Margit Warburg, and Brian Arly Jacobsen, 199–214. Leiden: Brill. Roaldset, Hege. 2020. Norwegian Missionaries and Zulu Converts. Conversion and Church Discipline in the Norwegian Missionary Society’s South African Congregations, 1879–c.1925. Stavanger: University of Stavanger. Sandström, Josef. 1935. Bland svarta kristna. Ur en missionärs anteckningar. Växjö: Smålandspostens boktryckeri AB. Sarja, Karin. 2002. ‘Ännu en syster till Afrika’: trettiosex kvinnliga missionärer i Natal och Zululand 1876–1902. Svenska institutet för missionsforskning. Sarja, Karin. 2003. The Missionary Career of Baroness Hedvig Posse 1887–1913. In Gender, Race and Religion: Nordic Missions 1860–1940, ed. Inger Marie Okkenhaug, 103–135. Uppsala: Svenska institutet för missionsforskning. Scriba, G., with G. Lislerud. 1997. Lutheran Missions and Churches in South Africa. In Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History, ed. Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, 173–94. Oxford and Cape Town: James Currey and David Philip. Simensen, Jarle, with Vidar Gynnild. 1986. Norwegian Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: Organizational Background, Social Profile, and World View. In Norwegian Missions in African History. Vol. I South Africa 1845–1906, ed. Jarle Simensen, 11–55. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS. Simensen, J., with T. Børhaug, P. Hernæs, and E. Sønstabø. 1986. Christian Missions and Socio-Cultural Change in Zululand 1850–1906. Norwegian Strategy and African Response. In Norwegian Missions in African History. Vol. I South Africa 1845–1906, ed. Jarle Simensen, 187–275. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS. Stavem, O. 1915. Et Bantufolk og Kristendommen: Det Norske Missionsselskaps Syttiaarige Zulumission. Stavanger: Det norske missionsselkaps boktrykkeri. Stråth, Bo. 2005. Union och demokrati: de förenade rikena Sverige och Norge 1814–1905. Nora: Nya Doxa. Thorkildsen, Dag. 1998a. For Norge, kjempers fedeland - norsk nasjonalisme, skandinavisme og demokrati i det 19. Århundre. Kyrka och nationalism i Norden: nationalism och skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800-talet, ed. Ingemar Brohed, 129–155. Lund: Lund University Press. Thorkildsen, Dag. 1998b. Kirkens Rolle i 1905: Nasionalreligiøsitet. In Kyrka och nationalism i Norden: nationalism och skandinavism i de nordiska folkkyrkorna under 1800 talet, ed. Ingemar Brohed, 281–310. Lund: Lund University Press.

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Welsh, D. 1971. The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Natal (1845–1910). Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Antoun Saadeh and the Concept of the Syrian Nation

Péter Ákos Ferwagner

Introduction If we read some of Hafez al-Assad’s speeches from the end of the 1970s, it may appear through some obscure allusions that the Syrian president cherished a long-term and coherent plan for foreign policy. It is obvious that his most important aim was to defeat Israel and to make his country a decisive regional power in the Middle East (Le Gac 1991: 147). To achieve this, however, in his view it seemed indispensable to recreate Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham 1 ) in the medieval sense of the term. This 1 Literally “land on the left-hand side”: in the holy cities of the Islam, Mecca and Medina to someone facing east Syria lay opposite Yemen, the “land on the right-hand side” (Bilad al-Yamin).

P. Á. Ferwagner (B) Department of Modern History and Mediterranean Studies, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_3

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state, which was held “virtual” by certain people—the idea of which was not new and the creation of which, naturally under the rule of his own dynasty, was already raised in 1943 and 1945 by Abdullah I, Emir of Transjordan (Carré 1971: 362–381)—would have included all Arab lands between Iraq and the Mediterranean Sea. Some historians think that the vehemently anti-Israeli Assad was prepared to restrain the war against the Jewish State even for a longer period in order to devote all his energy to the creation of a Greater Syria (Bianquis 1991: 64–70). It is telling that in the 1970s the boundary between Syria and Lebanon was marked only as a regional border on the official Syrian maps, and the border with Alexandretta (Hatay), detached in 1939, and with Palestine (and not with Israel!) was also marked in the same way (Pipes 1990: 3). The nostalgia towards a Greater Syria and the official policy in connection with it is shown by the fact that—as a Damascene researcher has recently drawn our attention to at an international conference in Montpellier— the concept of a Greater Syria “which was dismembered by the 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty and the Europeans” occupies an important place in the Syrian consciousness as well as in the school-books of different levels of education.2 All this indicates that the leaders of the Syrian state did not want to accept the actual size and extension of their country. They never forgot for a moment that before 1920 the region called Syria extended to much bigger areas: in addition to the present-day Syrian Arab Republic, it included Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sanjak of Alexandretta. After 1864, the Ottomans created three vilayets in this area (Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut) and the Sanjak of Jerusalem. In the nineteenth century on the basis of its cultural, geographical and climatic conditions, and even considering its social composition, many looked at this region as one. On the other hand, historians, including the most resolute followers of the Syrian union, unanimously share the view that apart from the Umayyad century (661–750) Syria has never been a unified nation. The famous Lebanese social scientist, Georges Corm worded it in this way:

2 Khanom Al Yazigi, “La Syrie: ‘Arabe’ et/ou ‘Méditerranéenne’?” (Paper Presented at the Colloque Manuels et Méditerranée (Mamed 2009): Échanges humains et culturels en Méditerranée dans les manuels scolaires, Montpellier, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, November 12–14, 2009). See the written version: Alyazigi (2012: 205–216).

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In the last one thousand years the area that we know as Syria today, was only comprised of provinces, which were governed in Damascus, Tripoli, Aleppo, Saida and Saint-Jean-d’Acre by the Mamlukes, and later by the officials appointed by the Ottomans. (Corm 1986: 75)

According to most authors, the society living there was far from being unified, and they did not have a sense of belonging together at all.3 It only changed with the 1916 anti-Turkish Arab revolt, the ephemeral Syrian kingdom of Emir Feisal (Ferwagner 2015: 5–14) and the French occupation of Syria in 1920. Feisal’s claim in 1918 to create a government in the area of the former Ottoman Syria may be considered the first manifestation of the pan-Syrian or greater Syrian ambitions. In compliance with it, the Damascene resolutions of the Syrian General Congress, adopted on 2 July 1919 assigned the borders of this state: We ask absolutely complete political independence for Syria within these boundaries: the Taurus System in the North; Rafah in the South and a line running from Al Jauf along the Syrian and the Hejazian line to Akaba in the south; the Euphrates and Khabur Rivers in the East and a line extending from Abu Kamal to Al Jauf; and the Mediterranean Sea in the west. (Hurewitz 1972: 63)

All this, however, came to nothing. The pre-World War I Greater Syria possessed an area of 335,000 km2 , but the Peace Treaty of Sèvres concluded with the Turks on 10 August 1920 deprived the Arab province of 150,000 km2 (Bitterlien 1996: 19). The decade between 1914 and 1924 was determining in terms of the future of the Middle East. It was during this period that the Greater Syria plan was formulated, too, and henceforth independence and unification became the principal topics of all future claims. The Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Europeans got a foothold through the mandate system, the borders were redrawn, and new, never seen states were born. Between September 1920 and March 1923, the French founded six new states: Lebanon, the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo, the State

3 For example, David Roberts is very clear about it and denies that the Greater Syria had had any kind of historical (Ottoman) antecedents. Roberts (1987: 13–14).

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of Alawites surrounding Latakia, Djabal Druz and the Sanjak of Alexandretta (Picaudou 1989: 66).4 At the same time, the British divided their mandate in the southern part of Syria province into two along the Jordan River in March 1921. Palestine was created in the west, where they allowed the immigration of the Jews, and Transjordan in the east, at the head of which, on the instigation of Churchill, they placed Feisal’s older brother, Abdullah, and where the settlement of the Jews was prohibited. Due to European penetration, the word “Syria” became saturated with a new semantic content, and from this time on, it only referred to the French mandate territories (“Little Syria”), except for Lebanon, of course, which within the mandate system became an independent state in 1926. The different political movements, including pan-Syrianism, also started during the decade between 1914 and 1924, although I would like to make it perfectly clear that nationalism was imported to the Middle East from Europe by local Christians in the middle of the nineteenth century, because they considered it as an instrument to improve their situation. Thereafter, it was adopted by Sunni Muslims in the following decades creating Arab nationalism. The territorial changes resulted in the development of three types of nationalism by the Christians before World War I, Lebanese separatism, the pan-Syrian idea and pan-Arabism (Pipes 1990: 21–22, 33).

The Birth of the Pan-Syrian Idea Although there are indications that the Arab “national consciousness” in the Middle East dates back to the sixteenth-seventeenth century, as the locals were aware of their separate linguistic and cultural identities, accompanied by their own historical memory, this was far from any concept of an independent Arab or Syrian state, and of course not accompanied by a desire to break with the Turks (Tamari 2017). Modern Syrian society was quite fragmented. In addition to the Sunni Muslim majority, dozens of non-Muslim and non-Sunni communities lived side by side. These communities were grouped around their own churches and religious leaders and each was characterized by different strengths of internal

4 Later France gradually merged these states. In January 1925, Aleppo and Damascus were united; in June 1942, Latakia was attached to them; then in December 1944 Djabal Druz, too. The last French soldier left the country in April 1946.

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solidarity. However, the Syrian communities still had a common cohesion factor, their mother tongue, Arabic. In the middle of the nineteenth century, due to various factors (Ottoman centralization efforts, Western penetration, Egyptian occupation), a new image of Syria was formed in the local political elite. Syria emerged as a separate entity, which was also the common fatherland of its peoples. Pan-Syrianism first gained supporters in the political elite and the intelligentsia, later attracted followers from all levels of society. Its origin dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when a Maronite Christian intellectual, Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883), started to emphasize that the object of loyalty of the local inhabitants must be Syria, which he considered a separate historical and geographical unit. He saw sectarianism and religious fanaticism as a threat to his homeland and urged the fullest integration of Syrian society. He sought to create unifying myths and emphasized the common features of patriotism: “O sons of the fatherland, you drink the same water, breathe the same air, and speak the same language. The land upon which you walk, your common interests and your customs are one. […] Syria […] is our fatherland […] and the population of Syria, whatever their creed, community, racial origin or groups are the sons of our fatherland” (Abu-Manneh 1980). It is owing to him that the old-established idea of Syria was connected with the notion of European nation, although he did not get to the separation of Syria from the Ottoman Empire yet. Bustani was probably the first Syrian nationalist to see the Syrians as a nation. Due to his work, several political attempts were made in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1877, Sunni Muslim leaders tried to persuade the former Algerian resistance fighter, Abdel Kader El Djezairi (1808–1883), living in Damascus, to become the leader of the movement demanding the independence of Greater Syria, which he was to be the king of, but he refused the offer. The pan-Syrian idea gained new impetus after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, when the organizations and groups supporting the idea quickly proliferated. However, pan-Syrianism only spread widely after World War I (Pipes 1990: 36–37). Following the birth of the mandate system, the Syrian nationalists did not recognize the Lebanese and Palestinian political entities, and they considered the whole region the western part of Greater Syria (Eshel 2008: 6). From among these nationalists, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) stood out as a real, modern political organization, also

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known as the Syrian People’s Party, which was founded at the American University of Beirut in September 1932 by an orthodox Christian, Antoun Saadeh (1904–1949), born in Lebanon, but living for a long time in Brasil (Lawson 1994). In the well-organized, totalitarian party, the president’s (zaim) word was the law, and in the 1930s, he had followers in Lebanon and Syria as well. His popularity culminated in 1938–1939. The membership reached fifty thousand during World War II, it contained mainly, but not exclusively Christians (in Lebanon a fair number of Shias also joined), and from the members, they formed a para-military militia (Guingamp 1996: 45–46). According to a Hungarian researcher, Ilona Ács, the membership increased even further after gaining independence, “primarily among the Druze urban petty bourgeoisie and the Alawite peasantry” (Ács 1984: 158). From the French mandatory authorities’ harassments (imprisonment, the dissolution of the party on several occasions), Saadeh fled in 1938, returned to Brasil, from where he moved on to Argentina.5 He returned to his mother country, Lebanon in 1947, where in 1949 he got involved in a conspiracy, which he was arrested for, sentenced to death and executed (Beshara 2012). As a response, members of the SSNP assassinated the Lebanese ex-Premier Minister, Riyadh alSolh (1943–1945, 1946–1951), because they held him responsible for the death of their party leader. Saadeh and the SSNP drew a lot from the theory of the Flemish Jesuit and orientalist, Henri Lammens (1862–1937), who strived for proving the existence of the natural and historical links of Syrian unity, which extended to most parts of the Middle East, and eagerly proposed “the racial unity of the Syrians”.6 In the centre of the party leader’s ideology can be found the idea that in the geographical Syria the Syrian nation took shape a long time ago, which was not identical with the Arab nation.7 According to the British journalist and Middle East expert, Patrick Seale: “In accordance with the prophet of the greater Syrian nationalism [Saadeh], it’s geography rather than history that bequeathed special identity to the inhabitants of natural Syria, which is different from the Arab identity” (Seale 1988: 26). Thus, the leader of the SSNP rejected 5 For his activity among the Latin-American Syrian diaspora see: Schumann (2004). 6 Henri Lammens. 1921. La Syrie, précis historique. Vol. 2 (Beyrouth), 278–280. Cited

by Picaudou (1989: 75, fn. 14). For Lammens’s theory concerning Lebanon see: Páll (2008). 7 For various aspects of Antun Saadeh’s ideology, see Beshara (2007).

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Arab nationalism (he didn’t consider the Arab a unified nation), instead of which he emphasized Syrian nationalism. Unlike Arabism, he ruled out ethnicity, religion and language as nation-building factors, and instead, he accentuated the diversity of the Syrian people and the historical ties that bind it to their homeland. According to him, the Syrian people should lead the Arab world, because their aptitude is superior to other Arab nations. He deeply believed in the superiority of Syrian identity to Arab. Therefore, the merging of Syria into a kind of unified Arab state would mean a socially “retrograde” step to him: economically and politically, the country would lose more by such a step, than it would gain. This Syrian nation has to preserve its own identity against the imperialism of the Western powers as well as against the Arab nationalists’ endeavours. It cannot be entirely European, but it cannot be entirely Arab either: it must be a bridge, a boundary between the two worlds, which, on the other hand, possesses its own psyche and civilization (Hourani 1954: 119). Saadeh promoted the creation of the state of the “United Syrian Nation” or of “Natural Syria”, which would have included the Sinai Peninsula in addition to the Fertile Crescent, and even Cyprus. In other words, based on this these myths, he rejected the Middle East borders drawn by Britain and France after World War I. (Decades later, party members were convinced that these artificial borders were the main cause of the violence and conflict in the region.) As the German researcher Eberhard Kienle (1996) said: “As the cantor of Syrian nationalism, he [Saadeh] redefined the borders of Syria including all the Mashreq, and even the island of Cyprus”. His concept of a nation differed from the European one. According to him, language or religion does not play a role in the nation’s development (he was a Christian in a Muslim environment), but the common development of the people who live in a particular geographical area does practically; he interpreted nation as a biological community. Once he wrote: The unity of the language does not make a group of people a nation yet, maybe it helps it maintain his cohesion. […] The world of the Arab language does not mean one single nation, and it is the same case with the English and the Spanish. […] Certain communities do not even need a unity of the language to create one nation, the Swiss are such an example. Religion – because of its origins – is not a national factor either, it is harmful to the formulation of a nation as it is a human creation with a global appearance. Religion can only become a nation forming factor, if

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the peoples make changes in it according to their national aims. (Sa’âdah 1970: 145–146)

This is why he rejected pan-Islamism besides Arab nationalism. Later, in 1958, when from the union of Egypt and Syria the United Arab Republic came into existence, and pan-Arabism flourished, the party opposed ardently the creation of the UAR and Nasserism. He defined the notion of a nation the following way: Nation is a human community, which has identical interests, a common historical past, homogeneous psychic and material characteristics in a given territory, and whose interaction with this territory during its whole history endowed it with characteristics and qualities distinctive from the other human communities. (Sa’âdah 1970: 145–146)

According to Saadeh, Syria was historically, culturally and geographically separate from the Arab world (“Syrian personality”), and its development happened through distinct phases, through the Phoenicians, the Canaanites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, etc.8 Thus, Syrianism (some people use the term “Syrian chauvinism” or “irredentism”) exceeded the religious differences. The SSNP made the eagle, the king of birds, living in the mountains of Syria its symbol, a clear indication of the party’s political ambitions. For the entirely laic and secular SSNP loyalty to the nation was above all, in this respect it may remind us of the European fascist parties of the era. The emblem that appeared in its black, red, white flag resembled the swastika. This emblem forms a vortex or whirlwind (Zawba’a) which is a glyph combining the Muslim crescent and the Christian cross, derived from Sumerian art, and it symbolizes that Syrian (Muslim and Christian) martyrs had shed their blood in a disciplined and dutiful manner in order for the whirlwind to sweep away the dark age (representing sectarianism and Ottoman occupation and the colonial oppression which followed) and lead to the rebirth of the nation. The party’s organizational structure imitated the fascist parties’ model as did its practice. Their marches, political rallies and activity in organizing and mobilizing youth served not only to spread their ideology and political goals, but also to demonstrate their power and ability to recruit new members and supporters. Sports events, regular lectures at the party’s headquarters and the publication 8 Saadeh. The Maronites are Syriac Syrians.

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of the party newspaper played an important role. The affection appeared in other formalities, too: the party’s anthem was written on the tune of Deutschland über Alles, the members saluted each other with raising the right arm in a Nazi-style, and Saadeh was said to admire Hitler (Johnson 2001: 150). There were some who addressed him as “Führer”. At the same time, the suggestive party leader himself rejected this kind of identification before the public. During one of his speeches in June 1935, he declared: I also want to use this opportunity to say that the system of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is neither a Hitlerite nor a Fascist one, but a pure social nationalist one. It is not based on useless imitations, but is [instead] the result of an authentic invention – [an ability] which is a virtue of our people. (Nordbruch 2009: 45)

He intended for the SSNP an Italian type “Risorgimento” engine role. However, according to a scholar, “Saadeh’s doctrines were explicitly antiIslamic, if not antireligious, anti-Arab, and antidemocratic – in an area with a predominantly Muslim population strongly in favor of Arab unity and traditionally inclined to individual freedom!” (Glazer 1967) Saadeh identified the eight basic principles of the party’s policy as follows: 1. Syria for the Syrians. 2. The Syrian question is an independent national problem, which is necessary to solve leaving other national questions out of consideration. 3. The Syrian question is the Syrian nation’s and the Syrian motherland’s question. 4. The Syrian question means the unity of the Syrian people existing already since the times before the history. 5. The Syrian motherland is the physical environment where the Syrian nation developed; it includes Greater Syria, Mesopotamia and the Sinai Peninsula, that is the Fertile Crescent and its star, Cyprus. 6. The Syrian nation is an indivisible society. 7. The energy of the national and social renaissance of Syria is nourished by the Syrian nation’s talent and its political and cultural history. 8. The general interests of Syria are superior to all other interests (Tibi 1997: 194).

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Saadeh disapproved of the French’s divisive politics in the region (the separation of Lebanon, the dismemberment of Syria) and colonization in general, which cut Greater Syria into minor nations and peoples. The Iraqi Sati al-Husri, called “one of the biggest thinker and propagandist of the Arab nationalism” by the Hungarian researcher Péter Wagner (2009), and who disputed Saadeh’s views in more than one respect, wrote about the SSNP in 1948: There is no party in the Arab world which can compete with the SSNP for the quality of its propaganda that influences reason as well as emotions, and for the strength of its organisation, which is as efficient on the surface as it is underground. (Tibi 1997: 196)

The party (in the words of Baun (2017): “popular organization”) remained a decisive factor in Syrian domestic politics even after the founder’s death (the colonel Adib Shishakli who was of Kurdish ancestry and who got into power by a coup in December 1949 himself sympathized with the greater Syrian ideology), but it lost a lot from its popularity enjoyed earlier. In the early 1950s, it became extremely radical, as Ilona Ács wrote “it provided a refuge for the ultra-nationalist elements which could be driven into acts of terrorism, it trained its followers for street fights, armed insurrections, assassinations, and coups d’état” (Ács 1984: 192, fn. 280). During the autumn elections of 1954, two members of it were elected to the parliament. Soon the authorities started to persecute it under the pressure of its principal rivals, the communist party and the Baath. After a political murder, they accused it of “regionalism”, hundreds of its members were arrested, and its activity was banned (Hopwood 1988: 82).9 The principal reason behind the conflicts most probably was that the SSNP as a pro-Western, anti-communist and as a 9 The murder was committed at a football match in April 1955. The victim was the popular colonel Adnan al-Malki, the highest-ranking Baathist officer in the army, and the fatal shot was fired by the Alawite sergeant Yusuf Abd al-Rahim who belonged to the military police’s effective force, about whom it was discovered that he was a member of the SSNP. The persecution and the prohibition of the party had important consequences in domestic politics: in the armed forces, the Baath became the country’s most powerful political force. Later, some information came to light about the murder according to which the Egyptian secret service also had its hand in it, because Cairo, setting panArabism as an aim, wanted to destroy the most significant Syrian rival of the pan-Arab ideology in this way. Cf. Seale (1988: 50). Others suspected western intelligence services in contact with the SSNP in the background. Roberts (1987: 41; Ács 1984: 201).

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matter of fact anti-Arab nationalist party rejected the effort of the Baath aimed at the unification of the Arab peoples and the abolishment of Western influence in the region. Despite this, the Syrian national idea still had a powerful effect on the Syrian political elite, even within the Baath, which in principle had a pan-Arab commitment.10 According to David Roberts, the greater Syrian idea exerted direct influence already in the 1930s and 1940s on the future Baathists (Roberts 1987: 11), while Eyal Zisser (2007) thinks that the Baath accepted many basic principles of its rival, the SSNP.11 The common features of the two organizations can really be enumerated for long: both professed secular ideologies (the separation of state and church), possessed a well-structured organizational background and wished to increase their influence on the middle class. Both of them were inclined to conspiracy and they had similar thoughts about the role of a powerful state. Both of them promoted industrialization which was the principal antidote to the underdevelopment of the overwhelmingly agrarian country, and fought against the remnants of feudalism. Both of them recognized the important role of Islam in the Arab world, but they did not assign a political role to it in the state’s life (Roberts 1987: 11). However, despite the common features, there were serious contradictions between them in their ideologies. The founder of the Baath, Michel Aflak (1910–1989) who lived in Iraq and broke the relations with Damascus earlier, in his speech delivered in 1977 on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the party scourged Arab (Egyptian and Syrian) “regional nationalisms” which were concepts invented by “imperialism and Zionism” to torpedo the Arab unity.12

10 Mustafa Tlass who was the Minister of Defence for a long time, and one of President Assad’s nearest colleagues, in the early 2000s called Antoun Saadeh one of his main inspirations, and considered Greater Syria as the first step on the road to Arab unity. Zisser (2007). 11 In full harmony with this, Daniel Pipes writes that the SSNP “incubated virtually every radical group in those two countries; it had, in particular, great impact on the Ba’th Party”. Pipes (1988). 12 “In fact this new nationalism is only the nationalism of the clans and the ruling classes who have backed off from real unity”. Aflaq (1977: 17).

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The Greater Syria Idea After 1970 Some people think that the greater Syrian idea had its greatest influence during Hafez al-Assad’s era (1970–2000) who raised the pan-Syrian thought to the rank of official state policy (Pipes 1990: 5). However, “the Arabs’ Bismarck”—as certain political analysts called him (Le Monde, 20– 21 November 1983)—did not accept entirely Antoun Saadeh’s concept of the pan-Syrian idea. He encountered very early with the heated rivalry between the pan-Arab Baath that he preferred and the greater Syrian nationalist SSNP. The ideological gap between them deeply divided even those who surrounded the young Assad in the early 1950s. There were some among the future president’s relatives who felt attracted by the SSNP and looked suspiciously, indeed adversely at the Baath (Seale 1988: 49). All this obviously affected him and influenced his political views. As President of the Republic, in contrast to the “rough” pan-Syrianism, Assad professed the pragmatists’ opinion: Greater Syria was certainly part of the Arab nation, and its creation was not the ultimate goal but only a step towards the formation of a wider Arab unity. In tune with this, in his speech delivered in April 1975 at the 6th Regional Congress of the Baath he didn’t see any contradictions between the unity of natural Syria and the strife for Arab unity (Seale 1988: 349). By all accounts, similarly to the pan-Syrian nationalists the president also rejected the borders of Little Syria, and he was characterized by a militant anti-Zionism as well. It is not accidental that the most important ambition of Syrian foreign policy became the recuperation of the Golan Heights lost in 1967, because without this strategically important territory the reconstruction of Greater Syria would not be possible.13 The defiant Assad declared after the fourth Arab–Israeli war that his country would continue the fight as long as Israel withdraws from all the Arab territories (Hopwood 1988: 58). When the Israelis withdrew from Kuneitra, the capital of the Golan that had been destroyed by bulldozers, and Assad could again hoist up the Syrian national flag, he made the following address to his audience:

13 According to certain people, it was because of the recuperation of the Golan and “the realization of the dream of Greater Syria” that Assad tried by all means to stabilize the internal political situation, so that nothing could hinder the achievement of this foreign aims. Kaminsky and Kruk (1987: 7).

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It is not possible to describe the events we are experiencing now. That’s why I simply say that the will of our people is unwavering, that our fatherland is above all, and that we must continue to be ready to expel the enemy from our Arab land. Regarding the victory and the future, I am optimistic, and I’m sure there is no force on Earth to prevent us from enforcing our rights. (Bitterlien 1986: 142–144)

He also tried to gain political influence among Israeli Arabs pushing their autonomy that fit perfectly into the Greater Syria plan. He held a radical, intransigent position vis-a-vis the Jewish State and criticized sharply the Egyptian President Anvar Sadat who in 1975 signed an army separation agreement and subsequently concluded a peace treaty with Tel Aviv (the “traitor” of the Arab issue).

Conclusion There is no consensus in the literature on the pan-Syrian characteristics of the foreign policy of President Hafez al-Assad, and indirectly on the validity of the Saadeh’s ideology in the 1970–1980s. According to Daniel Pipes, Assad did indeed pursue a pan-Syrian foreign policy for internal political reasons, since he could legitimize his authoritative power at home by doing so. In addition, he also argued that the pan-Arabism was discredited as a result of the break-up of the UAR resulting from the unification of Syria and Egypt, the unsuccessful Yemeni war of Egypt and the serious defeat suffered from Israel in 1967; it opened up the way for new ideologies. The Arab leaders were a disappointment, above all Sadat, so Syria needed a “regional axis”, and to achieve this, the greater Syrian thought seemed to be a “useful paradigm”. And ultimately, Assad’s personnel commitment to Greater Syria is not negligible either (Pipes 1990: 149–150). Raymond Hinnebusch, a prominent American historian, however, debates Pipes’s view that the pan-Syrian idea was decisive in the Syrian political elite of the 1970s. He thinks that for most Syrians the content of national identity is primarily Arab, not Syrian. Accordingly, Greater Syria is a component of the broader Arab nation, and although the majority of Syrians no longer believes in the establishment of a united Arab state, he still considers Syria’s unique identity among the Arab states as the “most Arabic”. Hinnebusch thinks that for the description of Syrian identity it is more adequate to use the concept of “pragmatic Arabism” than “pan-Syrianism”. Unlike Pipes, he believes that the primary cause

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of Syrian foreign policy is not ideology, but the intention to create a regional bloc against the Jewish State (Hinnebusch 1991: 1589). In line with this, Daniel Le Gac does not attribute any role to ideology in Syrian foreign affairs. It is typical that he does not even mention the concept of Greater Syria, apart from a glimpse in the historical introduction (Le Gac 1991: 19). Eberhard Kienle says that in the 1970s the definition of Syrian collective identity remained mainly Arabic, he argues that Assad began to emphasize the specific Syrian interests only in the early 1990s (Kienle 1996). According to Pipes, however, the president insisted even seventy years after the Paris Peace Conference on the 1919 definition of Syria, and Syria in his eyes meant in fact Greater Syria. At the same time, he does not deny that in his declarations Arab unity occupied at least the same prominent and significant role, which referred to the “combination” of pan-Arabism and pan-Syrianism (Pipes 1990: 191–192). David Roberts very clearly writes that “Greater Syria is the best explanation for the twists and turns of Syria’s policy towards the Arab world”. In his view, this plan is nothing more than Damascus’s aspiration to play a dominant role in the Levante. He claims that “the doctrine of Greater Syria is a powerful and politically active myth” (Roberts 1987: 141, 152). On the other hand, Hinnebusch agrees with Patrick Seale who describes Assad above all as an Arab nationalist, saying he defends the Arabs against Israel and its Western supporters. In his influential book, he asks: under cover of Baathism did not he cherish pan-Syrian ambitions? His answer is a clear no to the question asked by himself. He states that, despite all appearances, Assad, the convinced Arab nationalist since his childhood, never became a “pan-Syrian romantic”. In his view, he got disappointed in the pan-Arab idea, and against Israel—for lack of something better— he returned to his “Syrian environment”. Although he declared on several occasions that he was the “owner” of the neighbouring countries, he did not do that with the intention of annexation. Seale’s view is that he did not have such aspirations even concerning Lebanon, whose “sovereignty, independence and unity” was explicitly acknowledged in December 1985. “It’s true, we are one people but two states”. The final conclusion of the British journalist is that for Assad Greater Syria was merely a strategic necessity, not an ideological conviction (Seale 1988: 349–350). Itamar Rabinovich completely agrees with him and argues that Assad’s Lebanese ambition was only “political dominance” rather than annexation (Laurent 1984). On the other hand, Eyal Zisser says that Assad used Arabism only as “an adequate cover”, through which “he promoted himself, his class,

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his ethnic and regional interests” (Zisser 2007). The renowned German Syria expert, Volker Perthes, focuses on Assad’s pragmatism, which has prevailed in Damascus’s regional and international relations since 1970 (other authors also share the view that with Assad pragmatism gained over ideology). According to the Syrian geopolitical concept, only two great powers existed in the Middle East: Syria and Israel. Consequently, all Arab countries in the region had to tie their fate to Syria for the sake of regional equilibrium and to prevent the dominance of the Jewish State in the Mashreq (Perthes 2000). In other words, Perthes attributes no role to Greater Syria in the formation of foreign policy. The debate about the interpretation of Syria’s foreign policy in the 1970s and the plan of Greater Syria will certainly continue. All the more because the SSNP, the second largest legal party in the government-held areas, remained an active player in Syrian domestic politics even after Hafez al-Assad’s death. The loyalist militia of the party (“Eagles of Whirlwind”) provided significant support to the regime’s army after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war (2011), in return for which he gained ministerial portfolios (Solomon et al. 2019).

References Abu-Manneh, Butrus. 1980. The Christians Between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism: The Ideas of Butrus Al-Bustani. International Journal of Middle East Studies 11: 287–304. Ács, Ilona. 1984. Politikai küzdelmek Szíriában a függetlenség kivívásától a Baath Párt politikai hatalmának megszilárdulásáig (1946–1970) [Political Fights in Syria from the Achievement of Independence to the Consolidation of the Political Power of the Baath Party]. Candidate dissertation, University Eötvös Lorand, Budapest. Aflaq, Michel. 1977. Le Ba’th et les défis de l’avenir. Bagdad: Parti Ba’th Arabe et Socialiste. Alyazigi, Khanom. 2012. La Syrie d’après ses manuels scolaires: Arabe et/ou méditerranéenne? In La Méditerranée des Méditerranéens à travers leurs manuels scolaires, ed. Pierre Boutan, Bruno Maurer, and Hassan Remaoun, 205–216. Paris: L’Harmattan. Baun, Dylan. 2017. The Gemmayzeh Incident of 1949: Conflict over Physical and Symbolic Space in Beirut. The Arab Studies Journal 25: 92–123. Beshara, Adel (ed.). 2007. Antun Sa’adeh: The Man, His Thought: An Antology. Reading: Ithaca Press.

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Beshara, Adel (ed.). 2012. Outright Assassination: The Trial and Execution of Antun Sa’adeh, 1949. Reading: Ithaca Press. Bianquis, Thierry. 1991. Du sunnisme politique arabe en Orient. Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 62: 64–70. Bitterlien, Lucien. 1986. Hafez el Assad: Le Parcours d’un Combattant. Paris: Les Éditions du Jaguar. Bitterlien, Lucien. 1996. Guerres et paix au Moyen Orient: Les trois défis d’Hafez al-Assad: Liban-Palestine-Golfe. Paris: Jean Picollec. Carré, Olivier. 1971. La Ligue des États Arabes. Revue française de science politique 21: 362–381. Corm, Georges. 1986. Géopolitique du conflit libanais: Étude historique et sociologique. Paris: La Découverte. Eshel, David. 2008. Assad’s ‘Greater Syria’ Ambition? Military Technology 32: 6. u Ferwagner, Péter Ákos. 2015. Az els˝ o szíriai állam históriája: a kérészélet˝ damaszkuszi arab királyság [The History of the First Syrian State: The Ephemeral Damascene Arab Kingdom]. Belvedere Meridionale 27: 5–14. Glazer, Sidney. 1967. Book Review. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party. An Ideological Analysis by Labib Zuwiyya Yamak. The American Historical Review 72: 1045. Guingamp, Pierre. 1996. Hafez El Assad et la parti Baath en Syrie. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hinnebusch, Raymond. 1991. Book Review: Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition. American Historical Review 96: 1589. Hopwood, Derek. 1988. Syria 1945–1986: Politics and Society. London: Unwin Hyman. Hourani, A.H. 1954. Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay. London: Oxford University Press. Hurewitz, J.C. 1972. Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record: 1914–1956. New York: Octagon Books. Johnson, Michael. 2001. All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon. London: I.B. Tauris. Kaminsky, Catherine, and Simon Kruk. 1987. La Syrie: politiques et stratégies de 1966 à nos jours. Paris: PUF. Kienle, Eberhard. 1996. De la langue et en deçà: Nationalismes arabes à géométrie variable. Égypte/monde Arabe, Première Série 26: 153–170. Laurent, Annie. 1984. Itamar Rabinovitch: The War for Lebanon 1970–1983; Shimon Shiffer: Opération boule de neige. Politique Étrangère 49: 981–983. Lawson, Fred H. 1994. Syria. In Political Parties of the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Frank Tachau, 500–529. Westport: Greenwood Press. Le Gac, Daniel. 1991. La Syrie du général Assad. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe. Nordbruch, Götz. 2009. Nazism in Syria and Lebanon: The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1933–1945. London: Routledge.

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Páll, Zoltán. 2008. Rész és egész viszonya: törésvonalak Libanonban [The Relation of Part and the Whole: Ruptures in Lebanon]. Kül-Világ 5 (3–4): 61–85. https://epa.oszk.hu/00000/00039/00016/pdf/pall.pdf. Accessed 9 June 2021. Perthes, Volker. 2000. Syrie: le plus gros pari d’Assad. Politique Internationale 87: 177–192. Picaudou, Nadine. 1989. La déchirure libanaise. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe. Pipes, Daniel. 1988. Radical Politics and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20: 303–324. Pipes, Daniel. 1990. Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, David. 1987. The Ba’th and the Creation of Modern Syria. London: Croom Helm. Sa’âdah, Antoûn. 1970. La Syrie, mère des nations. In La pensée politique arabe contemporaine, ed. Anouar Abdel-Malek, 145–146. Paris: Seuil. Saadeh, Antoun. The Maronites are Syriac Syrians. SSNP. http://www.ssnp.org/ new/library/saadeh/misc/en/maronites.htm. Accessed 12 October 2009. Schumann, Christoph. 2004. Nationalism, Diaspora and ‘Civilisational Mission’: The Case of Syrian Nationalism in Latin America Between World War I and World War II. Nations and Nationalism 10: 599–617. Seale, Patrick. 1988. Asad of Syria: Struggle for the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris. Solomon, Christopher, Jesse McDonald, and Nick Grinstead. 2019. Eagles Riding the Storm of War: The Role of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. CRU Policy Brief, Clingendael Institut. https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep 21309?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 9 June 2021. Tamari, Steve. 2017. Arab nemzeti tudat a kora újkori Szíriában [Arab National Consciousness in Early Modern Syria]. Világtörténet 7 (39): 511–522. Tibi, Bassam. 1997. Arab Nationalism Between Islam and the Nation-State. London: Macmillan Press. Wagner, Péter. 2009. Államkudarc vagy demokratizálódás: merre tart Irak a polgárháború elcsendesülése után? [State Failure or Democratization: Where Is Iraq Heading after the Pacification of the Civil War?]. Külügyi Szemle 8: 102–123. Zisser, Eyal. 2007. The Syrian Phoenix—The Revival of the Syrian Social National Party in Syria. Die Welt des Islams 47: 188–206.

CHAPTER 4

On the Shores of Phoenicia: Phoenicianism, Political Maronitism, and Christian Nationalism in Lebanon Francesco Mazzucotelli

The Genesis of Phoenicianism The Corm House is a seven-story building in Art Deco style, tucked in a residential neighborhood close to the National Museum of Beirut. Vaguely reminiscent of a miniaturized version of the Chrysler Building in New York City, the house was built in 1928, at a time when its flamboyant owner Charles Corm was the only authorized dealer of Ford vehicles for the Middle East. Corm had previously founded La Revue Phénicienne, a French-language literary journal that ardently called for an independent Lebanon after the end of World War I. Although short-lived (in fact, only four issues were ever published in 1919), the journal proved very effective in the articulation of a discourse that posited modern Lebanon

F. Mazzucotelli (B) Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_4

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as the historical continuation of the ancient Phoenician culture. As they framed the Phoenician past in a trans-Mediterranean geography and a European civilizational context, Corm and the other Christian contributors to the journal argued that Lebanon had a distinct identity and deserved full sovereignty. “Today’s Lebanon,” as Michel Chiha argued in a seminal conference delivered in 1942, was “almost identical with the original Lebanon–Phoenicia” (Chiha 1984: 20) and was born again from its ashes just like the mythological bird with a flaming aureole. This “resurrection” of Phoenicia, as Salibi (1988: 172) called it, was inspired by archaeological explorations that ignited awe, nostalgia for the faded grandeur, and an aspiration toward political redemption through the means of national independence. All these elements were largely shared with other nationalist movements in the Middle East, who sought to found collective identities and political legitimacy within mythologies of the origins and the epic of foundation (Kaufman 2001). The Phoenician narrative mirrored the recovery of the Pharaonic past in modern Egyptian nationalism (Wood 1998) or the role played by ancient Mesopotamian references in the Iraqi nation-building process (Bernhardsson 2005), but was also charged with additional layers. Through the story of Europa, abducted by Zeus from the shores of Phoenicia; of his brother Cadmus, founder and first king of Thebes; and the connection with their father Agenor, the Phoenician king of Tyre, Corm (1934: 40) poetically claimed a sort of Phoenician primogeniture on Greek mythology and, more importantly, a rightful place for the shores of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos in the geography and history of Greek and Latin civilizations. The argument was pushed further by Chiha, who repeatedly disputed the Semitic character of the Lebanese people, claiming instead that it belonged to “the white race” and the European culture (Chiha 1984: 38). The genesis of Phoenicianism, as Kaufman (2001) has convincingly demonstrated, was a relatively late phenomenon and should be understood at the intersection of vested French colonial projects disguised as mission civilisatrice and Christian political agendas in Mount Lebanon that opposed any idea of assimilation into a wider Arab polity after the demise of Ottoman rule. Arguments in favor of an independent Christian entity in Mount Lebanon, based on the assertion of a separate communal identity and history, had already been advanced in the nineteenth century and on the eve of the World War, most notably by Niqula Murad and Bulus Nujaym (under the pseudonym of Paul Jouplain). However, they

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mostly equated the origins of Lebanon as an entity with the advent of Christianity and remained wary of Phoenician paganism. It was among the Lebanese diaspora in Alexandria, heavily influenced by Egyptian Pharaonism and late nineteenth-century French geographical determinism, that the idea of a genealogical continuity between the ancient Phoenicians and the modern Lebanese was first established. Foundational myths and teleological understandings of history recurred in the French-language literature of Egypt (Hervé-Montel 2012) and were crucial in the works of Yusuf al-Sawda and Jacques Tabet, who later became the director of the National Museum of Beirut, a pivotal place in the reconfiguration of the Phoenician past as a constituent part and indeed the starting point of Lebanese history and identity. Through archaeology, literature, and historiography, the narrative revolving around the Phoenicians proclaimed the continuous and compact timeline of an autochthonous population, which, despite invasions and attempts at subjugation, managed to maintain an uninterrupted self-consciousness and a large degree of autonomy (Sassine 1979: 349). This narrative gained traction after the establishment of the French Mandate of Lebanon in September 1920, as it seemed to provide historical and cultural legitimacy for the political project of a separate Lebanese entity under French protection and Maronite Christian hegemony (Kaufman 2004a). The main tenet of Phoenicianism, which could be summarized as Lebanon belonging to the European–Mediterranean sphere rather than the Arab–Islamic world, was heavily mobilized in order to refute the political projects that envisaged the merger of Mandatory Lebanon with Syria or other Arabic-speaking territories in the Middle East (Kaufman 2001). Despite some attempts at reaching out the Muslim population of Lebanon, Phoenicianism remained a Christian intellectual phenomenon that was deployed in support of the Lebanese nation-building project in opposition to pan-Arab and Syrian nationalism (Firro 2004). The Phoenician narrative and its impact on the rift between supporters and opponents of the distinct non-Arab identity of Lebanon remained constantly in the background of the political turmoil that engulfed Lebanon in the 1930s, often opposing Christian and Muslim political leaders (Kaufman 2004b: 238). On a wider scale, the incubation of the discours libaniste (Sassine 1979: 5) or the Lebanese national idea took place in a mostly Maronite milieu, for the protection of mostly Maronite interests, and through arguments that were mostly based in Maronite images, vocabulary, and

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sensitivity (Hakim 2013). It was therefore not surprising that the reception of the Phoenician Lebanist discourse was generally lukewarm among Christian (and even Catholic) denominations other than the Maronite one, and even less so among Muslim audiences. Phoenicianism and Lebanist discourses have been read as a reformulation along nationalist terms of Maronite sectarian and clerical claims (Aulas 1985). I argue that a purely sectarian understanding of the Phoenician narrative and its impact on the development of Lebanese nationalism can be nuanced. On the one hand, the sectarian prism ought to be unpacked in order to challenge the reification of communal identities and highlight the complex imbrication of clientelist politics and communitybased charity that defines Lebanese politics. On the other hand, modern sectarian discourses need to be understood in the frame of the nation-state model and the formation of volatile national identities (Haddad 2020). The problematization of the nexus between sectarianism and nationalism questions the notion of the artificiality of the nation-state in the Middle East, as well as a binary understanding of the categories of primordial and modern in Lebanese politics. The evolution of the Phoenicianist discourse, and its relation to Lebanese nationalism and Maronite Christian exceptionalism, provides an insight into the agency of local elites, their selective adoption of themes and concepts, and the role of the state as a fragile and yet constant reference. Lebanese nationalism appears not as a fully-fledged political doctrine, but as a spectrum of arguments and claims that morph over time in relation to the drastic mutations in the regional environment and the evolution of the Lebanese state-building process. The characteristics of the imagined community, in its supposed continuity with an ancient and almost mythical past, and its relation to contemporary challenges, are seen here as mutating in relation to the transformation of the political context, and particularly with the aim of preserving a state and a status quo where citizenship is however mediated by sectarian categories (Sassine 1979: 222).

Drawing Inspiration: The Imagined Mountain In 1919, Charles Corm rallied a group of ardent Francophile businessmen and intellectuals around the project of La Revue Phénicienne, which vibrantly supported the idea of an independent Lebanon in its supposedly natural borders. Kaufman (2004a) notes that Corm used the nom

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de plume “Ariel Caliban,” which, in an obvious reference to The Tempest by Shakespeare, seems to suggest the clash between the tamed, obedient colonial subject and the savage, unruly one, with France in the role of Prospero, the Duke of Milan. Corm’s dualistic imagery often included the antithesis of the spiritual and the carnal, or the gendered opposition between a feminized image of his native homeland and the archetype of the masculine, embodied by general Henry Gouraud, the French High Commissioner of the Levant who proclaimed the independence of the Mandatory State of Greater Lebanon in 1920. At this stage, Corm was already influenced by the political thought of the French nationalist Right, which had transpired into the Christian intellectual circles even before the creation of the Mandate. Of particular relevance were the ideas of Maurice Barrès, a French writer and politician who was a close associate of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Charles Maurras, the founder of the monarchist Action Française. From his association with Maurras and Paul Déroulède, Barrès developed his theory of a radical nationalism that postulated a holistic vision of a human community, finally purged from its perturbing (allogenous) elements and brought back to its (supposed) authenticity. In his perspective, the nation could form a spiritual and organic totality, unified and revived through its common origin, as long as its internal conflicts were transcended and the elements outside the national consensus were removed (Kaufman 2004c). The value accorded by Barrès to the relation between terre et morts (“the land and the dead”) led him to confer outstanding significance to specific places infused with the memory of collective sacrifice and a feeling of transcendental energy, where he sensed the beating heart of the nation, as in the hill of Sion-Vaudémont that he celebrated in his 1913 novel La Colline inspirée (Kaufman 2004a). After a trip to the Levant in 1914, Barrès wrote Une enquête aux pays du Levant, where he exalted the supernatural force exuding from some places connected to Phoenician and Greek mythology. The nascent Lebanist discourse embraced this theory in an almost cult-like status, venerating the paysage (landscape) of Lebanon as the receptacle of the physiognomy of the nation (Choueiri 2012: 228). Moving from the premise that geography makes history, Lebanist authors celebrated territory (in a strongly deterministic sense) and memory as the cornerstones of national identity above language and race. Among them, Henri Lammens, a Flemish Jesuit missionary that devoted himself to the study of the ancient and early Islamic history of

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the region, wrote a history of the Levant that emphasized its geographical and historical separateness from the Arab world (Salibi 1988: 132). In La Syrie: précis historique, published in 1921, Lammens echoed Barrès in order to counter the ideas of Sati’ al-Husri, who had theorized a common pan-Arab national identity based on the shared use of classical Arabic as a literary language. According to Lammens, on the contrary, that the people of Syria and Lebanon accidentally spoke Arabic was not a defining element of their national identity; in any case, not as much as the (supposedly) natural borders of Greater Syria and Mount Lebanon, the configuration and features of their physical space, and the collective memory inscribed in it (Kaufman 2004c). Perhaps paradoxically, the arguments proposed by Lammens could be, and indeed were stretched in antithetical directions. On the one hand, his emphasis on the geographical and historical unity of “natural Syria” shaped the political thought of Antun Saadeh and the pan-Syrian nationalism of the Syrian Social National Party (Dot-Pouillard 2016). On the other hand, Lammens advanced the thesis of the asile du Liban, or Lebanon as the historical mountain refuge of persecuted religious minorities, which not only reinforced the connection between identity and geography, but also provided a sense of mission and destiny to the advocates of Lebanese exceptionalism versus the rest of the Middle East (Salibi 1988: 134–135). Lammens was not the only writer who argued for the distinct identity, history, and political status of the Syrian region. In La Syrie de demain, published in Paris in 1916, Nadra Moutran promoted the cause of a Greater Syria under French protection (la Syrie française), where the Christian population, although demographically a minority, would hold a preeminent political and economic position. A similar position was expressed by Georges Samne, the secretary of the Comité central syrien, founded in Paris in 1917. In La Syrie, also published in Paris in 1920, he deplored the partition of the former Ottoman provinces between the French and the British mandatory administrations, emphasizing the commonality dictated by geography and history. In the introduction to the book, Shukri Ghanem, the former president of the committee, was more accepting of the post-1920 arrangements and supported the establishment of a separate government for le Grand-Liban ou la Phénicie (Firro 2003: 23–25). In La Syrie historique , éthnographique , religieuse , géographique , économique , politique et sociale, also published in Paris in 1920, Jacques

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Tabet downplayed the importance of (Arabic) language as a constitutive factor of national identity and emphasized the Phoenician origin of the Syrian population, whose legacy had supposedly not been broken despite conquests and occupations (Firro 2004). The prominence of Lammens above these authors stemmed from his status as a renowned Orientalist at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. Founded by the Jesuits in 1875, this French-language university strived from the beginning to become the incubator of a new professional and intellectual elite, overwhelmingly Catholic by religion and Francophile by culture (Herzstein 2009). The role of the Jesuit order as one of the main links between the Maronite Church and the Holy See in Rome had been strong since the seventeenth century (Salibi 1988: 80–81), but became even more pronounced during the nineteenth century, when Protestant missionary activities and educational facilities began to be established in the region and often became a channel for the promotion of British interests. In the increasingly polarized context of Mount Lebanon under Ottoman rule, schools and colleges run by the Jesuits sought to counter the expansion of Protestant institutions and promoted a Catholic education that was French in language, culture, and political orientation (Firro 2004). Starting from 1898, the Jesuit perspective was voiced through the literary journal al-Mashriq, under the editorship of Louis Cheikho, a respected Arabist who taught at the Université Saint-Joseph. His ideas reflected a tension between the celebration of the cultural and historical heritage of the Middle East and the call for French patronage. Cheikho was a clericalist conservative and expressed disdain for positivism, materialism, and the increasingly libertine mores in European societies. He was very critical of the ruling establishment of the French Third Republic, its revolutionary ideals, and the notion of laïcité, but still considered France as the natural and historical protector of the Christians of the Middle East, who were often described by clerical publications as victimized by the Ottoman imperial administration (Walker 2009). Jesuit-run schools and education facilities acted both as a conveyor belt for the Catholic conservative of the French Right between the establishment of the Third Republic and the onset of World War I, and as a central place for the re-elaboration of Maronitism, defined as an identity discourse and a historiographical approach that postulated the national character of the Maronite sect. At the political level, this Maronitism was reflected in a generalized opposition to the system of self-government that

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was devised under the Règlement Organique of 1861 and 1864, and in the request of a national, fully independent government under Maronite hegemony and French protection, through a system where legitimacy should stem from the people and not from the traditional aristocratic families of landlords connected to the Ottoman ancien régime (Aulas 1985). Authors such as Nujaym/Jouplain made the case for the Maronite arguments in favor of a Greater Lebanon (beyond the administrative limits of the autonomous province created in 1861) and were mirrored in the memorandum presented by the Maronite Patriarch Elias Huwayyik at the Paris Peace Conference in October 1919. The Patriarch demanded full independence for Lebanon, rejected the merger of Lebanon within Syria, and did not forget to ask for the protection of “liberal and generous France,” reaffirming the historical ties that made France the protector of the Catholics in the Orient (Zamir 1985: 15–16, 269–278). Such were the characteristics of the intellectual and political debate when La Revue Phénicienne appeared in the second half of 1919, quickly becoming a rallying platform for pro-French intellectuals and businessmen who were mostly the expression of a Maronite, French-speaking urban elite that was eager to dissociate itself from the Arab national movement and the Damascus-based kingdom of Faysal and the Hashemite dynasty (Kaufman 2004b: 89–93). The journal included literary essays as well as articles on economic and political topics. Even though the overall tone was not clericalist, many Lebanist contributions stressed the special relevance of the Maronites and the Maronite Patriarchate in particular, anticipating an argument that was also made in later publications (Sassine 1979: 250). The reference to the Christian heritage was assumed as the foundation of Lebanon’s national identity, following the example of the Action Française and its theorization of the Celtic, Roman, and Christian roots of the French nation (Kaufman 2001). To this layer, the contributors to La Revue Phénicienne added the emphasis on the (supposed) immutability of the geographical borders of Greater Lebanon, established since antiquity. The map of Phoenician sites became therefore an argument in favor of the rapprochement of the areas of Sidon, Tyre, Tripoli, and the Bekaa valley to the previously existing autonomous province of Mount Lebanon. The establishment of Greater Lebanon was then supposed to be seen not as a maneuver serving French strategic interests in the Levant or Maronite economic and political agendas, but as the restoration of a space that

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had been unduly mutilated under invading empires, most notably the Ottoman one. After a hiatus of fifteen years, dedicated to his business activities and personal fortunes, Charles Corm expanded Phoenicianist and Lebanist themes in a poem published in 1934 and titled La Montagne inspirée, in an overt reference to the novel written by Barrès. The poem, written in French, is divided into three sections, each one dedicated to a different mood: enthusiasm (for the reconstituted unity of the nation), agony (for the pain suffered during the just-lived past under Ottoman rule), and memory. The last section is composed of four-line stanzas in ABAB rhyming scheme and is arguably the most interesting in terms of content. The core of the poem is a praise of Lebanon’s civilizational mission through the centuries and its extraneity from the Arab–Islamic context (Kaufman 2004a). References to the Crusades (Corm 1934: 52) were used to celebrate the relations between Maronites and Frankish rulers, and by extension to reinforce the historical connection between Lebanon and France. The Crusader connection was used by Corm to consolidate the historical character of Lebanon as a Christian area, part of Biblical geography and Christian history (Corm 1934: 53, 56). The difficult reconciliation of Phoenician paganism and Christianity was solved by Corm through the (unplausible) claim of an embryonic Phoenician monotheism (Corm 1934: 37), or alternatively through the dualism between the Phoenician component (sensual, physical, and masculine) and the Christian component (spiritual and feminine) of Lebanese identity (Corm 1934: 35, 46). Through a pseudo-religious and pompous language, Corm shared with Barrès the idea that some places were foundational of national memory and identity because of the persistence of a genius loci (Corm 1934: 91) that shaped the peculiar nature of Lebanon and its Volksgeist (Choueiri 2012: 221). Once again, geographical determinism and claims of historical continuity, defined by the “stones” of the Lebanese mountains and nurtured by the blood of martyrs (Corm 1934: 62), were deployed to found a narrative that promoted Lebanon’s exceptionalism and particularity, ingrained in its Christian (and especially Maronite) component. Similarly, the celebration of the Phoenicians as the inventors of the first alphabet (Corm 1934: 39) and the praise of Lebanon’s multilingualism (Corm 1934: 91, 95) became tools against the claims of Arabism and were used to downplay the Arabness of the country, arguing that its

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national identity could not be founded on the mere attribute of the use of colloquial Arabic as the everyday language of communication (Kaufman 2004c). Corm’s writings (and La Montagne inspirée in particular) were particularly significant because the Phoenician theme became central, in contrast to earlier works that had provided marginal attention at best and had rather emphasized the role of the Maronite Church and the history of its foundation. The ideas of Corm, while borrowed by the French nationalist Right through the intermediation of Jesuit establishments, were functional to the political situation that had developed after the establishment of the Mandate of Greater Lebanon, where the ruling elites were searching for an ideology that could allow the integration of diverse segments into a state that had been desired overwhelmingly by the Maronite component, but was in need of deeper historical roots. The function of the Phoenician theme was then to inspire confidence in the very existence of the Lebanese nation as a separate entity, with its own identity and a status on par with other developed, civilized nations (Sassine 1979: 119–120, 133). All these themes and narratives were adopted since its inception by the Lebanese Phalanges party, which was aimed at defending Maronite hegemony and opposing Syrian and pan-Arab nationalisms. In the Phalangist discourse, Lebaneseness was supposed to legitimize the exceptional characteristics and history of the Lebanese nation (and in particular of its Christian component) against all the other populations and societies in the Middle East. An organicist idea of the nation, which could be unified through a charismatic leadership and firmly anchored in a Christian worldview, was once again based on the thought of Maurice Barrès and the concept of integral nationalism (nationalisme intégral ), as theorized by Charles Maurras and the circles of Action Française, and received in Lebanon through Jesuit establishments (Thuselt 2018: 87–88). Contemporary Lebanon appeared as the product of the heritage built over the centuries by earlier generations and civilizations, first and foremost the Phoenician one. These layers provided a historical ground for the existence of an independent Lebanon, detached from Syria and the Arab world, and endowed with a raison d’être of freedom and example of civilization. An attitude of both superiority and alienation vis-à-vis the Arab world transpired from the Phoenicianist narrative, often imbued with a sense of Maronite exceptionalism. In the following years, this discourse was developed as a cultural project that used multiple tools,

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including history schoolbooks, children’s literature, poetry and novels, art festivals, and music, including the legendary plays sung by Fairouz in the Baalbek ruins. Such cultural project, according to Bawardi (2016: 50–52), was not merely based on aesthetical or literary motifs, but was ideological and political in content and vocation, because it was aimed at political mobilization in support of a Lebanese nation based on its imagined Phoenician and Christian roots.

Phoenicia: The Merchant Republic While the Phoenicianist discourse was developed at multiple levels, the politics of Lebanon under the Mandate came to be dominated in the 1930s by the rivalry between two Maronite Christian leaders, both scions of influential families who received an education in Jesuit schools. Émile Eddé, leader of the National Bloc and supported by Maronite Patriarch Elias Huwayyik, was a fervent Francophile who envisaged Lebanon as a primarily Christian homeland with a non-Arab identity. His opponent Bishara al-Khouri, leader of the Constitutional Bloc, called for a fully independent Lebanon, which, although under Maronite hegemony, could establish a sound relationship with Syria and other Arab territories. Ultimately successful, al-Khouri was convinced of the possibility to coopt the elites of the different sects, and in the particular the most important Sunni notables of Beirut, in a trans-sectarian political compromise that would defend the interests of a rapidly developing financial and commercial bourgeoisie (Traboulsi 2012: 93–95). Bishara al-Khouri was associated with Henri Pharaon, a wealthy banker from an influential Greek Catholic family of Beirut, through his brotherin-law Michel Chiha, a banker and writer of Chaldean background who was related to the Pharaon through his maternal side and his wife. Chiha played a major role in drafting the Lebanese Constitution of 1926, and in 1934, he founded the daily Le Jour, which became the mouthpiece of the Constitutional Bloc. Through his editorials, Chiha developed a Lebanist thought that was later rearranged in a series of lectures delivered in a forum called Cénacle Libanais (Shehadi 1987). Some conferences, held between 1942 and 1953, were later collected in a book that was published in 1964 and republished in 1984. Chiha initially echoed the ideas of La Revue Phénicienne and Henri Lammens, including in particular the tropes of the mountain country as a safe haven for the oppressed or “a promised land for anxious minorities”

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(Chiha 1984: 19, 35), but he later bent those concepts in a direction that was functional to his economic and political agenda. Chiha was little interested in a pseudohistorical nobilitation of Maronite supremacism and sought to overcome the overlapping of Lebanese nationalism and political Maronitism, which made the former generally unappealing to the non-Catholics (Sassine 1979: 122). His main goal was to convincingly demonstrate Lebanon’s distinct identity. Although he rejected nationalist excesses (Chiha 1984: 149), he couldn’t help dousing his prose with heavy historical determinism (Chiha 1984: 144, 145), infused with a sense of predestination (Chiha 1984: 114). Racial overtones were present in Chiha’s writings, most notably when he defined the Lebanese as “a race of mountain highlanders / seafarers, very different from what is around her” (Chiha 1984: 147). In his opinion, the Lebanese people had to accept that their origin as a nation dated back far earlier than “someone” (by which he implied Arab nationalists) assumed in order to justify their politics (Chiha 1984: 25). In a 1942 conference titled Liban d’aujourd’hui (“Today’s Lebanon”), he went as far as stating the blood of ancient (Phoenician) progenitors was not entirely diluted, and that it would be very hazardous to say that the Lebanese were a “purely Semitic” people. Against the notion of the Semitic or Arabic character of the local population, Chiha said that the Lebanese were “quite simply” Lebanese, and at best a very mixed-up Mediterranean variety (Chiha 1984: 25, 34). Chiha defined Lebanon as a country of associated religious minorities with very diverse social class layers which had to unite and fraternize on their own local terms of settlement rather than on abstract notions of democracy (Chiha 1984: 42, 46). This did not prevent him from elaborating quite negative assessments of Islam as oppressive by default (Chiha 1984: 31). Two recurring themes were providentialism, or the idea that the Divine Providence had accorded a special aura to the Holy Land, of which Lebanon formed a part (Chiha 1984: 36), and exceptionalism, or a belief in the extraordinary characteristics of the country that fostered a peculiar pride based on the belonging to the petit pays (Choueiri 2012: 255). The “small country,” or the Heimat (Choueiri 2012: 244) where the individual was able to experience the reliability of their existence and establish an affective geography, was expressed in Chiha through the notion of petite province, the “joli lieu de notre enfance” (“pleasant place of our childhood”) that founded a special affective bond between the human

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being and the land of Lebanon (Chiha 1984: 149–151), just like Barrès had elaborated about his native Lorraine region (Chiha 1984: 153). Geographical determinism, or the idea that Lebanon had a “natural function” and a destiny inscribed in its geography and history (Chiha 1984: 113), remained a constant, but there was some significant change in Chiha’s thought. Whereas he stressed at first the “insular vocation” of the country (Chiha 1984: 23), in his later conferences (Le Liban dans le monde: perspectives d’avenir, held in 1951, and Présence du Liban, held in 1953) he emphasized Lebanon’s cosmopolitan disposition (Firro 2004), asserting that diversity was “our destiny” (Chiha 1984: 122) and that the exceptional wanderlust of the modern Lebanese was totally in line with their past (Chiha 1984: 157). The Mediterranean Sea was the source of Lebanon’s calling to universalism, because the country had been a trait d’union between East and West since the days of the Phoenician era (Chiha 1984: 161), which provided the prototype of an open economy based on free trade. Chiha saw the future of Lebanon as standing on its freedom, and in particular on the freedom of belief and freedom of enterprise (Chiha 1984: 118), which was particularly significant in a country that was devised as a distributor of services and goods more than a producer, in line with the unbridled laissez-faire, service-oriented economy that became the hallmark of Lebanon since the 1940s (Shehadi 1987). On the one hand, Chiha was opposed to pan-Arabism, arguing against a “grossly improper definition” of Middle East that destroyed the balance of power in the Mediterranean. Lebanon was described as belonging first and foremost to the Mediterranean world, and was called to uphold its “Mediterranean personality” (Chiha 1984: 134, 136), while at the same time contributing with its specific features to the Arab balance against Zionism and the threat represented by the Israeli state (Chiha 1984: 124– 130). On the other hand, Chiha was opposed to Marxism, whose primary goal he saw as the destruction of democracy through the muted work of political agitation, and the destruction of all the religious and spiritual forces and civilizations on Earth through the diffusion of materialism (Chiha 1984: 88–91). In a 1948 conference titled Valeurs, he defined Marxism as a source of apocalyptic conflict, and as an “ephemeral and soulless fiction” where everything was sacrificed to a totem “called the State, or the Party” (Chiha 1984: 66–68). Against this background, in the conclusions of his 1951 conference, Chiha called for the Lebanese

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government to push its economic policy toward the farthest edges of liberalism, maintaining Lebanon as the “very homeland of free enterprise” against any perspective of dirigisme or totalitarianism (Chiha 1984: 138–140). In short, Phoenician references in Chiha were carefully used to argue that the destiny of Lebanon, as created by its geography and history, resided in its role as entrepôt between Europe and the Middle East, and required the highest degree of freedom of trade and movement. This “tradition” had to be defended against subversion and sudden whims, or as he said more poetically “le Liban n’est pas un pays à coups de tête et à coups d’État ” (Chiha 1984: 41). In concrete terms, Lebanon was supposed to be politically independent, fiscally competitive, and generally aligned with the West because, as he argued in a 1950 conference called Le Monde d’aujourd’hui, the Mediterranean basin had become an appendix to the Atlantic (the ocean and, supposedly, the alliance) (Chiha 1984: 102). Chiha was, as Traboulsi (2012: 96) aptly wrote, “the organic intellectual of the commercial/financial bourgeoisie” of Beirut in the 1930s and 1940s. His role in drafting the 1926 Constitution and as an advisor to Bishara al-Khouri, who eventually became President of the Republic in 1943, made Chiha one of the “chief architects” of a political and economic system that envisaged Beirut as “a city-state of a modernized Phoenician type at the head of what was essentially a merchant republic,” as Salibi (1988: 179) eloquently said. On the other hand, his enormous influence in shaping the ideology of a minimal state, with scant governmental intervention and almost negligible public welfare, ensured that Lebanon would never reckon its shaky social foundations. His claims on individual virtues as the backbone of the country were naïve at best. At worst, they were a self-serving and deceiving narrative for a mercantile elite that favored a service-based economy to the detriment of industrialization, and pressed for reversing the wartime protectionist economy and revoking the customs union with Syria. In short, Chiha made use of the Phoenician foundational myth in order to advance the interests of a bourgeois elite (of which he was a member) that had accumulated its fortune as a result of the growth of Beirut into a global port city at the end of the nineteenth century (Farah 2021). Chiha helped establish the Société d’études et de realisations industrielles , agricoles et commerciales (SERIAC), which was a combination of French and Lebanese merchants, bankers, and business partners with close access to President Bishara al-Khouri and his close entourage (Gendzier

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2006: 46). With his acolytes, dubbed “the new Phoenicians,” Chiha also contributed to establish the Société libanaise d’économie politique (SLEP). Its president and main economist was Gabriel Menassa, who devised in 1948 the Plan de reconstruction de l’économie libanaise et de réforme de l’état, a publication that called for the promotion of free trade and international tourism and capitalized on the arguments set forth by Jacques Tabet (discussed earlier as an earlier exponent of the Phoenicianist current) in his 1934 publication Pour faire du Liban la Suisse du Levant. Lebanon’s tourist promotion in the 1950s and 1960s was not only part of the general pattern of mass beach tourism that occurred all around the Mediterranean basin (Maasri 2020: 51), but was also profoundly interspersed with visions of modern leisure and fashionability that reinforced the slogan of Lebanon as “the Switzerland of the East” and Beirut’s allure as a place for sophisticated fun (Kassir 2011: 304–309, 365–366, 385– 408). At the same time, the promotional images of beaches, yacht clubs, expensive hotels and restaurants, bikini-clad young women, night clubs, and archaeological sites (Roman and Phoenician, with Baalbek in a prominent role, at the expense of the later Arabic–Islamic heritage of cities like Tripoli and Sidon) embedded a Lebanese subjectivity in its Mediterranean geography and history, presented as “the cradle of civilization,” in the footsteps of the Phoenician myth of origin that had been endorsed by Yusuf al-Sawda in his 1919 book F¯ı sab¯ıl Lubn¯ an (Maasri 2016).

The Aftermath of Phoenicianism and the Politics of Isolation The National Pact of 1943, which Chiha contributed to devise, stemmed from the necessity to balance the need for a compromise among the different bourgeois elites of Lebanon, on the one hand, with the need to preserve the special nature of the country vis-à-vis the Arab world, on the other hand (Aulas 1985). The pact created a consociational system based on a power-sharing arrangement that often resulted in a praxis of reciprocal veto and in a general institutional fragility (Hagopian 1989). The pact did not quench the aspiration of pan-Arab nationalists toward a closer relationship between Lebanon and the other member countries of the Arab League, nor it eased the anxiety of those Maronites who were scared by the prospect of assimilation in an Arab-Islamic environment and still sometimes clung to the claim to Lebanon as the “national homeland of the Christians in the Middle East” (Suleiman 1967: 22).

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The 1960s were marked by massive urbanization processes with explosive social inequality, the rise of a new radical Left, which combined Marxism with Maoism and Third-Worldism, and the formation of Palestinian militant factions. Growing fears to lose both communal identity and control of the State led a significant portion of the Maronite political scene to reinforce the ideological paraphernalia of Maronitism. The undoing of the Lebanese state in the making up of the civil war led some Maronite political and intellectual exponents to call for a partition or a division of the country along sectarian lines, envisioning a homogeneous Christian territorial polity, whether in the forms of a canton or a completely independent state (Hagopian 1989). The Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik, founded in 1938 by the monastic Lebanese Maronite Order, became the stronghold of a militant thought that blended and expanded themes of Maronite isolationism and Phoenicianism, and often veered them along ethnic lines. Through the publication of books, pamphlets, and journals, the research center at Kaslik catalyzed Maronite distress, emphasized Lebanese exceptionalism and Islamic threat (Henley 2008), and provided intellectual legitimation to the Maronite supremacist and isolationist trend that eventually formed the right-wing Lebanese Front (Snider 1984). The theme of a Christian identity threatened by Arab nationalism, militant Islamism, and Marxism (or a combination of the three), coupled with slogans about resilience and resistance against attempts at submission, was predominant in the discourse of Maronite leader Bashir Gemayel and marked the transition among some Maronites from a self-perception as the vanguard of modernity into a national state defined in its borders since antiquity to a self-perception as an ethnic minority under constant threat of assimilation or annihilation (Thuselt 2018: 129–182). Incidentally, an offspring of this milieu is Walid Phares, a former ideologue of the Lebanese Forces wartime militia who authored a 1996 book called Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance, and who later became a controversial foreign policy advisor on the Middle East to US presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Donald Trump (Tharoor 2016). Extremist discourses during the Lebanese Civil War magnified themes that had been developed in the previous decades. The celebration of the Phoenician heritage and roots, which was often marked by gross distortions and misleading claims, provided a very effective tool for developing a discourse of Lebanese exceptionalism, which in turn legitimized the

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demand for political independence against Syrian and pan-Arab nationalist claims. Whereas Henri Lammens and Charles Corm imagined the Lebanese homeland as the Mountain, both in the geographical sense of the Mount Lebanon hinterland and in the symbolic sense of refuge and fortress against invading armies, Michel Chiha emphasized the Mediterranean (and by extension European) dimension and projection of the country. Maronite isolationists often used nationalist, Phoenicianist, and Mediterraneanist discourses, vested in geographical and historical determinism, to reframe sectarian aims. In their perspective, Lebanese nationalism, based on an emphasis on difference (from the Arab world) and particularism, became synonymous with anti-Arabism and the protection of the Christians against Arab nationalism, Islam disguised as Arabism, and Third-Worldism (Felsch 2016). The formation and transformation of the Lebanese nationalist discourse, with its tropes of Christian particularism and the evolution of the Phoenicianist narrative, problematize the ongoing debate on sectarianism and the religious dimensions of nationalism, and at the same time highlight the agency of local actors, the selective assimilation of concepts and doctrines, and the close connection between the politics of imagination of the national community and the state-building process, its fragilities and failures.

References Aulas, Marie-Christine. 1985. The Socio-Ideological Development of the Maronite Community: The Emergence of the Phalanges and the Lebanese Forces. Arab Studies Quarterly 7 (4): 1–27. Bawardi, Basilius. 2016. The Lebanese-Phoenician Nationalist Movement: Literature, Language and Identity. London: I.B. Tauris. Bernhardsson, Magnus. 2005. Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chiha, Michel. 1984. Visage et présence du Liban. Beyrouth: Le Trident – Le Cénacle Libanais. Choueri, Raja. 2012. Les sites paysagers de la mémoire du Liban. Baabda: Félix Beryte. Corm, Charles. 1934. La Montagne inspirée. Chansons de geste. Beyrouth: Éditions de la Revue Phénicienne. Dot-Pouillard, Nicolas. 2016. Sur les frontières : le Parti syrien national social entre idéologie unitaire et États-nations. In Vers un nouveau Moyen-Orient?

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États arabes en crise entre logiques de division et sociétés civiles, ed. Anna Bozzo and Pierre-Jean Luizard, 209–225. Roma: Roma TrE-Press. Farah, Cyma. 2021. The Moral Limits of Michel Chiha’s Economic Liberalism. The Legal Agenda. https://english.legal-agenda.com/the-moral-limits-of-mic hel-chihas-economic-liberalism/. Accessed 30 July 2021. Felsch, Maximilian. 2016. The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Lebanon. In Lebanon and the Arab Uprisings: In the Eye of the Hurricane, ed. Maximilian Felsch and Martin Wählisch, 70–86. London: Routledge. Firro, Kais. 2003. Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State Under the Mandate. London: I.B. Tauris. Firro, Kais. 2004. Lebanese Nationalism Versus Arabism: From Bulus Nujaym to Michel Chiha. Middle Eastern Studies 40 (5): 1–27. Gendzier, Irene L. 2006. Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958. New York: Columbia University Press. Haddad, Fanar. 2020. Sectarian Identity and National Identity in the Middle East. Nations and Nationalism 26 (1): 123–137. Hagopian, Elaine. 1989. Maronite Hegemony to Maronite Militancy: The Creation and Disintegration of Lebanon. Third World Quarterly 11 (4): 101–117. Hakim, Carol. 2013. The Origins of the Lebanese National Idea: 1840–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press. Henley, Alexander. 2008. Politics of a Church at War: Maronite Catholicism in the Lebanese Civil War. Mediterranean Politics 13 (3): 353–369. https://doi. org/10.1080/13629390802386713. Hervé-Montel, Caroline. 2012. Renaissance littéraire et conscience nationale. Les premiers romans en français au Liban et en Egypte (1908–1933). Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner. Herzstein, Rafaël. 2009. Les pères jésuites et les Maronites du Mont-Liban: l’Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth. Histoire et missions chrétiennes 9 (1): 149–175. Kassir, Samir. 2011. Beirut. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaufman, Asher. 2001. Phoenicianism: The Formation of an Identity in Lebanon in 1920. Middle Eastern Studies 37 (1): 173–194. Kaufman, Asher. 2004a. ‘Tell Us Our History’: Charles Corm, Mount Lebanon and Lebanese Nationalism. Middle Eastern Studies 40 (3): 1–28. Kaufman, Asher. 2004b. Reviving Phoenicia: The Search for Identity in Lebanon. London: I.B. Tauris. Kaufman, Asher. 2004c. From “La Colline inspirée” to “La Montagne inspirée”: Maurice Barrès and Lebanese Nationalism. In France and the Middle East: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Michel Abitbol, 225–246. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press.

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Maasri, Zeina. 2016. Troubled Geography: Imagining Lebanon in 1960s Tourist Promotion. In National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization, ed. Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei, 125–140. New York: Berghahn Books. Maasri, Zeina. 2020. Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salibi, Kamal. 1988. A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sassine, Fares. 1979. Le libanisme maronite. Contributions à l’étude d’un discours politique. PhD thesis, Université de Paris Sorbonne. Shehadi, Nadim. 1987. The Idea of Lebanon: Economy and State in the Cénacle Libanais 1946–54. Papers on Lebanon: 5. Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies. Snider, Lewis. 1984. The Lebanese Forces: Their Origins and Role in Lebanon’s Politics. Middle East Journal 38 (1): 1–33. Suleiman, Michael W. 1967. Political Parties in Lebanon: The Challenge of a Fragmented Political Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tharoor, Ishaan. 2016. The Dark, Controversial Past of Trump’s Counterterrorism Adviser. The Washington Post, 22 March. https://www.washingto npost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/22/the-dark-controversial-pastof-trumps-counterterrorism-adviser/. Accessed 30 July 2021. Thuselt, Christian. 2018. “Dream of a Republic”: Lebanese Political Parties as “Real Parties”. PhD thesis, Roskilde University. Traboulsi, Fawwaz. 2012. A History of Modern Lebanon. London: Pluto Press. Walker, Dennis Patrick. 2009. Clericist Catholic Authors and the Crystallization of Historical Memory of World War I in Lebanonist-Particularist Discourse, 1918–1922. Islamic Studies 48 (2): 219–260. Wood, Michael. 1998. The Use of the Pharaonic Past in Modern Egyptian Nationalism. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 35: 179–196. Zamir, Meir. 1985. The Formation of Modern Lebanon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Nationalism Without Nation: Sudanese Decolonization and Its Aftermath Moritz A. Mihatsch

During the Sudanese presidential elections 2010, at a campaign event for the SPLM candidate Yassir Arman in Khartoum, a speaker riled up the crowd, jesting “Beshir believes that, when he gets rid of the south, he lives in a white country. He even considers renaming the country from ‘Sudan’ to ‘Baidan’.”1 While the joke ridiculed the self-perception of socalled Arab Sudanese, many of whom consider themselves as non-African, it demonstrated how nation building in the country had failed and that the “African” Sudanese and the “Arab” Sudanese did not share a common

1 ‘Baidan’ in this case has a dual meaning. It is a derivative of ‘Abiad’ or white; in the same way, ‘Sudan’ is a derivative of black. At the same time, ‘Baidan’ is a dual of ‘baid’ which means egg, and is a slang term for testicles.

M. A. Mihatsch (B) British University in Egypt, Cairo, Egypt e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_5

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identity or state-nation. This division has not ended with the independence of South Sudan, as the ongoing conflicts in Southern Kordofan and Darfur demonstrate. The literature on Sudan has widely discussed the conflicts between northern and southern Sudanese, as well as differences within the north. Seminal authors include Douglas Johnson (2011) writing on southern Sudan, Julie Flint’s and Alex de Waal’s (2008) work on Darfur and Wendy James (2007) on the Blue Nile region. Douglas Johnson particularly pointed to the relationship between the center and the periphery, when he wrote: The exploitative nature of the central state towards its rich, but uncontrolled hinterland, the coercive power of the army in economic as well as political matters, the prerogative of the leader in redistributing revenues to the peripheries, the ambiguous status of persons who are not fully part of the central heritage – all of these have (been entrenched by the Sudanic states, the jihad state of the Mahdiyya and the colonial state and) re-emerged with force in the Sudan since independence. (Johnson 2011: 7)

Wendy James pointed to a different aspect of local conflict, when she analyzed the local perspective: (T)he struggle on the ground is not always best understood as between ethnic or religious groups, and drawing boundaries can produce as much conflict and misery as it solves (...). The conflicts which global modernity seems to provoke do not stem simply from pre-existing rivalries, but are created to a large extent by the processes of expanding modernity itself. (James 2007: 3)

While these explanations of the conflict from a local or regional perspective have a lot of merit to explain the specifics of the wars in the south or in Darfur, they do not fully explain why the cleavages at the base of the conflict emerged at the first point, or why the Sudanese state was unable to overcome them. If we take Renan’s (1990) argument that nations are neither mere ethnic, religious, nor language communities seriously, then one has to concede that there would at least have been the possibility to overcome these cleavages. This possibility, or the failure to grasp it, was located in the realm of national politics in Khartoum. Johnson hinted toward this, when he wrote that:

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Parliamentary government in 1965-9 was dominated by a series of coalition governments (...). Splits within both parties (NUP and Umma ...) made these coalitions unstable. (...) The parties’ own internal weaknesses, the insecurity of their hold on power, and the challenges they faced from non-sectarian parties in the remoter regions, made them less willing to compromise on the issue of religion, this being the only appeal which justified their contention for power. (Johnson 2011: 35)

But the politics in Khartoum are not the focal point of Johnson’s, de Waal’s, or James’ analysis. The question therefore remains why Khartoum’s elites failed to tackle the challenges which eventually would lead to disintegration of their state. The chapter argues that due to the weakness of the colonial state, the elite did not have to overcome its internal divisions or reach out to the periphery to form an effective nationalist movement. Being divided, they were unable to formulate a coherent vision for the nation postindependence, which would have been a prerequisite for effective nation building. In essence, the division of the nationalist movement led to a divided nation which is reflected by the eventual independence of South Sudan and the ongoing armed conflict in Sudan. This argument links in a twofold way to the overarching themes of this volume. Firstly, it demonstrates that a primarily elite-driven nationalism is vulnerable to failure, especially when the elite itself is divided. This is partly the case because the divisions between different sections of the elite led to competing narratives about the nation. Considering the clear rootedness of these narratives in history, the term myth could easily be perceived as disparaging, and thus, the chapter avoids the term itself. However, these competing historical narratives function largely in the same fashion. To make this argument, the chapter first discusses the structure of the condominium and the process of decolonization. It then presents the division within the nationalist movement in Khartoum, followed by a section on the lacking engagement of the peripheries in the process. Finally, the chapter asks why no successful nation building took place post-independence, followed by some concluding remarks.

Between Two Domini In this section, the chapter discusses how the unique structure of Sudan during the colonial period impacted its later development. The argument

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being that the structure as condominium firstly made it particularly easy to gain independence, and secondly created a bifurcated nationalist movement. The emergence of the condominium was a result of the specific colonization of the area. In the nineteenth century, Sudan was controlled by Egypt, which itself was a part of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, however, Egypt fell increasingly under British and French control, as a consequence of its foreign debt, and in 1882, Britain invaded Egypt and turned it into a de facto protectorate. A year earlier, Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese Sufi scholar, had declared himself to be a Mahdi, a millennial figure who creates a just kingdom on earth before Judgement Day. In 1885, his movement the Ansar successfully invaded Khartoum, killing the British general and colonial hero Charles Gordon. Reacting to public pressure and French and Belgian interests in the sources of the Nile, the British eventually tasked Kitchener, at the time sirdar of the Egyptian army, with the reconquest of the Sudan, which he started in earnest in 1896. By 1898, Kitchener re-occupied Khartoum. Importantly, he did so not in the name of Britain, but in the name of Egypt. Kitchener claimed to reinstate Egyptian sovereignty over Sudan. However, because it was the British doing so and Egypt was formally not part of the British Empire, only a limited sovereignty was reinstated. Sudan became a so-called Anglo-Egyptian condominium, a territory under the shared sovereignty of both Britain and Egypt. The condominium agreement of 1899 created a system in which Sudan was ruled by its own local government under the leadership of a governor general (Daly 1983). The governor general was proposed by the British and instated by the Egyptian king and led an administration of both British and Egyptian nationals, with the British usually in the more senior positions. By 1910, it came to the formalization of a governor’s council, and therefore, the position of the governor general was transformed from the position of a “virtual dictator” to something more comparable to the British prime minister, with a “machinery of government (…) along professional lines” (Abdel-Rahim 1969: 43). At the same time, the Sudan Political Service (SPS) was created, the administrative body of the country, with its members mostly hired from British elite universities (Collins 1972). In the beginning, the British attitude toward the traditional leadership and particularly religious leadership in the country was an attitude of distrust. The British were worried to become the victims of another religious uprising. Accordingly, they relied on a small class of

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modern-educated Sudanese. But this changed dramatically after a nationalist uprising in 1924 under the leadership of the White Flag League. The events not only resulted in the removal of the remaining Egyptians in Sudan, moreover “the small class of educated Sudanese (…) were now seen as the collective enemy of the British” (Abdel-Rahim 1969: 65). The administration in the country was re-directed. Whereas administration by educated Sudanese was the aim before, indirect rule became the “prevalent administrative slogan” thereafter (Currie 1935: 49). It took until 1942 for young educated Sudanese to challenge the British colonial administration once again. The modern elite had founded the so-called Graduates Congress in 1938. The Congress was active in a range of fields, including education, but in 1942 more radical elements among its members pushed a memorandum demanding full sovereignty for Sudan after World War II (Abdel-Rahim 1969: 125–127). Unsurprisingly, the government sternly rebuked the Congress, but at the same time moved quickly on the issue of closer affiliation. In 1943, the Advisory Council for the Northern Sudan Order was promulgated, and then, in 1944, the Advisory Council met for the first time. The Advisory Council remained however strongly controlled by the government, and therefore, the radical elements of the Congress, most importantly Ismail al-Azhari and the Ashiqqa, refused to participate. As a result, two factions emerged. On the one side, Sayyid Abdalrahman al-Mahdi, the son of the Mahdi who had rebuilt the Ansar, and his supporters believed it best to work within the British institutions as the Umma Party. They worked toward full independence of Sudan and used the slogan “Sudan for the Sudanese” (Ibrahim 2004: 195–236). On the other side, Ismail alAzhari, the Ashiqqa, and most of the younger graduates, supported by the leader of the Khatmiyya Sufi brotherhood Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani opposed the government and boycotted the institutions, eventually forming the National Unionist Party (NUP). This group, known as the unionists, stood for some sort of cooperation or unity with Egypt and they rallied under the slogan “Unity of the Nile Valley” (Niblock 1987: 184–195). The British continued to push forward with the association of Sudanese with their own administration by creating a Legislative Assembly and an Executive Council. In February 1950, the legal secretary suggested in a confidential memorandum to move to a system of full “home rule,” that is with a fully elected assembly and a fully Sudanese cabinet, only exempting foreign affairs and defense. This period should last for ten years, to be followed by a referendum on the status of Sudan. The governor general

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however felt that the time was not yet ripe, for such far reaching selfgovernance in Sudan (Beshir 1974: 173–175). In November 1950, the Egyptians announced that they would abrogate the condominium agreement. The British reacted by instituting a constitutional commission to redefine the Sudan’s legal status. Based on the findings of the commission, the governor general proposed the Self-Government Statute in May 1952. This statute would have given the Sudanese more rights, but at the same time eliminated the remaining Egyptian checks and balances. The statute submitted also proclaimed a deadline of November 1952 for counter-suggestions from the Egyptian government; otherwise, it would automatically go into effect (Sconyers 1987: 46–47). What followed was another deadlock in negotiations, which was only ended by the Free Officers taking power in Cairo on July 23, 1952. The Free Officers were a group of young army men who overthrew the Egyptian monarchy. The revolution shattered many long-held truths of Egyptian foreign politics and allowed for a new and innovative strategic thinking. The Free Officers understood that strategically speaking, getting the British out of Sudan was more important than maintaining some sort of unity of the Nile valley—especially if that unity would be enforced against substantial section of Sudanese society. As a result, the new Egyptian leadership lobbied the Sudanese to support a transition plan toward either full independence or some sort of union with Egypt. Afraid that opposing the plan would play into Egyptian hands, the British accepted (S.abr¯ı 1982). This timetable scheduled elections for 1953, followed by a short transitional period in which positions which were held by British or Egyptians should be given to Sudanese to create a neutral atmosphere for the Sudanese to freely decide their fate: full Sudanese independence or unity with Egypt. The elections were won by the NUP under Ismail al-Azhari. The British were convinced that now they had lost Sudan to Egypt. But the unionists, as reflection of internal Egyptian developments, opted for full independence (Mihatsch 2014: 86–87), which went into effect on January 1, 1956—only three years, five months, and nine days after the Free Officers revolution in Cairo. As can be seen, decolonization in Sudan happened not because of the overwhelming pressure of the nationalist movement, but because the two colonial powers drove each other toward the tipping point. From the perspective of the Egyptians, an independent Sudan was better than a Sudan under British occupation, and equally for the British, an independent Sudan was better than union with Egypt. This created a force where

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both co-domini were interested to push toward independence to preempt the other co-dominus. As a result, independence happened much faster than any of the participants had expected. The quick transition to independence meant that the Sudanese nationalist movement was never forced to unify. At the same time, the support of the British and the Egyptians for different parts of the nationalist movement reinforced the bifurcated nature of the movement, analyzed in more detail in the next section.

Divided Elite As discussed in the previous section, the Sudanese nationalist movement was divided into the Umma Party and the NUP. The division of the two parties mirrored the division of the Khatmiyya Sufi brotherhood and the Ansar, and their two sheikhs Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani and Sayyid Abdelrahman al-Mahdi. When Sayyid Abdelrahman’s father had originally declared himself Mahdi, a large number of smaller Sufi brotherhoods in Sudan recognized him as such. The Khatmiyya leadership did not, and went into exile in Egypt, where Ali al-Mirghani grew up. Meanwhile, the mosques of the Khatmiyya in Sudan were destroyed by the Ansar. As a result, when the British reconquered Sudan the Khatmiyya was treated with a certain amount of privilege. It is therefore not surprising that the movements and their leaders disliked and distrusted each other (Ibrahim 2004; Mohammed 1988). This division translated into ideological and strategical questions. Sayyid Abdelrahman had only been able to rebuild his father’s movement with the permission of the British. He therefore was careful to act within the political framework defined by the administration and refused the more radical approach of the younger graduates. But Abdelrahman’s relationship to Britain went deeper than mere strategic calculations. He had a certain respect for the British system, demonstrated by the fact that he imagined himself to become some sort of King of Sudan, akin to the British monarch. Furthermore, he sent his grandson Sadiq to study in Oxford. At the same time, the Mahdi had thrown out the OttomanEgyptian administration, an act the Ansar later increasingly redefined as a proto-nationalist act. Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani on the other hand grew up in Egypt and had a close relation to Egypt and the Egyptian monarchy. The fact how deep the distrust and division between these factions indeed were was demonstrated when on November 17, 1958, the

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Umma Prime Minister Abdallah Khalil handed power to General Ibrahim Abboud. What preceded this decision was a staccato of events and tensions across the Middle East. In just over two years, the region witnessed the Suez crisis, a border crisis between Sudan and Egypt, the unification of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic (UAR), the Eisenhower doctrine, its implementation in the Operation Blue Bat in Lebanon, and a coup in Iraq. At the same time, Khalil attempted to negotiate an aid agreement with the Americans and his government multiple times nearly collapsed over the issue, while rumors of Egyptian conspiracies and leaflets with death threats were circulating in Khartoum. Eventually, Khalil concluded that the opposition was planning to conspire with Nasser to destroy Sudanese sovereignty and join the UAR. Accordingly, handing power to the army seemed the reasonable solution (Mihatsch 2021). But the divisions within the elite went beyond the two factions expressed in the Umma and the NUP. The two parties were themselves divided. The NUP broke apart only months after independence, with Sayyid Ali distrusting the influence of Azhari and forming his own People’s Democratic Party. Prior to 1952, the unionists were a number of loosely organized and institutionalized peer groups, which all stood for some sort of union with Egypt and were all opposed to Sayyid Abdalrahman al-Mahdi. Because they boycotted the colonial institutions, they had no need to formalize their structures, and eventually did so only under Egyptian pressure. Their common cause, union with Egypt, came to an end when a government under their leadership declared full independence. The Umma Party on the other hand was able to maintain internal coherence slightly longer thanks to the central role of Sayyid Abdalrahman. But after his death in 1959, and shortly after the death of his son Siddiq in 1961, the leadership of the Ansar went to Imam alHadi, Siddiq’s brother, while Siddiq’s son Sadiq competed with his uncle over the political leadership of the Umma Party. The two figures represented two central aspects of the Umma Party: the revolutionary nature of the Mahdi’s movement was expressed by Sadiq, while Hadi represented the reactionary protection of the interests of Ansar notables which emerged during the neo-mahdist renaissance of Sayyid Abdulrahman. The conflict between the two men escalated violently to the point that members of Hadi’s party wing attacked an event of Sadiq’s party wing

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and injured Sadiq’s right-hand man Abdallah Nuqdallah (Abdel Salam 1979: 233–281). In both parties, the cleavage centered around the question of how power was legitimized. Azhari and the Ashiqqa in the NUP, as well as Sadiq and allies such as Nuqdallah, believed that power should be the result of qualification and achievement. They believed that religion should only have a limited role in politics. During the 1958 elections, the NUP went as far as to promote the slogan “la qadasah fi al-siyasah!”, which means “no holiness in politics” (Niblock 1987: 210). Sayyid Ali and Imam al-Hadi on the other hand believed that their position and influence on politics were legitimized through their religious role. An additional division within the elite was expressed by the communist and Islamist movements. Admittedly, the two parties only fully formed after the revolution in 1964, but the election results of 1965 were nevertheless telling. Of fifteen graduates’ seats, which were additional seats in parliament elected on a proportional basis by all Sudanese with a secondary school degree, eleven went to the communists, two to the Islamists, and another two to the NUP. This showed clearly that the educated Sudanese elite did not feel represented by the original nationalist parties Umma, PDP, or NUP. After Sudan’s independence, the elite was fractured into a multiplicity of splinter groups. These groups were often able to compromise on individual issues and sometimes able to cooperate for longer periods when parties re-merged or coalitions were created. This happened especially when necessary against specific actors who appeared to become too powerful, like Azhari in the late 50s, or Sadiq al-Mahdi in the late 60s, or when banning the communist party in the mid-60s. But they were not able to agree on a larger vision for the country. If we consider the nation as a collective narrative about the past, present, and future, it would be difficult to imagine a nationalist movement more at odds about the nation, than the Sudanese one. The chapter will return to this question in the final section, after discussing the regional dimension of this development.

Forgotten Periphery The previous sections demonstrate how Sudan shifted extremely quickly toward independence, and therefore, the elite failed to integrate as one nationalist movement. It is unsurprising that the elite in Khartoum also

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failed to reach out from the center to the peripheries. This challenge was partially created by the colonial state, particularly when it comes to southern Sudan, but it also went beyond that. In southern Sudan, the British applied a separate “Southern Policy” which limited interaction between the south and the rest of the country, promoted Christianization (with limited success), and English as language in schools. The first institution, the Advisory Council for the Northern Sudan, which allowed Sudanese in 1944 to participate in their own administration, explicitly excluded the South. Only with the creation of the elected Legislative Assembly in 1948, the southern Sudan started to participate in national affairs. In the run-up to independence, Southerners opted for full independence of Sudan from Egypt and Britain, but in a region with only few educated leaders, which were isolated for decades from the northern debates, it remained questionable who should or indeed could represent the region. As a result of the low number of trained southerners, during the Sudanization process, that is when positions in the administration which were held by British were given to Sudanese, only a few of these were given to southerners and as a result they felt that they exchanged one group of foreign rulers for another. This was followed soon after by the Torit mutiny in August 1955. Torit is often seen as the beginning of the civil war, even if violence mostly died down. Southern politicians were eventually convinced to vote in parliament for independence with the promise that a federal structure for Sudan would be duly considered. After independence, this promise was quickly forgotten (Howell 1978: 103–181). It was under the military dictatorship of Ibrahim Abboud that the conflict in the south escalated, after Abboud expelled foreign missionaries, moved the day of rest from Sunday to Friday, and started an Arabization and Islamization campaign. But even then, not all was lost. The first generation of young, well-educated southern Sudanese politicians made their mark after the revolution in 1964. Now would have been the moment for the northerners to reach out. As the protestors formed the so-called Professional Front, the southerners formed the Southern Front. Suddenly, a negotiated solution between north and south seemed possible. Unfortunately, the unity of the southerners did not last. William Deng who returned to Sudan from exile declared himself to be the true leader of the Sudan African National Union (SANU), the southern Sudanese

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movement in exile, and aimed to replace the Southern Front. The division between William Deng and the leaders of the Southern Front allowed the northern politicians to play them off against each other. They welcomed Deng as the true leader of the south and accused the Front of working with the rebels active in the southern provinces. But similar to the southerners, the northern politicians too were strongly divided, as discussed in the previous section, and as a result would not have been able to offer a true compromise to the southerners. After some political maneuvering, the various southern groups, including SANU in exile, met with the northern politicians for the socalled Round-Table Conference in Khartoum. The divisions among the southerners, which were intentionally exacerbated by the northerners, prevented the southerners from exerting true pressure. This however did not lead to a solution of the problem in line with a northern Sudanese vision, but just deferred the problem by continuing the status quo. In addition to demonstrating the divisions of the southerners, the conference revealed the ignorance of the northerners regarding the south and the views and demands of the southerners.2 The democratic leaders of northern Sudan felt betrayed by the result of the roundtable conference. They felt that the bad relationship between the north and the south was due to the army and that they had overthrown the army also in the name of the south. They had believed that, with the end of Abboud, it would be easy to solve the remaining disputes. As a result, when in 1965 Muhammed Ahmed Mahjoub came to power, he decided to solve the problem of the southern insurgency militarily. Yassir Arman compared the two in a discussion: “The islamization and arabization strategies of Abboud were a picnic compared to what was going to come later on.”3 But not only in the south Sudanization was seen as a replacement of one group of outsiders by another. The same was true for the peripheries in the north, like the Nuba Mountains and the eastern Sudan region inhabited by the Beja people. Accordingly, the 1960s saw the emergence of the Beja Congress and the General Union of the Nuba Mountains (GUN) (Mihatsch, forthcoming). In the 1950s, politicians 2 The various opening speeches given at the roundtable conference give a clear impression of this. They are reproduced in: ACR, A/85/17 (Sudan Informazioni, Round-Table Conference on the Southern Sudan). 3 Yassir Arman, Personal Discussion (Khartoum, 7 April 2010).

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elected from the peripheries to the national parliament were mostly candidates exported by the national parties from the capital to the peripheries. The regional movements now tried to get residents of their regions to be elected, to be able to present the local needs on a national stage. Their demands were not yet as developed as the demands of the southern parties, and cooperation between the northern regional movements and the southern parties was not always straight forward, but it was a clear demonstration that the divisions in Sudan were not merely north versus south. The elite in Khartoum was not entirely ignorant of the urgency and scope of the national cleavages. The editor of al-Ayam, Bashir Muhammad Said believed that without the implementation of federalism, Sudan might face “dismantlement, division and destruction.”4 He argued that the national parties should take the topic of local governance more seriously and should consider decentralization.5 However, Said was fully aware that the national parties were thinking mostly strategically in relation to electoral competition with the Beja Congress and GUN. They remained largely unwilling or unable to engage with the roots of why these parties emerged in the first place.6 Ironically, the appearance of the regional parties possibly contributed to the opposite. Faced with a challenge by “African” Sudanese movement in both the south and the north, some in the Khartoum elite started to take increasing recourse to their Arabness and a pan-Arab ideology. But such a move, while it might have had also an ideological component, was as much due to practical concerns of coalition building. The more parties were represented in the Khartoum parliament, and the more seats in the north were lost by the supposed big national parties Umma and NUP, the more difficult it became for these parties to form anything resembling a stable coalition. Accordingly, the stronger the regional demands became, the more difficult it became to formulate a national vision or a national social contract, as detailed further in the following section.

4 Baš¯ır Muhammad Sa¯ıd, Al- Ay¯ am, March 10, 1965, p. 3. . 5 Baš¯ır Muhammad Sa¯ıd, Al- Ay¯ am, May 20, 1965, p. 3. . 6 Baš¯ır Muhammad Sa¯ıd, Al- Ay¯ am, July 26, 1956, p. 3. .

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Elusive Sudanese Nationalism during the earlier colonial period, as expressed in the White Flag League aimed at unity with Egypt. Accordingly, they did not use a term of common belonging. “Sudani” or Sudanese at this time simply meant “black.” As Sharkey showed, the term Sudanese originally described black Muslims of slave origin in northern Sudan. She made the assumption that it was probably the British who after 1919 first used the term Sudanese to distinguish between people born in Sudan and people born in Egypt. By the late 1920s and 1930s, the term was finally picked up by some members of the reading societies as a label to express their nationalism (Sharkey 2003: 31–34). This is well shown by a story which NUP politician Khidr Hamad told in his autobiography; the British administration required people to declare their nationality when enrolling in schools and again when taking up positions within the administration. By nationality, they meant the tribal origin, such as Jaali Arab, one of the Sudanese Arab tribes. Hamad wanted his nationality to be registered as Sudanese instead, an idea many older Sudanese would have rejected considering the negative connotations of the term. The problem of this new “Sudaneseness” was that it understood Sudanese as a variation of Arab, with certain African characteristics (Osman 1989: 136–141). Additionally, nationalism was inherently connected to education, as a result of the Graduates’ Congress being the first nationalist institution in the country. That meant that the label Sudanese described primarily educated Arabs and Arabic speaking elites in the center, but did not include the vast majority of peoples in the periphery. With the co-domini pushing each other toward independence, there was no need for a more inclusive nationalism. Moreover, there simply was not enough time. The rapid decolonization heralded by the Free Officers revolution in July 1952 and completed in January 1956 did barely leave the time for bare procedural questions. Writing a constitution, the Sudanese would have been forced to come to terms with the cleavages in their society and find solutions how to bridge the gap between different conceptions of the nation. Should Sudan be a unitary or a federal state? What role should religion play in the constitution? Should the system of government be parliamentary or presidential? Trying to answer these questions, different parts of society would have needed to formulate their ideas of the nation and the state, and then to compromise with other groups. However, this process never happened.

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In 1956, due to the hurried process of decolonization, Sudan became independent with a transitional constitution, which was a mere: temporary arrangement which was hurriedly contrived at the eleventh hour (...) It was the intention of its makers to replace it, at an early date, with a permanent constitution which would adequately reflect the character, the needs, and the aspirations of the Sudan and the Sudanese. (Abdel-Rahim 1969: 226–227)

In the following years, a constitution was drafted by a special committee, which eventually was presented in 1958, but never debated by parliament. It was only the Abboud regime which actually replaced the transitional constitution to legalize and legitimize its own hold of power. This constitution was however once again scrapped after the popular uprising in 1964, with the transitional constitution coming back. The leaders during the second democratic period once again did not prioritize the constitutional question. A new constitutional commission only met by February 1967 and once again, drafts by the commission were never discussed in parliament until the Numeiri coup d’état in 1969. The quick decolonization led to a divided national movement, which lacked a shared experience which would have allowed them to formulate a common vision of Sudan and the Sudanese. As a result, the elite in the center was divided among the Umma and the NUP/PDP, with each party being internally divided over questions of legitimacy and the source of power. Additionally, vast sections of the educated elites in the center did not choose any of these parties or party factions, but opted for one of the two ideological movements, representing a vastly different conception of Sudan and a future project for the state and nation. At the same time, the southerners, the Beja, Nuba, and others, did not feel represented by any of these parties and formed their own regional parties. The following years of political meandering did not create the basis for a shared experience, but rather the opposite, deepened political cleavages and personal distrust. The fact that none of the post-independence governments attempted to solve the constitutional deadlock was therefore not really a sign of bad priorities but resulting from the knowledge that no government coalition would have survived the concrete discussion of the pertinent constitutional questions. The Sudan is therefore not only an extreme example of a nationalist movement lacking a concept of

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nation, but the very make-up of the nationalist movement inhibited the emergence of such a concept after Sudanese independence. To a degree, this deadlock was broken toward the end of the Numeiri period with the introduction of Islamist policies, but the very introduction of these policies led to a renewed civil war in the south. For John Garang and the SPLA, the aim was a new Sudan, a nation concept different from the one proposed by the Islamists. Failing that, they opted for the independence of the south. This independence superficially appears to have made the path toward a Sudanese nation easier. But even with Sudan being only a rump state, the diversity of the country remains enormous, and for many residents of the peripheries, their shared experience is the experience of suffering at the hands of the center.

Conclusion This chapter argued that the specific structure of the condominium and the hurried independence, the elite was not forced to overcome its internal divisions or its differences with the peoples in the periphery, to be successful. Being divided, they failed to formulate a collective idea of the nation and as a result failed to compromise on a constitution. What can be observed is not merely an “official nationalism,” as Larmer and Lecocq (2018: 902) termed it being challenged by other nationalism from below, but more so the presence of competing official nationalisms. These official nationalisms were then additionally challenged from alternative nationalism from below. Neither the colonial, nor the post-colonial experience formed the basis for a collective narrative. Renan’s nation (1990) built on a collective understanding of the past, present, and future, based most strongly on an experience of shared suffering, could not emerge as the different groups, rather than suffering collectively, experienced suffering at the hands of each other; be it the Khatmiyya being forced into exile by the Mahdi before the condominium, be it the stark division between the unionists and the groups supporting full independence during the late condominium, or be it the suffering of the peripheries due to underdevelopment and military interventions at the hands of the elites in Khartoum after independence. It is this failure rooted in the 1950s and 1960s which continues to reverberate on Sudanese politics until today, even after South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Ironically, South Sudan itself is also the victim

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of a failed nation-building process (Mihatsch 2011). In terms of a more theoretical perspective, the Sudanese case demonstrates that it might be worthwhile to differentiate more strongly between nationalist movements with a true national core and mere anti-colonial movements which fail to formulate a nation concept, as in Sudan or in countries such as Libya as discussed elsewhere in this volume.

References Abdel-Rahim, Muddathir. 1969. Imperialism and Nationalism in the Sudan: A Study in Constitutional and Political Development, 1899–1956. Oxford Studies in African Affairs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Abdel Salam, El FatihAbdullahi. 1979. The Umma Party 1945–1969. MA, University of Khartoum. Beshir, Mohamed Omer. 1974. Revolution and Nationalism in the Sudan. New York: Barnes & Noble Books. Collins, Robert. 1972. The Sudan Political Service; A Portrait of the ‘Imperialists.’ African Affairs 71 (284): 293–303. Currie, James. 1935. The Educational Experiment in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1900–33. Part II. Journal of the Royal African Society 34 (134): 41–59. Daly, M.W. 1983. The Development of the Governor-Generalship of the Sudan, 1899–1934. The Journal of African History 24 (1): 77–96. Flint, Julie, and Alexander de Waal. 2008. Darfur: A New History of a Long War. Rev. and Updated ed. African Arguments. London and New York: Zed Books. at, Al-H al Wa M¯ a Hid.r H . amad. 1980. Mudakir¯ . araka al-Wat.aniyah, Al- Istiql¯ ˘ Ba ad-Ha. Khartoum.¯ Howell, J. 1978. Political Leadership and Organisation in the Southern Sudan. PhD, University of Reading. an al-Mahd¯ı: A Study of Ibrahim, Hassan Ahmed. 2004. Sayyid ‘Abd Al-Rah.m¯ Neo-Mahd¯ısm in the Sudan, 1899–1956. Islam in Africa, v. 4. Boston: Brill. James, Wendy. 2007. War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Johnson, Douglas Hamilton. 2011. The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Peace or Truce. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. Larmer, Miles, and Baz Lecocq. 2018. Historicising Nationalism in Africa. Nations and Nationalism 24 (4): 893–917. Mihatsch, Moritz Anselm. 2011. Sudanese Independencies, 1956 and 2011. SSSUK Bulletin 44 (July): 15–31. Mihatsch, Moritz Anselm. 2014. Stories of a Failed Nation; Sudanese Politics 1945–69. PhD, University of Oxford.

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Mihatsch, Moritz Anselm. 2021. Dependence After Independence: Sudan’s Bounded Sovereignty 1956–1958. Journal of Eastern African Studies 15 (2): 236–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2021.1904705. Mihatsch, Moritz Anselm. forthcoming. The Liberation from Fear: Regional Mobilization in Sudan After the 1964 Revolution. In Sudan, 1504–2019: From Social History to Politics. Mohammed, D.J. 1988. The Contribution of Sayed Ali Al-Mirghani, of the Khatmiyya, to the Political Evolution of the Sudan, 1884–1968. PhD, University of Exeter. Niblock, Tim. 1987. Class and Power in Sudan: The Dynamics of Sudanese Politics, 1898–1985. Albany: State University of New York Press. Osman, Abdelwahab A.M. 1989. The Political and Ideological Development of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, 1945–1986. PhD, University of Reading. Renan, Ernest. 1990. What Is a Nation? In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 8–22. London and New York: Routledge. u al-Faq¯ar. 1982. Sovereignty for Sudan. London: Ithaca Press. S.abr¯ı, H . usayn Dh¯ Sconyers, David. 1987. Servant or Saboteur? The Sudan Political Service During the Crucial Decade: 1946–1956. Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 14 (1): 42–51. Sharkey, Heather J. 2003. Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Colonialisms 3. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 6

Multiple Layers of Competing Nationalisms in Contemporary Ethiopia Jan Záhoˇrík and Ameyu Godesso

Introduction Recent news are coming from Ethiopia in regard to the war in Tigray region and other conflict zones in other regions, like Amhara, Benishangul-Gumuz, Konso or Oromia. These trends are not new but only show a fragile socio-political environment whose roots go back deep to the history of modern Ethiopian state and the process of nationbuilding. Unlike other African countries, Ethiopia does not have a direct experience with European colonialism with the exception of a short-lived Italian colonialism. Despite this, since the 1960s we can observe growing nationalist tendencies inside Ethiopia as well as an intensified process

J. Záhoˇrík (B) Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] A. Godesso College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_6

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of nation-building which has been redefined throughout the last three regimes (Imperial—until 1974; Marxist—until 1991; and Federal—since 1991). A lot has been written on the nationalism in Ethiopia both from the perspective of the state and various ethnic groups inside Ethiopia. In last three decades, we can observe at least three different competing nationalist projects—the Oromo, Amhara and Tigray nationalism, with various degrees of overlap with the official state nationalism as being reproduced by all above-mentioned regimes. In this chapter, we first discuss the background of the official state nationalism, which we call Pan-Ethiopianism. Then, we analyse the root cause of the birth and growth of the so-called ethnonationalism, or nationalist projects which were contrary to the official state perspective. And last, we focus on current trends in Ethiopia which are changing the socio-political landscape and which redefine former nationalist projects. By this, we particularly mean the Tigray and Amhara nationalisms, currently on the rise and challenging the existing ethno-federal landscape which we discuss later in this chapter. More than in any other African country, primordialist and constructivist approaches to ethnicity have been debated in Ethiopia in last three decades, basically since the introduction of the ethnic federal system in which ethnic identity became instrumentalized as the main source of identity for everyone and both the government and diaspora nurtured this discourse on ethnicity since 1990s. Despite Ethiopia’s economic growth since the early twenty-first century, highly politicized ethnicity has been a significant drawback into socio-economic and political development since basically all major political and economic decisions have been made through “ethnic” lenses. Such a setting helped to create an atmosphere of division and mistrust, ethnic competition and rivalry since the ethnic identity has begun to be treated as a primordial entity, and many people do believe that ethnic groups do have certain specific features which distinguish them from other ethnic groups. For several decades, it was a norm that people of Tigrayan origin were occupying the major positions in the military forces, business and politics. In Ethiopia, the ethnic favouritism helped the ethnic consciousness to emerge, and the elites played a significant role in that process. Historical symbols began to be revived and reused for political purposes. Imperial figures such as the Emperor Menelik II began to be seen as ruthless dictators and murderers, and the position of Lij Eyasu began to be restored as someone who had an intention to truly modernize Ethiopia and come

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up with elements of equality and equity among various social, ethnic and religious groups. Primordial elements of ethnic identity such as language, common descent and ancestral linkage have been important especially for educated elites in the diaspora or in Ethiopia (e.g. Schlee 2003). This type of discourse can be well observed on elitist debates on to whom Addis Ababa belongs (Benti 2009), as well as a centre/periphery debates which for a long time played a central role in Ethiopian historiography (Bach 2016). The Ethiopian political system is based on the fact that all “sovereign power resides in the Nations, Nationalities and Peoples” (The Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 1995, 79), but this would mean that individuals are not recognized without their ethnic origin which, as generally less accented but rightly pointed out by some, may contradict with the fundamentals of human rights provisions of the same constitution declaring inviolable and inalienable human rights and freedoms. Politicized ethnicity can be, as we argue in this chapter, one of the major obstacles to peace and development as it is taken as a primordial entity. Not only the government, but the diaspora as well promote such a discourse which in turn contributes to failed social and political dialogue. Let us have a closer look at what the role of elites and historical symbols is in the process of nationalism awakening in Ethiopia. As some argue, the Oromo nationalism or Pan-Ethiopian nationalism, or any other nationalism in Ethiopia, would rather get solidified in the era of globalization as transnationalism and digital technologies help to (re)create bonds and gather a larger number of people to a common cause (Yusuf 2009). We have written on the role of the diaspora on the politics in Ethiopia elsewhere (Záhoˇrík and Godesso 2022), so we would not put emphasis on transnational links in this chapter but rather focus on some major trends that keep coming up in Ethiopia in regard to nationalism.

Pan-Ethiopianism The Ethiopian Empire whose existence lasted until 1974 began to emerge since 1855 after Tewodros II became an Emperor. Particularly since the times of Menelik II (1889–1913), Ethiopia reached more or less the shape it has now and its territory enlarged significantly. Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Emperor ruling the country from 1930 to 1974, presented himself as a modernizer who wanted to make Ethiopia a significant and respected entity on the map Africa and the world. The first step

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towards this was done in 1923 when Ethiopia became a member of the League of Nations and Ras Teferi Mekonnin (in 1930 inaugurated as the Emperor Haile Selassie) began to set up links to various European countries such as Belgium, Sweden, Czechoslovakia and others, beside already existing connections with the three great powers, France, Great Britain and Italy on whom Ethiopia was economically dependent. In 1931, the first Ethiopian constitution came into being and the Ethiopian Empire codified three key pillars of the state and the nation: the Emperor, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Amharic language and culture (The Constitution 1931). Also, a few Eritrean educated elites identified themselves with Ethiopia during the Italian occupation of Eritrea (Abbay 2010: 273). The constitution was revised in 1955 and strengthened the unity of the nation based on these pillars while denying the cultural diversity and heterogeneity of its many peoples (The Constitution 1955). When in 1952, Ethiopia formed a federation with Eritrea, and in 1962 turned into a unitary state due to a highly centralized nature of the Ethiopian system, the idea of Pan-Ethiopian unity began to shake with the outbreak of the Eritrean War for independence and the rise of the Eritrean secessionism labelled as Eritreanism (Abbay 2010), which lasted until 1991, and in 1993, Eritrea officially gained independence (Iyob 1997). Since the moment of abolishment of the federation, the Eritrean resistance towards the unitary state and the whole project of Pan-Ethiopianism grew from a relatively limited and narrow and predominantly Islamic to widerange, inter-religious and well-organized mass movement (Kyrow 1994: 232–233). Haile Selassie’s policies towards building a nation were based on a grand idea of homogenization under the supremacy of the ruling elite, and therefore bringing diverse people together under the umbrella of Amharic culture. This period is labelled either as Amharization (or Amharanization) or Ethiopianization and up to this day causes tensions among political activists and scholars. Fake nationalism. Haile Selassie set up some new elements in Ethiopian politics and contributed by his vision to the fact that Ethiopia became, particularly among Afro-American and West African intellectuals taken as a country of African purity, independence and freedom. Although the Emperor listened to the modernizing intellectuals, centralizing nature of the state and nation remained the same since the proclamation of the first Constitution in 1931 (Záhoˇrík 2013: 52–53).

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The Pan-Ethiopian nationalism which was a product of the Imperial regime under Haile Selassie created space for some long-term trends in the so-called permanent popular nationalism, as for instance Gebrewold (2009) discusses which can be manifested in various ways, one of them being sport or athletics in particular. Another aspect of this can be also religion, given the fact that Ethiopia has been traditionally perceived as an Orthodox Christian country for which religion constitutes the basis of the state. What, on the other hand, the nation-building project underestimated was the enormous socio-economic gap between the ruling elite and an absolute majority of the country. Not only was 95% of the population illiterate in the times of the 1974 revolution, which was the highest illiteracy rate in Africa, but there existed basically no middle class as a general leader of economic growth. Combined with the inability of the Ethiopian state to redistribute wealth into the region regularly affected by repeated famines, social unrest was becoming more of a necessity throughout the 1960s and together with it, the concept of nation-building began to shake. In the 1960s, Pan-Ethiopian nationalism was confronted by Haile Selassie University (now, Addis Ababa University) students. The students did not want to take the modern Ethiopian state as a nation for granted. They started to question the nature of the nationalism that the Ethiopian state had built on. One of the leading figures in a revolutionary student movement, Wallelign Mekonnen published a short essay titled “On the questions of nationalities in Ethiopia” in 1969 where he described PanEthiopian nationalism as “Fake Ethiopian Nationalism” (Kefale 2013: 28). His essay is by many taken as the beginning of a new era of challenging the unity of the Ethiopian state and alleged homogeneity of the Ethiopian nation. For him, this fake Ethiopian nationalism characterized a political, social and economic system that promoted the interests of the Amhara, to a certain extent that of the Tigray groups and an Ethiopia Orthodox church by religion. He then proposed the end of this fake nationalism through revolutionary armed struggle. The issue of ethnicities and national unification was so sensitive to authorities that students’ theses related to regional groupings were not accessible to others and researchers were not expected to become involved in debates that would in one way or another doubt about the national unity of Ethiopia, designed by the ruling elite. The national unity was taken by the court as something eternal and unshakable (Triulzi 1983: 112). Aside

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from these developments in the university, the Pan-Ethiopian nationalism was already facing difficulties from intellectual elite class. The elite classes mainly from the Eritrean, Oromo and Tigrayan origin had instituted discourses like “liberation” and “self-determination” in the Ethiopian body politics. Thus, the Ethiopian student movement spearheaded by the intelligentsia, among other things, contributed to the birth and growth of ethnonationalism. On the other hand, while the Haile Selassie era gave rise to various nationalist projects inside the country, the question remained who represented the Ethiopian nation, and what to be an Ethiopian meant. This is correlated with the issue of the Amhara identity which is still in question these days, particularly due to the rise of the so-called Amhara nationalism in regard to the regime change in Ethiopia and the war in Tigray. According to various authors, like e.g. Mackonen Michael, many people who are labelled by outsiders as Amhara,refer to themselves as Ethiopians, or they identify themselves with the province, like Gojjame from the province Gojjam. The Amharic-speaking Shoans consider themselves closer to non-Amharic-speaking Shoans than to a “supra-ethnic group” comprised of multiple subgroups (Mackonen 2008: 4–393). Pan-Ethiopianism is a nationalist project which uses certain historical symbols and is “carved out of the dominant discourse of unifying Ethiopia under a monarchy (Jemal 2020: 208)”, and later on in a certain sense reproduced by the Marxist Derg regime which helped to give birth to multiple ethnonationalist projects, or as Bekri Jemal puts it, “Ethiopianism” (Jemal 2020: 208).

Ethnonationalism from the Derg to EPRDF The reaction towards centralizing nature of the Ethiopian state under Haile Selassie was obvious. First of all, the Eritrean War for independence created a space for other ethnic and regional movements to emerge, such as the Oromo with the creation of the Macha and Tulama Association (MTA) in 1960s which paved the way to setting up the Oromo Liberation Front in 1973 after the MTA was closed by the Imperial regime in 1968. The Ethiopian student movement that found its climax in the late 1960s served as a pretext not only to the 1974 revolution but primarily to the creation of ethnic liberation fronts throughout the 1970s and 1980s which in its majority were influenced by Marxism-Leninism but were also

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fighting against the Derg regime due to its failure to address ethnonational demands for emancipation and due to its oppressive and centralizing nature. Subsequent era of the Derg which was based on a military rule mixed with cherry-picked Marxist principles of self-determination of nations led to increased nationalist sentiments in the regions. The government reacted, besides other things, by reshaping the country into twenty-four administrative units in order to defuse nationalist movements (Keller 1995: 242). The socialist constitution from 1987 in its article 2 stated that Ethiopia was a “unitary state in which all nationalities live in equality”, and that Ethiopia “shall ensure the quality of nationalities, combat chauvinism and narrow nationalism, and strengthen the unity of the working people of all nationalities” (The Constitution 1987). The Tigray and the Oromo nationalist movements, represented by their respective Liberation Fronts (TPLF and OLF), had to deal with different issues. Unlike the Tigrayan, the Oromo nationalist project aimed at creating a pan-Oromo entity from the very beginning up to this has had to deal with regional internal fragmentation caused by multiple factors including religion, external interference, as well as geographical and clan-based differences (Østebø and Tronvoll 2020). As Aalen puts it, the “concept of ethnic groups as objectively and externally identifiable, combined with the assumption that every citizen is an ethnic citizen, makes the Ethiopian system very different from other federal systems in the world” (Aalen 2011: 40). The system of ethnic federalism was centred around the rule of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a leading element of the EPRDF coalition, and gave little space for Oromo and Amhara nationalist visions to flourish. The effect of EPRDF-imposed self-determination of nations within united Ethiopia was what sometimes is labelled as a “prison of nationalities” (Fisher and Gebrewahd 2018). Large public support within Ethiopia for the war with neighbouring Eritrea was largely caused not so much by ethnic and national sentiments, but rather by the “centrality of territory in the conceptualization of statehood” in the region (Matshanda 2020),as well as by externalization of internal nation-building constraints in both Ethiopia and Eritrea (Steves 2003).

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Reshaping the Nationalist Landscape in Twenty-First Century The so-called Oromo and Amhara protests that began first in Oromia in 2015 and a year later were extended into Bahir Dar and Gonder marked the end of the ethnic federal landscape under the umbrella of the EPRDF that Ethiopia has been experiencing since the mid-1990s. Hundreds of killed, dozens of thousands of imprisoned and political parties dysfunctional, this all led to massive protests with a nationalist background that in turn forced the EPRDF to find a solution in electing an Oromo politician as a prime minister with a potential for completing reforms of monumental proportions (Weber 2018). Immediately after Abiy Ahmed came to power, the potential for the rise of ethnonationalist movements seemed to be limited as his response to previous almost thirty years of the EPRDF rule was liberation of political space, freedom of speech, opening Ethiopia towards a dialogue with a strong Ethiopian diaspora overseas as well as other regional and international actors. Loved by ones, loathed by the others, Abiy has been seen by many as a certain continuation of the previous EPRDF government out of which he was chosen to reshuffle the ruling arena and decrease the rage particularly in the Oromia region. The highest expectations obviously came from the Oromo people, particularly the youth, who brought Abiy to power by several years of protesting (Fakude 2019: 9–10), being dissatisfied with both the socio-economic situation and the ruling oligarchic system which turned elections and democratization into what some call an “electoral authoritarianism” (Abbink 2017). For a long time, ethnicity and ethnic aspiration of various Ethiopian groups (particularly the Oromo) were attempted to be supressed by the EPRDF regime, but together with Clapham we may agree that in Ethiopia the false assumption of the TPLF/EPRDF rooted in Marxism, that “ethnicity was no more than a superstructural phenomenon derived from economic exploitation, which could in turn be neutralized by representation and development, proved to be utterly inadequate” (Clapham 2017: 107). It has also been documented elsewhere that the identity issue during the federal set up widened and deepened the dividing lines (among others) between the Oromo and Somali people where lots of violent cases have been reported (Markakis 2011: 326). One of the key proponents of the Oromo nationalism, the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), does not fully speak about independence but

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some of the statements by its representatives are at least not far from that: “The aim of the Oromo struggle led by the OLF is only to gain back our country that was taken away from us by force. It is not, in any way, against the rights of any other people. The OLF believes that the Oromo people win the right to self-determination and open up a venue for other peoples to achieve the same rights. After winning the right to self-determination, the Oromo people will live side by side with its neighbours in peace, equality and respect. The OLF believes that peace and security in the region is possible only when oppressions of any sort are eliminated and peoples live together through mutual understanding, equality and respect for each other’s rights”.1 Throughout the years, other representatives have been trying to find correlation between the possible independence of Oromia and therefore the collapse of the so-called Ethiopian Empire with the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, although it seems that from a multitude of political, historical, international, social and religious reasons such a comparison is rather difficult. In our previous section, we have mentioned how ethnonationalism entered the Ethiopian body politics mainly spearheaded by the political elites of Oromo and Tigre. In what follows, we find an emerging elite group in the current competing nationalisms, the Amhara. Amhara has now begun to have a fresh currency in the competing nationalisms of the twenty-first century. Since Abiy rise to power in 2018, Amhara nationalism has been rising and became popular in the country and among some Ethiopians abroad. It should be noted that Amhara nationalism already started at least in 1992 when All Amhara People’s Organisation (AAPO) was founded by the late Prof. Asrat Woldeyes. During this time, Amhara nationalism got unprecedented negative reactions. The reactions were arising (still arise to some extent) out of the question of who an Amhara is. Whatever the reactions, Amhara nationalism resurfaced since 2015 and developed parallel with the Oromo protest, as “there has been an emerging Amhara activism and political mobilization of [Amhara] identity” (Tazebew 2021: 305). Amhara nationalism, however, clearly reached its height after the National Movement of Amhara (NaMA) was formed in June 2018. According to Tezera, NaMA constitutes “primarily a collective of like-minded townsfolk, with its rank and file members and supporters located among the lower and upper-middle-class town youth,

1 http://www.oromoliberationfront.org/Publications/OSvol10Art101.htm.

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teachers, bureaucrats, professionals and the diaspora” (Tazebew 2021: 305). Like other ethnonationalisms in Ethiopia, which were formed in the 1960s, NaMA is concerned with identity politics. How Amhara identity could be interpreted and applied now is difficult to discern. There are controversies related to the Amhara identity in contemporary Ethiopia. Siegfried Pausewang (2005), in the summary of his article “The Two-faced Amhara identity”, detailed the nature of Amhara identity and how the identity is subject to context. The fact is that “[t]he ethnic group of the Amhara, mostly a peasant population, is different from a mixed group of urban people coming from different ethnic backgrounds, who have adopted Amharic as a common language and identify themselves as Ethiopians” (Pausewang 2005: 286). We have already mentioned that Amhara nationalism has become popular after Abiy came to power. But on the other hand, Abiy’s Ethiopian-first nationalism, which is closer to some forms of Pan-Ethiopian nationalism in Ethiopia and the diaspora, has already threatened ethnonationalism and led to war with ethnonational forces, such as the TPLF and the OLF. We are not here interested in discussing how Abiy’s Ethiopian-first nationalism, Pan-Ethiopia nationalism and/or Amhara nationalism similar are, but how these forms of nationalism are dissimilar with ethnonationalism. In what follows, therefore, we try to explore how Ethiopia-first nationalism, Pan-Ethiopian nationalism (Ethiopia-first nationalism) in Ethiopia and the Diaspora are strikingly different from ethnonationalism.

Views on the Modern “Ethiopian State” The meaning of “Ethiopian state” is highly problematic, especially when we move from idealized aspects of Ethiopia, where consensus is not readily obtained, to realistic aspects. To discuss this, it is useful to make a distinction between the Pan-Ethiopian nationalism and ethnonationalism views on the Ethiopian state. Under the narratives of “Great Tradition”, Pan-Ethiopian nationalism extols Ethiopia’s past and future glories. These narratives are something unquestionably celebrated and with absolute loyalty. As Christopher Clapham put forth these narratives are built around imagining of Ethiopia not only as an old state of past but also with its future greatness (Clapham 1969), wars of independence and symbolized as a Christian state, whereas among the Christians, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo has held a dominant role (Pankhurst 1990; Jalata 2005).

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A foundational notion that shaped Ethiopia’s “national” identity and the nature of the Ethiopian state was “Exceptionalism”. Hence, Ethiopian nationalism is narrated largely based on exceptionalism (Finneran 2003). One of the exceptionalist narratives revolve around Ethiopia’s (Adwa) victory over the Italian colonial power. The other exceptionalist narrative is closely linked to the Kebra Negast “Glory of the Kings”, a collection of legends in the early fourteenth century related to the birth of Menelik I which associated the history and tradition of Ethiopia with a Biblical tradition going back to King Solomon and Queen of Sheba, known as Makeda. (Brooks 2000).Above all, state and religious symbolisms are seamlessly intertwined in the Ethiopian past and present. This was strongly the case for the unitary organizing principle that Menelik II (1889–1913) established, Haile Selassie (1930–1974) consolidated, and finally, the Derg (1974–1991) centralized. Unity, thus, is the peculiar narrative of Ethiopian nationalism. This nationalism in Ethiopia meant keeping a strong state of united people. That a united people would guard of its great nation from enemies and traitors. Put simply, “Unity” is built around “the common enemy”. These “enemies”, some external while many are seen as internal traitors working within the nation to destroy it, are apparently used as a unifying set of tactics and are inherent in the rhetoric of the Ethiopian body politics. [The issue of enemies has become the lowest common denominator throughout the Ethiopian history and has even continued to occupy much place in Abiy’s Ethiopia-First Nationalism.] Except for this, the narratives of Ethiopian nationalism have started to recede when ethnonationalist fronts took the helm of government in 1991. The collapse of the socialist Derg regime in 1991 and the arrival of EPRDF meant the replacement of a centralized unitary state with a decentralized ethnonational federal state, including the separation of state and religion (in principle). The ethnonational federalism introduced by the EPRDF was a huge blow for the Pan-Ethiopian in Ethiopia and abroad. The new political power elite (ethnonationalist) that worked to dispose of Derg and that continued to rule Ethiopia afterwards (in EPRDF) and the Ethiopianists stood sharply in contrast regarding how the modern Ethiopian should be seen. The ethnonationalists do not believe in the greatness of Ethiopia. They counter the “Great Tradition” focused rather on the country’s failure to develop and democratize (Marzagora 2017). On the other hand, Ethiopian nationalists, needless to say, believe in the

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greatness of Ethiopia, but consider the EPRDF government to be the cause of the “Ethiopian failure” (Gebrewold 2009). Ethnonationalism often sees unity with suspicion. From this perspective, Ethiopian nationalism is oblivious of the diversity and diverse interests that compose the actual “nation”, past and present. Ethiopian nationalism takes the Ethiopian state as a nation-state for granted. This is why this nationalism opposes the formation of state federation. Those nationalist Ethiopians, i.e. mainly Amhara elites who lost power to Tigrayan and urban elites (1991–2018), who oppose Eritrea’s independence and Ethiopian federal system arrangement, consider the EPRDF government a traitor of Ethiopian national identity and unity.These “National Identity” and “Unity” narratives are often seen by the ethnonationalists as a discourse that Ethiopian nationalists embrace and use to, implicitly or explicitly, deny or dismiss the country’s diversity, past and present. It is also considered as a denial of an ethnonational-based federal system of government. As noted above, a war of independence is a distinctive feature of Ethiopian nationalism. It stresses Ethiopia’s history as a non-colonized nation. Gebrewold noted, “[e]ven the non-Amhara or non-Tigrayan educated urban elites consider the fact that Ethiopia was never colonized as the core of Ethiopia’s national identity” (Gebrewold 2009: 82). This seems, however, a general argument. For many ethnonationalists and their educated elites in Ethiopia, it is hard to believe that Ethiopian history is not exclusively a non-colonial history. It has been widely argued internal colonialism characterizes Ethiopian history, and that the Amhara or the Tigrayans were the colonizers of the rest of Ethiopia (Jalata 2005). Asafa goes on to say that “…the Ethiopian state was formed by the alliance of Abyssinian (Amhara-Tigray) colonialism and European imperialism” (Jalata 2005: 80). With the dissolution of EPRDF, and the formation of a new party called, Prosperity Party (PP)—established by Abiy Ahmed in December 2019—Ethiopianism is likely to resurface in the Ethiopian political discourse. Ethnonationalists argue that the merger of EPRDF into a countrywide party is part of Abiy’s general policy of distancing the country’s politics from ethnic federalism. The political elites in the Prosperity Party and alike make the narratives that for an Ethiopian state to return to its glorious past and unity though, promoting one unified Ethiopian national identity. The animosity between the PP and TPLF eventually escalated into the Tigray War in November 2020.

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Conclusion The article has shown that nationalism in Ethiopia is best seen as both Pan-Ethiopian and ethnonationalism, of holding and claiming divergent ideas, most importantly about the formation of “Ethiopian state”. The former often has drawn its core of national ideology from memories of past glory, independence and victory over a former colonial power. The so-called ethnonationalism stands in sharp contrast to the ideology of the former one. It partly came as a result of centralizing tendencies of the Imperial, socialist as well as EPRDF governments created a space of “politics of grudge and revenge” which particularly the elites of various groups are reproducing (Jemal 2020: 214). Such a situation is a perfect ground for historical grievances, use and abuse of historical symbols, and terminology which keeps coming up as the new government of dr. Abiy Ahmed and his Prosperity Party is termed as “neo-neftegnya”, designation of an old feudal expansionist policy of the nineteenth century which many primarily Oromo representatives see as the main source of historical injustice (Ylönen and Meckelburg 2020: 146). Such a polarization goes through the diaspora discourse on ethnicity, history and the very nature of Ethiopia and its future shape. While those who identify themselves as Amharas are somehow linked with the history of the empire of the nineteenth century, particularly the Oromo diaspora uses various symbols of historical Empire as a proof of “Amhara chauvinism” (Mackonen 2008: 399). A constant clash between various historical interpretations, historical symbolism and myths, as well as the unity or diversity within the Ethiopian society, is a daily phenomenon characterizing Ethiopian politics.

References Aalen. Lovise. 2011. The Politics of Ethnicity in Ethiopia: Actors, Power and Mobilisation under Ethnic Federalism. Leiden: Brill. Abbay, Alemseged. 2010. Nationalism in Historic Ethiopia. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 16: 269–289. Abbink, Jon. 2017. Paradoxes of Electoral Authoritarianism: The 2015 Ethiopian Elections as Hegemonic Performance. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35 (3): 303–323. Bach, Jean-Nicolas. 2016. New trends, Old Views: The Ambivalent Centre/Periphery Paradigm in Ethiopian Studies. Proceedings of the International Conference on Ethiopian Studies 18, eds. Eloi

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Benti, Getahun. 2009. A Blind Without a Cane, A Nation Without a City. In Essays on Oromo Studies: Ethiopianist Discourse and Politically Engaged Scholarship. ed. Ezekiel Gebissa, 147–166. Trenton: Red Sea. Brooks, Miguel F. 2000. Kebra Nagas: The Glory of Kings. Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press. Clapham, Christopher. 1969. Haile-Selassie’s Government. London: Longman. Clapham, Christopher. 2017. The Horn of Africa: State Formation and Decay. London: Hurst. Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. 1995. https:// www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b5a84.html. 21 August. Fakude, Thembisa. 2019. Ethiopia—A New Dawn?. In Al-Jazeera. 26 August 2019. Finneran, Niall. 2003. The Persistence of Memory: Nationalism, Identity and the Represented Past: The Ethiopian Experience in a Global Context. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 3 (1): 21–37. Fisher, Jonathan, Meressa Tsehaye Gebrewahd. 2018. Game Over? Abiy Ahmed, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front and Ethiopia’s Political Crisis. African Affairs 118 (470): 194–206. Gebrewold, Belachew. 2009. Ethiopian Nationalism: An Ideology to Transcend All Odds. Africa Spectrum 44 (1): 79–97. Iyob, Ruth. 1997. The Eritrean War for Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jalata, Asafa. 2005. State Terrorism and Globalization: The Cases of Ethiopia and Sudan. In Sociology Publications and Other Works. https://trace.tennes see.edu/utk_socopubs/86, accessed on 12 July 2021. Jemal, Bekri M. 2020. The Depoliticisation of Two Competing Nationalisms and the Introduction of Democratic Meritopianism as a Possible Way Out for Ethiopia. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 38 (2): 205–220. Kefale, Asnake. 2013. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Ethiopia: A Comparative Regional Study. New York: Routledge. Keller, Edmond J. 1995. Revolutionary Ethiopia. Bloomington: From Empire to People’s Republic Indiana University Press. Kyrow, Alexander. 1994. Ethnic Factors in Post-Mengistu Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in Change: Peaantry, Nationalism and Democracy, eds. Abebe Zegeye and Siegfried Pausewang, 231–241. London: British Academic Press. Marzagora, Sara. 2017. History in Twentieth-century Ethiopia: The ‘Great Tradition’ and the Counter-Histories of National Failure. Journal of African History 58 (3): 425–444. Matshanda, NamhlaThando. 2020. Ethiopian Reforms and the Resolution of Uncertainty in the Horn of Africa State System. South African Journal of International Affairs 27 (1): 25–42. Mackonen, Michael. 2008. Who is Amhara? African Identities 6 (4): 393–404.

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Markakis, John. 2011. Ethiopia. The Last Two Frontiers. Woodbridge: James Currey. Østebø, Terje, and Kjetill Tronvoll. 2020. Interpreting Contemporary Oromo Politics in Ethiopia: An Ethnographic Approach. Journal of Eastern African Studies 14 (4): 613–632. Pankhurst, Richard. 1990. Social History of Ethiopia. Institute of Ethiopian Studies: Addis Ababa University. Pausewang, Siegfried. 2005. The Two-Faced Amhara identity. In Scrinium I. Varia Aethiopica, ed. Denis Nosnitstin, 273–286. Sankt Peterburg: Byzantinorossica. Schlee, Günther. 2003. Redrawing the Map of the Horn: The Politics of Difference. Africa 7: 3–368. Steves, Franklin. 2003. Regime Change and War: Domestic Politics and the Escalation of the Ethiopia-Eritrea Conflict. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 16 (1): 119–133. Tazebew, Tezera. 2021. Amhara Nationalism: The Empire Strikes Back. African Affairs 120 (479): 297–313. The 1955 Revised Constitution of Ethiopia. In https://chilot.files.wordpress. com/2011/04/1955-rvised-costitution-of-ethiopia1.pdf The Constitution of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Review of Socialist Law, 14, 2, 1987. In https://chilot.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/ 1987-ethiopian-constitution1.pdf Triulzi, Alessandro. 1983. Competing Views of National Identity in Ethiopia. In Nationalism and Self-Determination in the Horn of Africa, ed. Ioan M. Lewis. London: Ithaca Press. Weber, Annette. 2018. Abiy Superstar—Reformer or Revolutionary?. SWP Comment 26. Ylönen, Aleksi, and Alexander B. Meckelburg. 2020. Ethiopia: Between Domestic Pressures and Regional Hegemony. In Africa’s Thorny Horn Searching for a New Balance in the Age of Pandemic, ed. Giovanni Carbone, 122–148. Milan: ISPI. Yusuf, Semir. 2009. Contending Nationalisms in a Transnational Era. The Case of Ethiopianist and Oromo Nationalisms. Journal of Asian and African Studies 44 (3): 299–318. Záhoˇrík, Jan. 2013. Ethnicity and Regime Change in Ethiopia. In: Regime Change and Succession Politics in Africa Five Decades of Misrule, ed. Maurice N. Amutabi and Shadrack W. Nasong’o, 48–58. New York: Routledge. Záhoˇrík, Jan, and Ameyu Godesso. 2022. The Ethiopian Diaspora and its Impact on Politics in Ethiopia. In Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa, ed. Bach, Jean-Nicolas et al. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.

CHAPTER 7

Somali and Libyan Transition Towards Independence Compared: The Struggle Between New and Former Elites Antonio M. Morone

Italy’s defeat in World War II and the loss of dominion over its African colonies, instead of leading to a rapid settlement of the former Italian colonies, gave rise to a long and complex political and diplomatic process that lasted until the late 1940s. Article 23 of the peace treaty signed in Paris on February 10, 1947, forced Italy to give up its colonies and hand over all decisional power to the four victorious powers (the United States, the USSR, France and the United Kingdom), which had a year from the treaty’s ratification to reach a solution; otherwise, the colonial dossier would pass to the UN, as in fact happened in September 1948. Despite the international obligations, the new Italian ruling class, backed by a broad consensus that also included the Leftish parties, set

A. M. Morone (B) Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_7

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about promoting an alternative political and diplomatic plan that would allow Italy to regain possession of its former colonies as quickly as possible. Italian policy ranged from a maximalist position, demanding a pure and simple return of the former possessions, to a subsequent compromise that was open to multiple solutions in terms of the territory or the type of sovereignty to be claimed. Italy struggled for its former colonies in “continuity with its previous foreign policy despite any internal upheavals” (Rossi 1980: 581) because oversea possessions were intended as a powerful means to regain Italian place on the international stage. Furthermore, the lack of any kind of purge of former fascist officers and the granting of a “never promulgated amnesty”, that suddenly stripped the Italians of any blame (Del Boca 1982: 17), were other reasons that can explain the deep commitment of the Ministry of Italian Africa (Ministero dell’Africa italiana, MAI) to act for Italian return in Africa and at the same time for its survival. The recovery of the colonies came to symbolically represent a pivotal issue related to the ‘homeland’ and ‘Italianness’ for the new Italian Republic. The bad side of the Italian colonialism was publicly removed and a positive storytelling of the recent colonial history was asserted by an Africanist lobby who grasped all together colonial top-ranking officers, politicians, intellectuals and former Italian settlers. On the contrary, many factors were in play to oppose the idea of a possible “return of the colonies to Italy,” starting from “the hostility of the Arabs, the strenuous opposition of Ethiopia and, above all, the lack of reliability of Italy until its political orientation and its place in the international system were clarified” (Novati and Paolo 2011: 360–361). Furthermore, the rising of nationalist movements in the Italian colonies under British occupation was revealing the agency of the African subjects and the commitment of certain newly established élites to content for the power not only with the colonialists but also with their African intermediaries. In fact, the colonial administration relied strongly upon the intermediation, service and consensus of some auxiliary groups as, for example, chiefs, soldiers, judges and lower-rank personnel. Italy had lost its status as a colonial power, experiencing this diminution of its international role as a vexation, an injustice, which the new republican ruling class tried to remedy throughout the post-war period, up to 1949. Italy’s defeat did not bring about the independence of the colonies, but rather the replacement of Italy’s dominion with that of Great Britain and France, accompanied by Italy’s staunch efforts to regain its overseas possessions. The British Military Administration was imposed

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on Somalia, Eritrea, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Ethiopian region of Hawd-Ogaden, while France occupied Libyan Fezzan. The power of last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was restored by the British immediately after the liberation of Addis Ababa, because Ethiopia was never and properly a colony, rather a sovereign state, member of at that time League of Nations, that was illegally occupied by the Fascist Italian regime in 1935. For this reason, Ethiopia was never considered as part of the dossier of the former Italian colonies by the international diplomacy, neither by the Italian diplomacy. However, the United Kingdom tried to disconnect the southern Somali-speaking region from the Haile Selassie’s Empire to accomplish the so-called Bevin Plan that was launched in 1946 in order to merge all together former Italian Somalia, British Somaliland and HawdOgaden under a British trusteeship on the basis of principle of ethnic homogeneity of the Somalis. Precisely for the Ethiopian opposition to the Bevin Plan, it was finally putted aside in 1948 and Ogaden was returned to the full Ethiopian sovereignty. In order to enhance this policy towards Africa, the post-Fascist Italy and above all the MAI were committed to organize and finance a series of more or less secret operations, with the aim of “restoring relations with the native peoples”1 : to chiefs, askaris (colonial soldiers), qadis (judges), sheikhs, various ranks of government officials and other former intermediaries of the colonial administration were allocated considerable funds to encourage them to work for Italy’s return to Africa. In Somalia, Italy established close relations with the Congress of Somalia (or Congress of Green parties) which grasped all together a number of smaller groups established between 1943 and 1947, with the aim of counterbalancing the growing consensus of main nationalist party, the Somali Youth Club, founded under British auspices in 1943, which later became the Somali Youth League (SYL) in 1947 (Touval 1963). Both parties sought independence for their country, but whereas for the Somali Youth this meant fighting for immediate and unconditioned independence, the Congress favoured a long period of preparation under a regime of international trusteeship which, none too covertly, referred to Italy. In Libya, the Italian government provided funding for former colonial soldiers’ association as well as notable and later on for the Istiqlal Party, founded in 1948 in Tripoli. Also, the Libyan intermediaries were asking 1 Historical Archive of Casale Monferrato (henceforth ASCM), AL, Italy, Giuseppe Brusasca (henceforth GB), b. 71, Report on MAI activities, 31st December 1949.

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for an Italian trusteeship, at least over Tripolitania, while the Libyan nationalists demanded the independence and unity of their country. The Free National Bloc (Al-Kutlahal-Wataniyyah al-Hurrah), founded in May 1946, became the most important political national party under the leadership of Bashir al-Sa’dawi, one of the main members of Tripoli’s resistance who had been in exile since the 1920s (Khadduri 1963). The turning point in the transition towards independence of the former Italian colonies was the discussion at the General Assembly of the United Nations of the so-called Bevin-Sforza Compromise signed on May 6, 1949. The political election in Italy during the spring of the 1948, and then, the Italian government’s decision of joining the Atlantic Alliance in April 1949 definitely confirmed the pro-Western orientation of Italy so that an agreement over the colonies with Great Britain became possible. According to the secret Italian-British treaty, Libya would have divided into three different trusteeship administrations under the responsibility of Italy in Tripolitania, the United Kingdom in Cyrenaica and France in Fezzan; Eritrea would have divided between Ethiopia and British Sudan; and Somalia would have returned to Italy under trusteeship. The Trusteeship System, regulated at the 12th Chapter of the 1945 San Francisco Charter, along with the United Nations peace and security system, gained “immense popularity” in the post-war period (Betts 2007: 50): the reason was that the trusteeship supposedly merged the instances of African nationalism, but, over and above all, ensured European colonialists’ interests. The idea of Trust referred to a paternalistic view of relations between Europe and Africa and was definitely different from that of freedom: the trusteeship agreement was always a loss of freedom, whatever the promise of coming development (Bain 2003). For many African nationalists, the Trusteeship System was basically a facade for keeping old colonial ideas, and, not by chance, when Italy staked its claim for trusteeship of the former colonies, it did so by defending, rather than condemning its colonial past. An unexpected turn of events came about on May 18, 1949, when the General Assembly of the United Nations did not pass the Compromise. In the context of the emerging bipolar world and under pressure from the African and Asian nationalist movements, an outdated policy anchored in a colonial system was clearly anachronistic and showed all its contradictions. Italy and the United Kingdom now performed a radical U-turn: in a diplomatic about face on October 1, 1949, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Sforza, declared at the United Nations Political

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Committee his support for granting immediate independence to Libya and Eritrea and, after a period of adequate preparation, to Somalia as well. Great Britain followed the Italian move and tried to promote its intermediaries within the soon-to-be independent States. The Italian move was, however, taken too long to really represent a clear-cut attempt to distance itself from the colonial past, and in fact, the nationalists in the former colonies stayed suspicious. The long transition towards independence of Italian former colonies ended with two different UN resolutions: on November 21, 1949, the Resolution n. 289 acknowledges the Italian trusteeship over Somalia with the precise commitment to grant country independence by ten years term, while independence of Libya was disposed by the end of 1951 under the crown of King Idr¯ıs al-San¯us¯ı, head of the Muslim brotherhood San¯us¯ıyah and a faithful British ally. The final decision over Eritrea was reached the following year on December 2, 1950: according to the Resolution n. 390, Eritrea became an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia. This solution fuelled much controversy and did little to prevent the conflict that was to break out between the two countries in the years to come. The international solution for the former Italian colonies paradoxically reinstated old pre-colonial forms of power and institutions in newly independent countries like Libya and Ethiopian-Eritrean federation. The Somali case was instead different and more in line with the majority of African independences, since a new ruling class was established by the Italian trusteeship, which, within many limits of course, represented a clean break with pre-colonial history. Therefore, during the 1940s, the international decision making over the future settlement for former Italian colonies brought about a rising competition between Italy, Great Britain, France and their respective African intermediaries on the one hand and the nationalist leaders and supporters who usually established their associations or truly political parties during the early post-war period. It is too simplistic and definitely wrong to insist on the end of Italian colonialism during World War II and the non-existence of a distinctive colonial dimension in the post-war period. On the contrary, the argument discussed in this chapter is the competition between the various colonial projects of Italy, Britain and France and their intermediaries and its clash with different national movements.

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The Italian Trusteeship and Somali Nationalism Somali nationalism quickly grew after the end of World War II around the commercial and Muslim élite of Mogadishu. Since its foundation in 1943, Somali Youth represented the main nationalist force that struggled for “the union of all Somalis in general and young people in particular, with the consequent repudiation of any existing prejudices, such as the reer (family clan) and tar¯ıqu¯a (Islamic brotherhood) distinctions, and the education of the youth in modern ideas of civilization.”2 Equality for all Somalis was combined with the political project for the union of all the Somali-speaking lands in the Horn of Africa (the former Italian Somalia, British Somaliland, French Somaliland, Ethiopian Ogaden and the Northern Frontier District in British Kenya). Most of the party leaders were merchants, artisans, clerks and officials, especially from the Gendarmerie, who had set up a mutual aid organization to cope with the drastic and rapid changing economic and social situation after the war (Barnes 2007: 280). Many of these had achieved “some grade of education” during Italian colonialism, even if they were certainly far from being an “either politically sophisticated or well educated” elite in terms of modern Western education (Castagno 1959: 84). The SYL attitude towards religion was reputed as “radically secular”, while its programme was inspired by socialism (Lewis 1958: 252). However, the Islam represented a shared background for all the thirteen founding fathers of the Club and has to some extent prepared the ground for the emergence of nationalism. Of course the idea of the Somali nation was a secular byproduct of the colonial domination, nevertheless the Muslim education and literacy of the Somali people, the international relations with other Muslim communities and the idea of unity, inherent to the community of believers (umma), shape a common sense of belonging that traced back to the eighteenth-century concept of Somali total genealogy (Cassanelli 2010). Since the immediate post-war period and then during the ten years of the Italian trusteeship (Amministrazione Italiana della Somalia, AFIS), from April 1, 1960, to the day of Somali independence on July 1, 1960, the main political trend was represented by the confrontation, sometimes

2 Historical and Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (henceforth ASMAE), Rome, Italy, Direzione Generale Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana della Somalia (henceforth DGAFIS), b. 9, f. 2, Syl’s Charter, s.d.

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conflict, between the progressive agenda of the SYL and the conservative politics promoted by the Congress of Somalia and the Italy’s (post)colonial plans. The political intermediations between the Italians and the Congress were from one side repeating the patron-client relationship between colonizers and colonized subjects during the past colonial time when Italian government administered Somalia by lavishing rewards on the so-called Somali capo-qabila (chiefs), notables and askaris and by paying them salaries. At the beginning of the 1950s, many Congress members asked and received money or honours from the new trustee authorities. In return, the Congress committed itself to fight for a Somali transition within the trusteeship framework and not against it as the League had promised to do. On the other hand, the Congress represented an unprecedented opportunity for the Somali intermediaries to become politicians and to upscale their bargaining with the Italians. In the mid-term, the path of the people of the Congress was to develop a reformist project and to become the main opposition party, regardless of the links with the former colonizers. Although the Congress and the SYL both were political elites with a relatively narrow consensus among ordinary Somalis and both did have some programmatic points in common, regarding themes such as freedom of association and expression, work and professions, education and economic development, the their vision for the future Somalia was opposite. The Congress was distinctively characterised by its conservative vision of society, its customary rules and the fragmentation of political identities. On the contrary, the SYL had set its sights on substituting collective clan rules with the individual rights of future citizens, by invoking the idea of a modern nation. The League gave precedence to the talents and political activism of its younger members over the role of the elders, which sparked off a generational struggle, long before it became a political one. When Italy accepted the trusteeship and made it into a sort of renewed civilizing mission, the colonial past was no longer condemned, but became an example to defend and even re-propose for the next mission in Somalia. This was in accordance with the debate that, already in the postwar period, had settled around a factitious separation between fascism’s colonial crimes and the supposed liberal colonialism’s contribution to African cultural and economic development. Through the trusteeship, Italy sought to testify its collaboration with the United Nations system and to gain the benefits of a strengthening of relations with all those countries, especially the Arab and Mediterranean ones, which had just

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gained independence. The mandate was seen as possibly contributing to the Italian policy which aimed to give “more credit to its historical precedents or to its commercial and cultural interests in the Arab world, pushing neo-Atlanticism towards a kind of neo-Mediterraneanism” (Novati and Paolo 2011: 257). The Italian plan to rule again Somalia by means of a renovated civilizing and developmentalist mission left on the ground more than one contradiction. Despite the eminently peaceful nature of the trusteeship, “the politicians got carried away by the armed forces” and arranged to send in Somalia around 6,000 national troops (Del Boca 1990: 221). Such a large military deployment was totally unjustified and resulted in more than one complains from the Somali Youth who accused Italians of carrying out a number of irregularities and downright abuse in the maintenance of public order. Furthermore, “many officials with previous experience in Somalia or in another colony” were given a position in the AFIS.3 The division of responsibilities and administrative powers between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministero degli Affari Esteri, MAE) and the MAI further complicated matters: the MAE designated the highest offices of the AFIS, entertained relations with the United Nations and ultimately answered to the prime minister as regards the performance of the trusteeship, while all the rest was in the hands of the MAI, which, in particular, managed the general administration of the trusteeship and ensured liaison with, and provisions for Somalia. This imbalanced state of affairs where the MAI clearly had the major share of duties did not change until the final suppression of the Ministry in 1953. The Italian strategy in reality was not intended to promote the collaboration with the Congress as the first and main goal of the mandate; on the contrary, the Italian authorities acted to promote an “understanding of the moderate faction and to isolate the extremists” within the SYL, who steadfastly opposed any suggestion of collaboration with Italy.4 The collaboration between the AFIS and the Congress of Somalia was deliberately intended to support this political plan to offset any of the League’s extremists. The League’s decision to start truly cooperating with the Italians occurred since 1952; however, the definitive participation of the SYL 3 The National Archives (henceforth TNA), Kew Gardens, UK, Foreign Office (henceforth FO), b. 1015, f. 553, Report on the handover, from Gamble to Colonial Office, 15th May 1950. 4 ASCM, GB, b. 47, f. 273, Secret report n. 44,337/1717 from Fornari to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 25th September 1952.

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in the trusteeship experiment was achieved only on the occasion of the first parliament election in 1956 that the SYL largely won, while the Congress was finally disembroiled from the AFIS. Some of the former groups or political actors who had once been part of the Congress now disappeared, while others were reconstituted in autonomous parties, a clear demonstration that although the SYL was indeed the nationalist party par excellence, the Congress had not merely existed because of its client-patron relationship with Italy. The political agendas of the newly founded parties had in common with those of the League the goal of the Somali independence, but they still maintained the Congress’s conservative approach towards the modernization of society. They also had strong links with the clans and based their political consensus on such a kind of affiliation: consequently, their vision for the soon-to-be independent Somalia was a decentralized structure of State rather than the strictly centralised system promoted by the League. In reality, also the SYL had to compromise with the conservative forces of the Somali society and consequently experimented a consistent process of ‘ruralization’. The SYL enrolled “chiefs and notables amongst its party members” in contraposition to others who were “considered anti-League” and linked to the Congress, many of whom were the same people who had been on the Italian payroll and served the territorial administration.5 For the League, the recourse to the clan chiefs was a means to an end, whereas for the parties that succeeded the Congress, the linking with chiefs, elders and notables represented the very social and cultural base of their political programme. In any case, the mobilization of consent was not an unidirectional process. As soon as the chiefs, elders and notables realised that the creation of a new State was moving the seats of power elsewhere, clan dynamics opted for centralization, with the risk that every clan formed its own ‘small homeland’, which was not necessarily a fundamental part of the so-called Somali nation. After the election of the first Somali parliament and government in 1956, the Italian administration indeed only maintained full and exclusive control over the country’s budget (until 1957) and its Defence and Foreign Affairs, whereas, for all other issues, the SYL was included in the process of decision making. In this period of time, the League quickly passed from cooperation with the AFIS to building up an exclusive 5 ASMAE, DGAFIS, b. 20, f. 28, Letter from SYL board to Fornari, 9th November 1950. In 1951, there were about 600 capi-qabila (clan-head) on the AFIS payroll.

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monopoly of the Somali political and institutional system. Between the summer of 1957 and autumn 1958, a complex political and institutional crisis brought the League under the control of the pro-Nasserist party faction which was led by the former President Haji Mohamed Hussein. With sound backing from Nasser’s Egypt, Haji Mohamed Hussein was re-elected at the presidency of the SYL on July 28, 1957, when he was residing in Cairo thanks to a scholarship from the university and mosque of al-Azhar. The new president soon questioned collaboration with Italy and opposed a wider political and social reform throughout the country along the lines of the Egyptian Revolution. After a number of clashes within the party which overlapped with pressure from several international players—first and foremost from Italy which risked losing its margin of control over the former colony—the crisis ended with the ousting of the pro-Nasserist faction from the party. Aden Abdullah Osman, the former League president, chairperson of the parliament and the major advocate of dialogue with Italy, was then returned to the presidency. In the end, Haji Mohamed Hussein’s choice of favouring the pan-Arab politics of Nasser’s Egypt, over and above Muslim and Somali allegiances (what the Somalis call soomaalinimo), had actually come to undermine the pan-Somali goal and the whole relationship with the Italian authorities, risking to put into question the Somali independence, already planned for 1960. On the eve of the 1959 second political elections, the SYL government proclaimed a state of emergency, which de facto placed the opposition, including Haji Mohamed Hussein’s splinter group of pro-Nasserists, under strict control. Under the auspices of Egypt, Haji Mohamed Hussein had indeed founded a new party, the Great Somali League (GSL), on July 24, 1958. The SYL ticked all the boxes in the equation between nation, State and party which now forced the opposition to become anti-system parties and therefore a danger for the selfsame cause of national independence: “The formula was first stability and then democracy” (Castagno 1959: 362). On a completely different note, in 1958, all those Somalis, who had served in the ranks of the Congress during the 1940s and invoked Italy’s return to Somalia, now ended up making an appeal to the representatives of the League, as “colonialist collaborators”, regarding their participation in the trusteeship experiment.6 In a climate of strong 6 ASMAE, DGAFIS, b. 9, f. 2, no. 20/8–1 Somali Police confidential report, 8th November 1958, Speech of Haji Mohamed Boracco, President of the Liberal Party of Somali Youth.

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political confrontation, which witnessed several violent incidents, the elections were held in March 1959. As an extreme and desperate protest, the opposition decided not to take part, making the result a foregone conclusion, seeing that the registered candidates were only from the SYL. The League emerged as the hegemonic party and Somalia in a very similar manner like many other African newly independent States became ruled by the one-party system. The proclamation of the Somali Republic independence, on July 1, 1960, coincided with the union with the former British Somaliland Protectorate and for this reason represented an important step along the path of the pan-Somali project. However, it was the revisionist policy of the Somali government that really challenged the boundaries set by the colonial powers in the Horn of Africa, and this soon made Somalia a destabilizing factor in the region: Somalia went to war twice against Ethiopia, in 1963–1964 and again in 1977–1978 over possession of Ogaden. In the years immediately following independence, the disadvantage of the North, the former Somaliland, with regard to a power-sharing system centred on Mogadishu, became apparent on more than one occasion, even resulting in violence. Furthermore, the regional contrasts soon overlapped clan-based tensions. The weakness and fragility of Somali institutions were a direct result of the unique case of Italian decolonization, its politics and, above all, its attempt to keep an influence over Somalia through the dependence of the new State institutions by the technical and financial international aid. The ten years of the AFIS represented the climax of the Italianisation of Somalia, but were simultaneously the beginning of a rapid downsizing of Italian influence. The formation of an Italian-speaking ruling class, the transplantation of Italian-style modern institutions in the country and the establishment of a close connection between Somalia’s fragile economy and financial and technical aid from Rome had seemed to be enough to guarantee the former colonial power a prominent role in the newly founded Republic of Somalia. Italy lacked both the sophisticated tools and skills it needed to exercise that pervasive, albeit indirect, influence to which it so aspired, within the framework of what, after the 1960s, came to be known as development cooperation. At the same time as Italy was forced to renounce its direct rule over Somalia, it also rapidly lost its grip on the whole Somali area, and the United States and Great Britain were obliged, at least partly, to come to contribute to the aid of Somalia to try to prevent the country from leaving the Western orbit. The new Somali national leadership was coming from

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the Somali Youth’s ranks, and consequently, it was mostly composed by ‘new persons’ who do not have a previous history of co-optation into the colonial administration and, on the contrary, who have fought and won against the concurrent Somali élite composed by the former intermediaries. In the case of Somalia, the conservative élite which animated the Congress of Somalia represented the losers of the play for the Somali independence and for the control of the new State institutions.

The Libyan Loose Federation and Its Conservative Leadership During the 1940s, the political environment in Libya reflected a similar contraposition to that in Somalia between young and progressive nationalist elites who were straggling for independence and unity of their country and conservative elites, composed by commercial and administrative notables or Muslim leaders, who were also supporting the independence of their country, but from a parochial perspective rather than national. The Nationalist Party (al-Hizb al-Watan¯ı), founded in secret in 1944 in Tripoli and then officially recognized in 1946, had a reformist programme. It was the moderate nature of the programme and the differences of opinion within the party that persuaded one of its bestknown founders, Ahmed al-Faq¯ıh Hasan, one of the leading Libyan poets and intellectuals of those years, to set up a new party that was explicitly republican and unitary, the Free National Bloc (Al-Kutlah al-Wataniyyah al-Hurrah), founded in May 1946. In Cyrenaica, the ‘Omar al-Muht¯ar Club (N¯asi ‘Omar al-Muht¯ar), founded in Cairo in 1942 and then relocated to Benghazi, adopted a similar programme. In 1948, prior to the Four Power Commission (FPC)’s arrival in Libya with the mandate to investigate the wishes of the population regarding the country’s future, Bas¯ır al-Sa‘d¯aw¯ı, one of the most prominent Tripolitanian member of antiItalian resistance who had been in exile since the 1920s, moved the offices of the Libyan Liberation Committee (Hay‘at tahr¯ır L¯ıbiy¯a) from Cairo to Tripoli, relying on the support of the Arab League and Egypt, where the movement had been founded in 1947. Bash¯ır al-Sa ‘d¯aw¯ı’s intention was to create an umbrella organization that could bring together the different elements of the political spectrum around a programme for an independent and unified Libya. This attempt soon foundered, both because of internal friction and because of the emergence of the Italian, British and France plans for Libya’s division.

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Immediately after the war, the MAI began to promote and finance associations or actual parties close to Italy in Tripolitania. In a way very similar to Somalia, the pro-Italian associations adhered to pre-modern forms of political mobilization or social categories produced by colonial rule: the membership in a qabila (kin group), family and Islamic brotherhood or, otherwise, the service in the former colonial administration or in the army. The very first plans for resuming contacts with the Libyans involved Suleiman al-Qaramanli, whom the Italian Prime Minister, Alcide De Gasperi, had asked to support the Italian cause in Tripoli shortly before his return to the homeland from Rome. The Libyan notable descended from the dynasty of Turkish origin that had ruled Tripoli from 1711 to 1835, before the second Ottoman occupation. During the colonial period, his father, Hassuna al-Qaramanli, had been among the first interlocutors of Italian power and later became mayor of Tripoli, and was one of the best known of Italy’s intermediaries along with the al-Muntasir clan of Misurata, the other great city of the Tripolitan coast (Anderson 1986: 126). A few days after his arrival in Tripoli, on October 1, 1945, Suleiman died of a severe form of meningitis, suspected by some to actually be an assassination orchestrated by the British to pave the way for their political influence. In any case, about a year later, in November 1946, Italy had found new intermediaries with whom to organize its propaganda in Tripolitania, whose value for the MAI was estimated, at least as a start, at 100 million Lire (Del Boca 1993: 362): Taher al-Qaramanli, a former officer of the Italian army and a brother of the late Suleiman; Ibrahim bin Sha’ban, the Berber-speaking chief who had been imprisoned by the British for his great proximity to Italy; and Ramadan el Gritli, who had led a band of Libyan irregulars in the service of Italy during its occupation of the country. Italy’s interest was especially aimed at Libyan officials in service at the BMA but with previous service experience in the Italian administration, who amounted to over a thousand people, in addition to soldiers who had served in Italy’s colonial army.7 The former askaris were identified as additional privileged intermediaries who, thanks to their military preparation and discipline, were not only close to Italy, but could quickly give 7 To be exact, there were 1071 persons who in 1949 were still in service among the administrative personnel of the Islamic law courts as clerks, bailiffs, postal workers, nurses, teachers and custodians. ASDMAE, Affari Politici (henceforth AP), Section III, 1946–1950, b. 52, letter from Zoppi to the MAI, 17th December 1949.

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rise to associations modelled on their military organization. The major efforts for establishing the Association of Askaris, whose members in 1949 numbered about 20 thousand,8 were made by the non-commissioned officer Abdusalam Sellabi thanks to “substantial Italian aid and despite the obstacles of the [British] authorities.”9 On the part of some Libyans, there was therefore a substantial willingness to renew their relationship with Italy and its colonial rule. On January 24, 1946, according to a document published by the Italian historian Angelo Del Boca, a certain Tripolitan notable whose name is not mentioned, wrote to De Gasperi suggesting that Italy should commit itself “to the autonomy and freedom [of Libya]: pledge that the Libyan provinces are provinces of Italy legally recognized by all nations and that the inhabitants are considered Italian citizens and that they will enjoy the same rights and benefits as national metropolitan citizens, pledge that Italy will follow its work of reconstruction and spiritual and intellectual elevation of these populations and the enhancement of its territories; pledge that Italy will give freedom and independence to these populations […] and allow the removal of all those officials who were compromised for their Fascist ideas” (Del Boca 1993: 351). Although for Del Boca, it was a petition marked by “uncertainty and confusion” (Del Boca 1993: 351), on the contrary, these Libyan notables really aspired to a greater and different participation or integration in the colonial system, without necessarily desiring independence: they were proposing themselves as intermediaries with the Italians. Although Italy had counted exclusively on those notables, who were considered the most “trustworthy” in the light of their previous colonial history, the British were looking for the support of other intermediaries, different from the Italian ones, but still exponents of a certain social conservatism. The limits of British relations with the nationalists were precisely their smaller willingness to ultimately support British goals of influence, and in fact, it is out of discussion “the hostility of British policy towards Tripolitanian nationalists’ demands for a unified country and their close ties with the Arab League” (Ahmida 2005: 63). In this sense, the relationship with the leading shaikh of San¯us¯ı Order, Idr¯ıs al-San¯us¯ı and the Cyrenaic notables, whom the British counted on, 8 ASDMAE, AP, Section III, 1946–1950, b. 52, note for the MAI, n.d. September 1949. 9 ASDMAE, AP, Section III, 1946–1950, b. 52, memo of the Military Information Service, 12th November 1949.

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given their preceding colonial cooperation and the contingency of the moment, proved to be more fruitful. Their preceding colonial cooperation referred to the history of San¯usiyyah’s struggle against Italian colonialism, even though not the personal fight of Idr¯ıs al-San¯usi, who repaired in exile in Egypt, then under British influence. The contingency was instead linked both to the competition between the British, French and Italian colonial plans, and to the narrow temporal margins imposed by international diplomacy to arrive at a definitive settlement for Libya. Finally, the policy of France relied upon the intermediation of Saif al-Nasr family that also had a history of opposition to Italy and good relations with the San¯us¯ıyyah. In this situation, the competition among different European colonial plans was also exploited by the Libyans along their intermediation activity with the foreign powers. The case of al-Muntasir family was a good example: in 1946, al-Jabha al-watan¯ıyya al-mutt¯ahida (National Unity Front) was founded in Tripoli under the leadership of Sal¯ım al-Muntasir as an expression of the region’s conservative notables and with the support of “notables and tribal shaykhs” who also had served in the Italian administration (Young 2012: 118). Sal¯ım declared himself in favour of a British trusteeship, and in return, he was appointed as a member of the Advisory Council of the British Military Administration. However, at the end of 1948, Sal¯ım was the main architect of the establishment of the Party of Independence (Hizb al-Istiql¯al) with a programme that favoured a “united and independent Libya opposed to a San¯ us¯ı Emirata” and close to the Italian influence.10 Sal¯ım reputed to get better rewards from being one of the main intermediaries of the Italians in Libya rather than the main referent of British in Tripoli, always after Idr¯ıs al-San¯usi. The Libyan élites were definitely committed and able to bargain with the European powers enhancing their own agenda. The rejection of Bevin-Sforza Compromise put aside the idea to divide Libya in three different trusteeships under the rule of Italy, United Kingdom and France. However, the European powers immediately rode the wave of a federal solution for the soon independent Libyan State, properly because the federation was seen as the best way to protect their influence over the country. While the Count Sforza was declaring at the United Nations the Italian willingness to acknowledge the former 10 TNA, FO, b. 371, f. 97,269, Confidential, Brief Bibliographical notes on Tripolitanian Senators, attached to the Dispatch No. 45 (10,116/52) from British Legation in Tripoli to Anthony Eden, FO, 27th March 1952.

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colonies right to become independent States for the first time after the end of World War II, the United Kingdom took the momentous and on July 1, 1949, proclaimed Idr¯ıs al-San¯us¯ı as Am¯ır of Cyrenaica with the purpose to jeopardise the future of Libya and safeguard its influence over the country. Thus, an axis of dialogue was created between Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan, which drew together the various local notables in their various though similar relations with the hierarchies of European colonial influence. It was ultimately Idr¯ıs, because of his religious and political role, who acted as a meeting point between the different regional realities and promoted a “compromise between the varying foreign interests and intense but contradictory national aspirations” (Martin 1975: 45). Not for chance after having lost the battle for a republican Libya, the more progressive elements of Libyan nationalism engaged in a new struggle aimed at averting the idea of a federal structure, with the help of financial support from Cairo.11 This structure was viewed as an indirect continuation of the divisions that had been imposed by European rule. Bash¯ır al-Sa‘d¯aw¯ı’s plans came off worst here too, pitted against an unholy alliance between foreign interests and the conservative regional élites that had brought together the supporters of Idr¯ıs who were all convinced that the federal solution would be the best way of holding and preserving their respective positions of power in the new independent Libya. In actuality, “Idr¯ıs used his personal influence and statesmanship to persuade influential Tripolitanian leaders to rally in favor of federalism, without which the unity of Libya would probably never have been achieved” (Khadduri 1963: 319): however, his return to Libya after the exile in Egypt was thus not experienced by all Libyans as an authentic liberation, but instead as a conservative restoration. The independence of Libya was proclaimed on December 24, 1951, under the crown of King Idr¯ıs al-San¯us¯ı. The loose federation among Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan represented the main instrument for the external interferences of the United Kingdom, France and then United States that were able to keep their military bases and installations in Libya, and also the interferences of the former colonial power that was able to preserve the economic interests of the Italian settlers in Tripolitania and afterwards its access to the Libyan oil. Furthermore, the 11 TNA, FO, b. 371, f. 97,267, Secret, Summary of political events in Tripolitania during December 1951.

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federal institutions were also, as planned, an easy way to hold and protect the local or regional position of power. The federal government “was at the mercy of the provinces,” where the governors appointed by the King had the ultimate authority to determine how federal laws were applied (Habib 1979: 65). In this way, the application of the federal system tended to reinforce regional divisions rather than helping to overcome them with the aim of national unity. In actuality, the King Idr¯ıs was more inclined to rely upon Islam and religious ties rather than the Arab identity and pan-Arab narrative in order to strength the foundations of the new Libya. Idr¯ıs was still above all the most prominent sheikh of San¯ us¯ıyyah before to be the King of the country, and for this reason, “the identity provided by Islam has been inestimably more important than it has been for the Ottoman successor States of the Arab East” (Anderson 1986: 65). Islam rather than Arab identity was intended as the principal instrument for overcoming the particularism of the qabila and for construction of a modern State: “Islam was institutionalized as a source of political legitimation, and the Constitution in fact […] confirmed the sacred nature of the monarchy” (Baldinetti 2006: 231). The San¯us¯ıyyah was also utilised to endorse Idr¯ıs power all around the country and the Brotherhood’s institutions infiltrated the federal system and became State institutions, even if out of the Constitutional regulations. The first elections of the new independent Libya, in March 1952, showed in no uncertain terms the prevalence of the conservative project and the final defeat of nationalists. The nationalists opposed to Idr¯ıs had thought that this electoral test would enable them to restore the balance in their favour, if not actually reverse it: Tripolitania had 35 representatives to elect in a total of 55, with 15 for Cyrenaica and 5 for Fezzan. Instead, the results delivered both the parliament and the country safely into the hands of Idr¯ıs’ political establishment. This result was aided by electoral legislation that had been conceived principally to achieve this aim. The protests led by the Tripolitanian National Congress of Bash¯ır al-Sa‘d¯aw¯ı’ provided the pretext to King Idr¯ıs for banning the parties and expelling intellectuals and politicians, including Bash¯ır himself, from the country. As a report in British archives put it, “regarding Tripoli alone the opposition [of Bash¯ır al-Sa‘d¯aw¯ı’] scored a resounding victory and if Government value their own prestige it behoves them to take energetic measures to increase their influence in this important area.”12 Thus,

12 TNA, FO, b. 371, f. 97,269, secret, administrative and political report on the elections by G.P. Cassels, 17th March 1952.

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despite the victory of forces connected to Idr¯ıs, Libya came into being split between two centres of power, Benghazi and Tripoli; this split was also endorsed by the system of having two capitals with a parliament that had to shuttle between them. Still more, the elections demonstrated the weakness of the nation, in the sense that, once again according to the British analysis, “the majority of people who went to the polls voted for individual personalities, and not for parties or policies at all.”13 The voting had thus been influenced by a political and theoretical perspective that was often far away from a national one, and had much more to do with family ties, personal reputation and clientelist relationships. Despite the fact that the nationalist parties had referred to the Arab League and to the ideas, passions and slogans of the wider pan-Arab movement, “the ideological discourse which was largely based on Arab nationalism, and which had characterized the political formations in exile” did not transfer in a perfect and operational form into these same bodies when they engaged in real politics (Baldinetti 2006: 136). The process of economic and social modernization and mass urbanisation that followed the discovery of oil in 1959 and the increasing political pressure from Nasser’s Egypt was the real force that during the 1960s progressively eroded the social milieu at the base of the political consensus for Idr¯ıs and his regional allies.

Conclusion The transition to independence of Somalia and Libya shows a similar struggle between nationalists who were fighting for an independent, united and modern country and the intermediaries who were acting for a reform of the colonial State and society were the independence was also requested, but within a conservative framework that can guaranties their position of power. The young nationalists were trying to take over the position of the intermediaris inside the State institutions: once upon the decolonization was approaching, the competition between those different élites was moving from the struggle for the independence or the reform of colonial system towards the confrontation for ruling the new State. Both nationalists and notables were part of the late colonial society; however, their social milieu, their political business and their ideals and motivations

13 Ibidem.

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were very different. Beyond similarities, the unique history of the end of the Italian colonial rule in Africa determined the opposite outcomes of Somali and Libyan transition to independence with reference to the different ruling élite who was able to take over the power in each country. In Somalia, where Italy returned in Africa and disposed for a process of decolonization very similar to many other countries in Africa and centred upon who were called in British system the detribalized people or in French system the évolués, the Somali nationalists bargained the control of new State institutions with the Italian authorities. The Somali case was in actuality the only one process of decolonization modelled on the Italian print, even if the union of the former Italian Somalia with the British Somaliland at the independence day and the massive Nasserist influence over Somalia limited the Italian capacity to exert an undisputed influence over the country after the end of his last direct administration. However, there is no doubt that the last Italian rule in Africa ended in 1960, and only at this point, the Italian colonialism was really over. On the contrary, the relatively quick transition to independence in Libya, at the beginning of the 1950s before most African States and the plan to divide the country among three sphere of foreign influence, prevented the Libyan nationals to grow enough to successfully led the postcolonial State. Only twenty years later, in 1969, the Revolution of Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi realised a revenge for the nationalists, even if the Nasserist and pan-Arab ideology of al-Qadhdhafi was different from the Libyan nationalism during the 1940s. While in Somalia the new political leadership was compounded by new and young people who did not have a very close history of intermediation with the former colonial power, in Libya the independent political leadership was deeply rooted in the colonial and pre-colonial dynamics of power. Libyan nationalists were the losers of the transition to independence which, on the contrary, enthroned the former intermediaries of the colonial masters. This outcome allows the European powers to maintain the control of their main assets and interests in Libya: France, the United Kingdom and then the United States were able to keep open their military bases on the Libyan territory, while the Italian former settlers’ community in Tripolitania was able to preserve its economic and social prominent role in the Western part of the country and also Italy maintained a discrete influence over the federated government based in Tripoli.

References Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif. 2005. Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya. New York: Routledge.

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Anderson, Lisa. 1986. Religion and State in Libya: The Politics of Identity. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 483: January. Anderson, Lisa. 1986. The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bain, William. 2003. Between Anarchy and Society, Trusteeship and the Obligation of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldinetti, Anna. 2006. Islam e Stato in Libia dal secondo periodo ottomano alla Jamahiriyya (1835–1969). In Dopo l’impero ottomano. Stati-nazione e comunità religiose, eds. Anna Baldinetti, Armando Pitassio. Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino. Baldinetti, Anna. 2010. The Origins of the Libyan Nation: Colonial Legacy, Exile and the Emergence of a New Nation-State. London: Routledge. Barnes, Cedric. 2007. The Somali Youth League, Ethiopian Somalis and the Greater Somalia Idea, c.1946–48. Journal of Eastern African Studies 1: 2. Betts, Raymond F. 2007. La decolonizzazione. Bologna: il Mulino. Betts, Raymond F. 2011. Mediterraneo. Asimmetrie Nord-Sud. Il Politico 3. Cassanelli, Lee. 2010. Speculations on the Historical Origins of the ‘Total Somali Genealogy’. In Milk and Peace. Drought and War. Somali Culture, Society and Politics, eds. Marcus Hoehne, Virginia Luling. London: Hurst & Co. Castagno, Alphonso A. 1959. Somalia. International Conciliation 552: March. Castagno, Alphonso A. 1964. Somali Republic. In Political Parties and National integration in Tropical Africa, eds. James S. Coleman, Carl G. Rosberg. Berkeley: University of California Press. Del Boca, Angelo. 1982. Gli italiani in Africa Orientale, vol. III: La caduta dell’Impero. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Del Boca, Angelo. 1990. Dopo la risoluzione dell’Onu del 21 novembre 1949, politici e militari preparano il ritorno dell’Italia in Somalia. Studi Piacentini 7. Del Boca, Angelo. 1993. Gli italiani in Libia, vol. I : Tripoli bel suol d’amore, 1860–1922. Milano: Mondadori. Habib, Henry. 1979. Libya Past and Present. Valletta: Aedam Publishing House. Khadduri, Majid. 1963. Modern Libya. A Study in Political Development. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Lewis, Ioan M. 1958. Modern Political Movements in Somaliland, I. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 28: 3. Martin, Yolande. 1975. La Libye de 1912 a 1969. In La Libye nouvelle. Rupture et continuité. Paris: Editions du centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Novati, Calchi, and Gian Paolo, eds. 2011. L’Africa d’Italia. Una storia coloniale e postcoloniale. Rome: Carocci. Rossi, Gianluigi. 1980. L’Africa italiana verso l’indipendenza (1941–949). Milan: Giuffrè. Touval, Saadia. 1963. Somali Nationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Young, Crawford. 2012. The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of independence, 1960–2010. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

CHAPTER 8

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Birth of Mexican Nationalism Reflection on Religious Symbol of Mexican Nation Radoslav Hlúšek

Modern nations and nationalisms in Latin America,1 especially their origin and development, show couple of different features compared to their counterparts in Europe. The reasons of such situation lie in colonial past of modern Latin American republics from which and in which all of these nations and nationalisms originated. In all of these cases, the nationalistic

1 In this context, I mean Spanish Latin America, because the case of Portuguese Brazil is a little bit different.

R. Hlúšek (B) Department of Comparative Religion, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia e-mail: [email protected] Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Pardubice, Comenius University, Czech Republic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_8

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ideology was the matter of Creole2 elites as it will be analyzed later in this chapter. But the case of Mexico is even more special because of the religious symbol embodied in the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe (or Virgin of Guadalupe)3 which was taken by the representatives of Mexican nationalism as crucial. As such, Our Lady of Guadalupe was perceived as a symbol of arising Mexican nation, element of difference that was used for making distinction between so-called peninsulares (those from Pyrenean peninsula) or gachupines (those with spurs)—Spaniards from Spain; and Creoles (those from New World)—Spaniards from New Spain who stopped feeling to be Europeans (Spaniards) and began to feel to be Americans (Mexicans).

On Some Particular Features of Nationalisms in Latin America American theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson in his famous book Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) among other things analyzes the conditions, which enabled the breakup of Medieval Latin universalism at the beginning of modern history. According to him, the most crucial reasons include the origin and development of capitalism, especially the capitalism of the technology of printing, which enabled the local languages to become the languages of books and later the languages of newspapers as well. By this manner, the hegemony of Latin as universal language of Medieval Europe started to break up and local languages, now written and printed, became the attributes of territory and the community of the people living in such specified territory. Reformation was the second factor, which in large measure succeeded exactly thanks to the technology of printing. In fact, printing, more precisely printing in local languages (see, e.g., the Bible translated by Martin Luther to German), served as an effective vehicle for spreading of protestant ideology across Western, Northern, and Central Europe. At the same time, local languages became the languages of state administration used by European absolutistic rulers. Thus, those languages were connected with the territories where they were used, 2 In general meaning, I mean all the people of European origin born in America; it means not only in Latin America but in North America as well. 3 In Spanish Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Virgen de Guadalupe or only La Guadalupana.

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and by this manner, the imagined communities of people who felt to be related to each other due to the printed local language could emerge. Printed administrative languages became the basis of national awareness because they created united field of trade and communication on lower level than Latin but on higher level than local unprinted (only spoken) languages; because thanks to the technology of printing they became more stable; and because thanks to the printing these languages became the instruments of power (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 39–46). All that has been written until now is related in some way to Europe and to the emergence of European nationalisms in the second half of eighteenth century (era of Enlightenment) and in nineteenth century (Romantic period). Ideas of Enlightenment had significant influence on the origin of nationalisms not only in Europe but in Latin America as well; nevertheless, the case of Latin America was quiet different. Anderson first of all emphasizes that the language which I have been analyzing until now as a crucial feature in Europe was not important in Latin America. Spanish territories (but Brazil and British colonies in North America as well) represented a special case where the language was not a significant factor because inhabitants of colonies spoke the same language4 as was spoken by their counterparts in European metropolis. Leaders of nationalist movements on the Western hemisphere did not consider the language to be something important for their struggle against metropolis5 (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 47). On the contrary, the importance of technology of printing was as significant as in Europe, even though the range of used languages was substantially limited (only Spanish, English, and Portuguese). Anderson also points out that the engagement of lower classes in national movement as a significant factor of the creation of national imagined communities did not occur in Spanish America (nor in Brazil). On the contrary, colonial societies were afraid of the activity of lower

4 I am aware of the existence of native American languages, but the nationalist movements which led to the independence of the USA and Latin American countries were related to Creoles, not to the native peoples. Even though they were supposed to be incorporated to the new nations (at least in the case of Mexico), it was not them who could take decision in this process. Creole’s plan was to assimilate them, to hispanize them, not to let them keep their cultures and languages. 5 It is possible to add that the role of Spanish, English, and Portuguese in America was comparable to the role of Latin in medieval Europe.

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classes,6 which represented the majority of colonial societies, and because of that fear, the Creoles took the initiative in independence movement. Regarding the social stratification, the national movements in Spanish America were concerned to only thin social stratum (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 48–49). Taking into consideration these special conditions, we can see that the dissatisfaction of Creole elites with the policy of Madrid which led to struggles for independence must have different reasons because in any respect Creoles were much closer to Spaniards than to Indians and African slaves. In spite of that, it was Spain that became the enemy of Creoles. It was caused by the so-called Bourbon reforms (second half of eighteenth century) connected especially with enlightened king Charles III (Escamilla González 2010: 29). These reforms inspired by Enlightenment, liberalism, and mercantilism strengthened and centralized the power of Madrid, put new taxes on colonies, restricted the economic activities of the Creoles in colonies, supported migration of peninsulares to colonies, and markedly restricted the access of the Creoles to colonial administrative posts (Brenišínová et al. 2018: 196–198). Exclusion of the Creoles from colonial political power as well as centralization and new taxes caused growing dissatisfaction of Creoles with the policy of Madrid. Together with the successful war for independence of thirteen British colonies in North America,7 French Revolution (1787–1799), and subsequently the conquest of Spain by Napoleon, the background for wars for independence in Spanish America was established. But these economic and political reasons would not be sufficient if the awareness of belonging to different entities than to Spain did not exist. This sense of belonging to, e.g., Mexico, Peru, Chile, etc., came from the organization of Spanish empire, which was based on viceroyalties (in the case of Mexico, it was viceroyalty of New Spain). These administrative units provided territorial background for the Creoles and led to the creation of the sense of belonging of the Creoles to these units. Awareness of common origin created Anderson’s imagined community within their social class. This process was very long and started already in seventeenth century (as I will 6 It means Indians and African slaves (the example of Haiti where black slaves gained independence on France in 1804 was deterrent and unacceptable for the Creoles). Mestizos represented a different case. They were involved into national movements in Spanish America and became the part of new Latin American national societies. 7 American Revolutionary War or American War of Independence (1775–1783).

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mention later). In the course of time (seventeenth-eighteenth century), the Creoles step by step stopped feeling to be Spaniards and began to feel more as, e.g., Mexicans, Chileans, Argentinians, etc. On the other hand, the enormous vastness of viceroyalties and enormous distances which one had to travel to get from one colonial center to another caused the failure of the idea of the creation of one American nation and one American republic.8 Even though it was common even in the first decades of nineteenth century that the Creoles claimed themselves to be Americans, the above-mentioned vastness and long distances caused that this denomination gradually ceased to exist in favor of more local national and territorial denominations. On the contrary, much lesser vastness and much shorter distances among the centers of thirteen British colonies in North America were the reasons why in the end the denomination American was successfully appropriated by English-speaking and Protestant9 Creoles of what is the USA now (Anderson 2006 [1983]: 63).

On the Case of Mexico---Our Lady of Guadalupe The Creole nationalism in Mexico, which slowly emerged during colonial era,10 shows the same or very similar characteristics (analyzed above) as its counterparts in the rest of Spanish empire on American continent. However, at the same time, its local specifics can be observed. Even though the political, philosophical, etc., peculiarities would undoubtedly also deserve attention, this chapter is focused on very special feature of Mexican nationalism, which belongs to religious sphere. I do not say that other Latin American nationalisms do not have their own religious symbols neither I intend to deny the importance of local Marian cults 8 Apart from Brazil, where Portuguese king escaped from Napoleon and established monarchy, all new created Latin American countries labeled by Creole elites as nations were strictly republican (inspired by the USA and French revolution). 9 It is necessary to mention that the reformation and Protestantism as one of the key factors related to the emergence of national movements in Europe were not important in Spanish colonies in America. Since the Spanish kingdom as the protector of Catholicism did not allow the Protestants to enter its overseas colonies, the reformation and Protestantism did not play any important role in national movements in Latin America. 10 Colonial era (better to say era of the existence of viceroyalty of New Spain) of Mexican history started in 1521 when Spaniards led by Hernán Cortés conquered Aztec capital Tenochtitlan (or Mexico-Tenochtitlan) and finished in 1821 when the war for independence ended.

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in Mexico itself and in other territories of Spanish America.11 But the role of the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico is so significant that the emergence (and existence) of modern Mexican nation cannot be imagined without its crucial religious symbol embodied in this very exceptional Mexican Virgin. Apart from the fact that she represents the very central point of Mexican Catholicism (official as well as popular), her importance exceeded the borders of religion long time ago (and the borders of Mexico as well) and penetrated into all spheres of the lives of Mexican people. Without any exaggeration, it can be stated that she represents the point in which otherwise very heterogeneous and divided12 Mexican society found its unifying element.

On the Origin of the National Symbol According to the tradition and to the legend, the apparition of Virgin of Guadalupe to Náhuatl-speaking native peasant called Juan Diego occurred on December 12, 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac then north of Mexico City.13 The legend of apparition was published in four basic literary works in Mexico City in seventeenth century. The most famous of them (because it is the one which was written in Náhuatl) is Huei tlamahuiçoltica (By a Great Miracle) of which the legend itself forms

11 It is typical that the present-day Latin American republics are under the protection of Virgin Mary in some of her appearance. To mention at least couple of examples, Our Lady of Luján is patroness of Argentina (and also of Paraguay and Uruguay), Our Lady of Guápulo is patroness of Ecuador, or Our Lady of Copacabana is patroness of Bolivia (Lafaye 2006: 302). 12 Economically, politically, socially and even racially. We can also add religiously,

because according to the last census realized in 2020 Mexico has 126,014,024 inhabitants of which only 90,224,559 (71,6 %) are Catholics (https://www.inegi.org.mx/temas/rel igion/). Although the census regarding the religion counts only with population of more than 5 years old, it provides us relevant information. At the same time it reveals the decrease of Catholics in the country, because according to the census of 2010 there almost 90% Catholics in Mexico. The rest of Mexicans belongs mostly to various Protestants denominations or professes no religion. Nevertheless, it is also typical for Mexico that even though someone is not Catholic he/she respects Our Lady of Guadalupe. 13 Tepeyac is currently located within broader center of Mexico City, but in those times it was situated outside of the city on the mainland; meanwhile, the city itself was built on Tezcoco lake which was then dried up and practically does not exist today.

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the part called Nican mopohua (Here Is Recounted).14 It was published by Luis Lasso de la Vega in 1649, and together with Miguel Sánchez´s Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios Guadalupe (Image of the Virgin Mary Mother of God of Guadalupe; 1648), Luis Becerra Tanco´s Origen milagroso del Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe 15 (Miracuolus Origin of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe; 1666), and Francisco Florencia´s Estrella del norte de México (North Star of Mexico; 1688), it is considered to be the so-called Guadalupe gospel (Maza 1992: 54). It is not the goal of this chapter to analyze these four Guadalupe gospels or the content of the legend itself. Here, I can only say that they are the first historical sources, which narrate the story of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As the reader can notice, it happened not less than almost 120 years after the events they describe had occurred. I do not want to examine here why the crucial event of Mexican Catholicism and nationalism was written down and published so late.16 I want to focus on the importance of Virgin of Guadalupe for the creation of Mexican nation, but it is true that no historical source (of native or Spanish origin) written before 1648 mentions the apparition. They talk about the Guadalupe cult and famous image of her but not about the apparition itself that created appropriate conditions for neverending dispute between so-called aparicionistas and antiaparicionistas (supporters and opponents of the apparition) (Hlúšek 2014: 13, 32). The question is, however, why is it just Our Lady of Guadalupe who became the essential symbol of Mexico and modern Mexican nation? Why is it just her who was adopted as a symbol of Creole emancipation within the process during which New Spain in seventeenth century but especially in eighteenth century stopped being both New and Spain and was becoming Mexico? Why is it just her who stands out in the pantheon of

14 To those who are interested, I recommend an excellent English edition published in

1998 by Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart as The Story of Guadalupe. Luis Lasso de la Vega´s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649. 15 Revised and published again in 1675 as Felicidad de México (Felicity of Mexico) (Noguez 1995: 132, 135). 16 I did it in Hlúšek 2014. See also Poole (1995), Brading (2002), and O´Gorman (2001).

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so plenty of saints popular and worshipped in Mexico and more specifically in the pantheon of equally plenty of Virgin Maries of whom Mexico is metaphorically said pregnant?17 There are several answers, several reasons to explain this situation, and all of them are connected not only with Marian devotion very popular in Catholicism (not excluding the Spanish one) but with the history of Guadalupe cult and with geographical location of Guadalupe shrine, too. First of all, it is necessary to remark that the cult of Virgin of Guadalupe originated in Spain, more precisely in southwestern region of Extremadura where the Virgin Mary under the name of Guadalupe had been worshipped since the first half of fourteenth century.18 Many conquistadors (including Cortés) came from this poor Spanish region and it is natural that they took their Virgin to the New World. As I mentioned above, there are several sources written before 1648 that give evidence about Guadalupe cult in Mexico and about Guadalupe shrine on the hill of Tepeyac with famous Guadalupe image located in it (Hlúšek 2014: 20– 32). However, they implicitly refer to the Virgin of Extremadura, which most probably replaced maternal deity of Nahua Indians called Tonantzin worshipped on Tepeyac before. Substitution of native maternal goddesses for Virgin Mary was very common practice of Catholic (not only Spanish) missionaries, and the same happened in Mexico as well. The fact that Tonantzin was worshipped by the Indians of Central Mexico and pilgrimages to her shrine on Tepeyac were very common is testified very well in various historical sources (e.g., Sahagún 2000, part III: 1143–1144). However, although Catholic saint substituted pre-Hispanic goddess and adopted her maternal attributes, within the native environment her cult did not reach popularity outside Central Mexico (Mexico City and its surroundings) until eighteenth century (Hlúšek 2014: 56–57) what is hardly believable when we realize her exceptional position nowadays also within native communities. Cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe was primarily

17 Our Lady of Remedies, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Juquila, and tens of other Virgins literally filled up the space of Mexico in both geographical and religious sense of the word (Hlúšek 2014: 12). 18 For making distinction between these two Virgins of Guadalupe, the Spanish one is commonly called Virgin of Guadalupe of Extremadura. Most of the people are not aware of the existence of two Virgins of the same name because the Mexican one became much more famous. To learn more about her cult and legend of her apparition, see Turner and Turner (1978: 42–47).

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connected with Spanish and Creole environment of New Spain; meanwhile, the spiritual life of native communities was concentrated on saint patron of each of them. What is, however, the most important is the fact that because of her famous image, which depicts her as dark skin Indian woman19 , she became to be understood as Mexican, as connected with the Mexican land and its inhabitants. Exactly, this feature separated her and her devotees from Spain and connected her with Mexico. Apart from it, Virgin of Guadalupe had strong rival in Our Lady of Remedies20 which has also been worshipped in Mexico City and both of them were considered to be the protectors of the city. Meanwhile, the Guadalupe protected the city from the floods; the Remedies protected it from the droughts but both of them provided protection from epidemics which affected the city and the whole viceroyalty many times. Between the conquest and great epidemic of the disease known by Náhuatl name matlazahuatl 21 (1736– 1739), sixteen other great epidemics decimated22 New Spain (Brading 2002: 196). During this epidemic, images of several saints were carrying in processions around the city (including the statue of Our Lady of Remedies). But only when the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was brought in procession from Tepeyac to the city in May 1737, the epidemic started to cease. This procession was the result of her declaration as the patroness and protector of Mexico City by viceroy and at the same time archbishop Juan Antonio de Vizarrón y Eguiarreta what had occurred a month earlier (Escamilla González 2010: 36; Brading 2002: 202–203). It looks like the epidemic of matlazahuatl represents certain break point because it ceased only through the intercession of local Mexican Virgin what prefigured her rise as the symbol of Mexican nation (Salas Cuesta and Salas Cuesta 2013: 80–81). That process had, however, deeper roots what confirms publishing of four Guadalupe gospels in previous century. Indeed, the process of Creole emancipation began in seventeenth century when new

19 On the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, see more Brenišínová et al. (2018, p. 140). 20 Patroness of Cortés´s conquistadors who were carrying her wooden statue during

their military campaign against the Aztecs (Brading 2002: 86). 21 Probably kind of typhoid fever (Brading 2002: 194) even though the translation of Náhuatl word refers to the smallpox. No source, however, defines that epidemic like that (Hlúšek 2014: 42). 22 Meanwhile, according to the rough estimate, there were 25 million people living in what is now Mexico, and there were only 1,9 million of them in 1580 what means decrease of more than 90% (Wachtel 2003: 157).

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generations of the descendants of conquistadors and first settlers grew up. Most of them had never been to Spain and perceived the metropolis as foreign country and peninsulares as representatives of foreign power, which was ruling and exploiting their country. We cannot forget that Creoles, although they were much more numerous than peninsulares and represented the economic base of viceroyalty,23 had very restricted access to the highest administrative posts of New Spain.24 It is natural that they started to see themselves as different in comparison with peninsulares and as such they started to look for their own symbol which would distinguish them from metropolis. Indian looking Virgin satisfied Creole ideas the best because of her appearance, connection to Mexico and its native inhabitants and last but not least because of the legend of her apparition which confirmed this connection. The search for distinctive supernatural symbol of new nation can be the reason and explanation why the story of apparition was first published only in the middle of seventeenth century and why the representatives of Creole ideology made her the central point and symbol of Creole emancipation. The geographical position of her shrine also contributed to her exceptionality. Situated very close to the capital of viceroyalty, she has always been closely connected with Mexico City it means with the center of power, politics, economics, and religion as well, because archbishop of Mexico City has been the head of Mexican church since the beginning of colonial era. Every new viceroy and archbishop (and other colonial officers and in general everyone) who was coming from Europe (or just from the port of Veracruz which was the principal port on the coast of Gulf of Mexico) to the capital of New Spain had to pass by Guadalupe shrine on Tepeyac and naturally stopped there to pay tribute to the Virgin (Taylor 1987: 12). Gravity and importance of the capital were logically transmitted to Guadalupe shrine and cult, and it was the advantage that no other Virgin had, nor Our Lady of Remedies whose statue was located in Metropolitan cathedral25 in the center in those times and not on such important route. It means that 23 They were the owners of means of production. The economy of Spanish viceroyalties

in New World, of course, consisted in the work of the Natives and African slaves. 24 For example, only four of 170 viceroys of New Spain were Creoles (Anderson 2006 [1983: 56). 25 In 1810, it was moved to Naucalpan west of Mexico City (today urbanistic part of the city but administratively belongs to the state of Estado de México, not to Mexico City) where it has been until now.

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all people who were coming to Mexico City first passed by Guadalupe shrine on the outskirts of the city. Apart from it, Virgin of Remedies did not help to stop the epidemic of matlazahuatl. But what is more important, she was considered by the Creoles (and by the peninsulares as well) to be the Virgin of Spaniards protecting the conquistadors in the battles with Indians; meanwhile, Virgin of Guadalupe was perceived by them as protector of Indians and of Mexicans in general.26 Four Guadalupe gospels provided the Creoles with codified Guadalupe texts, which, thanks to the technology of printing, could be and were reproduced and distributed in whole New Spain, which, as I remarked above, gradually stopped to be both New Spain and Spain and was becoming Mexico. Peninsulares were more devotees of traditional Marian images known to them from their home; meanwhile, Creoles were ostentatiously worshipping local dark27 skin Virgin. To distinguish themselves and their motherland from the peninsulares and from Spain, the Creoles, although marked by the feeling of superiority toward the Indians, started to rehabilitate and subsequently glorify pre-Hispanic past of their motherland. At first sight, it seems to be a paradox, but the glorification of Indian past and marginalization of Indian present became integral part of Mexican national ideology (two sides of the same coin). Especially, the heroic fight of the Aztecs against conquistadors became the part of Creole nationalism28 embodied in their own resistance to the Spaniards. It also led to the connection of glorious Indian past with for them equally glorious Creole present by means of local Virgin who herself chose their country.29 Declaration of her as patroness of Mexico City in 1737 and as patroness of

26 And it is necessary to emphasize again and again that Creole considered themselves to be Mexicans and not Spaniards. 27 Moreno in Spanish. That is why Our Lady of Guadalupe is very often called Morena or Morenita (diminutive). 28 The “aztequism” (Mácha 2010: 120) is really omnipresent in national ideology of modern Mexico, and sometimes, it looks like not only the contemporary Indians do not exist but other pre-Hispanic native cultures as well. 29 Non Fecit Taliter Omni Nationi (He has not done thus for any other nation), verse from psalm 147 was used already by Florencia in his Estrella del norte de México (Florencia 1895: 132). By this verse, which is, of course, related to Israel, Florencia intended to put his country and nation (it means Creoles) on a par with Israel because God revealed Virgin Mary to no one but Mexicans. Since then, this verse is used by representatives of Mexican church as the evidence of the fact that Virgin Mary herself chose Mexico (Hlúšek 2014: 34).

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whole New Spain in 1747 confirmed by the pope Benedict XIV30 in 1754 was logical outcome of Creole effort for emancipation (Hlúšek 2014: 44). Spreading of Our Lady of Guadalupe´s patronage is the example on which it is possible to demonstrate the gradual growth of her importance as well as the territory where her cult spread. At the beginning, it was only Mexico City and its surroundings and it took almost 200 years until it was extended and accepted outside Central Mexico. It was still closely connected to the capital as the center of the country what positively influenced the cult. But only in eighteenth century we can talk about spreading of the cult of Virgin of Guadalupe outside the center of the country, especially within the native communities which were traditionally orientated on their saint patrons. This process was marked by growing Creole emancipation in the spirit of which the Creoles were trying to establish Guadalupe cult in native environment, from which, according to the legend, it had come out and in which in reality it was not very known before (Taylor 1987: 14–15). The fact that originally Nahua goddess Tonantzin and Catholic Virgin Mary became the Virgin of the Maya, Zapoteco, Mixteco, Totonaco, and other native groups is the result of enforcing her cult by Creole church authorities from political center of the country (Mexico City) in eighteenth century and after successful war for independence in next century (Hlúšek 2014: 58). From this point of view, the coronation of her image in 1895, spreading of her feast day to whole Latin America by Leo XIII in 1900 and declaration of her to be the patroness of whole Latin America by Pius X in 1910 (Nebel 2002: 128) did not cause any surprise. In 1945, she was declared by Pius XII to be Empress of the Americas, and in the end, Juan Diego was canonized by John Paul II in 2002 (Hlúšek 2012: 68–69). During this time, Mexico gained independence (1821) and underwent turbulent development marked by political and economic liberalism, secularization and by Mexican Revolution (1910–1917). These events strengthened the significance of Virgin of Guadalupe (even in spite of the secularization of Mexican state), because after the war for independence there was nothing what could limit her dominance not only on religious field. As early as in the second half of seventeenth century, her importance started to penetrate into the social and political spheres and this process was much more intensified during the era of Bourbon 30 At the same time, he determined the date of her feast day on December 12 (as it is narrated in the legend) (Brading 2002: 213).

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dynasty which led dissatisfied Creoles to the war against metropolis. Our Lady of Guadalupe provided them with ideological and spiritual background in their struggle. On the eve of war for independence, Servando Teresa de Mier, Dominican, politician, philosopher, and ideologist of Mexican independence elaborated Guadalupe myth by declaration that Mexico had been converted to Christianity long time before the conquest by apostle Saint Thomas who had brought the image of TonantzinGuadalupe to Mexico as a symbol of his mission. Teresa de Mier by this way intentionally omitted Spaniards and ascribed their missionary role right to one of the Christ´s apostles. By this way, he connected Mexico directly with Christ and the role of Spaniards saw as unnecessary.31 Only the war for independence represented the final realization of the apocalyptic promise (Wolf 2008 [1958]: 164). At the turn of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Virgin of Guadalupe already represented whole Mexico and its inhabitants; in addition, her cult was also rooted even in native communities. As such in that time she was not only the Creole Virgin yet but the Mexican one in general identified with all inhabitants of Mexico regardless of their origin and social class. This position and significance predestined her to be patroness of the rebels and due to that their struggle was justified also on religious field because they were protected by patroness of the country herself. Thus, the war for independence put Our Lady of Guadalupe definitely on the pedestal of Mexican pantheon (Hlúšek 2014: 44). It is typical that in the first stage of the war the leaders of insurgent army were priests—Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos y Pavón, both of them later captured and executed. The priests were ideologists of Mexican nationalisms and Creole emancipation from seventeenth century and represented the most educated class of colonial society. It was them who were the bearers of Enlightenment ideas, especially Jesuits who educated the Creole elites and created appropriate space for their emancipation. Their expulsion in 1767 was taken by Creoles as unwarranted interference of Madrid in Mexican affairs and contributed to the development of Mexican patriotism (Eichlová 2010: 29). Apart from it exiled Jesuits of Creole origin (in Mexican case, e.g., Francisco Javier Clavijero) wrote down national histories of their motherlands by which they contributed to Creole nationalisms (Eichlová 2010: 37). Leaders of the rebels, especially Hidalgo, 31 We should keep in mind that Spaniards justified the conquest of New World by spreading of true faith—Christianity, better to say Catholicism.

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took the figure of Virgin of Guadalupe as their flag and never forgot to ascribe their victories to her. It is questionable to predicate the future of Guadalupe cult if the war for independence was not successful. However, the cult of Our Lady of Remedies can serve us as an example. She, as the patroness of peninsulares and royal army, was seen by the Creoles as the enemy of Virgin of Guadalupe. After the war, her cult declined what was in sharp contrast in comparison with Guadalupe cult which, on the contrary, flourished. Even though later it recovered, it cannot be compared anymore with the significance of the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Hlúšek 2014: 46). The independence was perceived by Creoles as fulfillment of the promise of supernatural mother about the liberation from authority of Spanish fathers-oppressors and returning of the land to chosen nation, election of which was manifested in the apparition of Virgin of Guadalupe on Tepeyac. Thus, the land of the supernatural mother was finally possessed by her rightful heirs and the awareness of the chosen nation together with their gained independence found their symbolic expression in a single master symbol of Mexican Virgin (Wolf 2008 [1958]: 164–165).

Instead of Conclusion It is not uninteresting that independent Mexico is declared as laic and secular republic32 where Catholic church lost its privileged position and also lot of properties. However, the position of Our Lady of Guadalupe was not touched by this policy. On the contrary, as the patroness and protector of the country, she represents one of the instruments of Mexicanization33 and as such she has been present also in official policy and ideology of the country. Even the turbulences of Mexican Revolution did not change this situation, on the contrary, as hundred years before she appeared on the standards of revolutionary armies of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. It is not surprising that revolutionaries as well as representatives of central power took refuge under the protection of Virgin of

32 So-called Law Juárez (Ley Juárez) declared in 1855 is considered to be the first step in secularization of Mexican state (Reyes Heroles 1974, part 3: 24). 33 I mean the creation of modern Mexican nation according to the example of national movements in Europe. According to the Mexican nationalist ideology, all classes of heterogeneous Mexican society should be incorporated into nation.

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Guadalupe (both were Mexicans). Although after the revolution anticlerical and leftish ideas took strong position in Mexican national policy, no government dared to touch the national symbol and its shrine. Cristero War (1926–1929)34 showed that anticlerical and antireligious attitudes also had their limits. Even though the mistrust to the clergy is very typical for the Mexicans of all origins, deep faith is typical for them as well. They are ready to defend it as part of their tradition and every attempt to violate it meets resistance (Masferrer Kan 1996: 204). Even the anticlerical and leftish policy of post-revolutionary Mexico did not make the position of Guadalupe cult weaker. Unshakeable position of Our Lady of Guadalupe found its expression also in fact that Mexicans were able to incorporate their national symbol even into this ideology and worker’s organizations of Mexico declared Virgin of Guadalupe to be the Queen of Labor in 1955 (Camacho de la Torre 2001: 107). It can be stated that creation of modern Mexican nation is intimately bound to Guadalupe identity of Mexicans because their collective awareness came out much more from their religious than political or ethnic consciousness. That is why the most appropriate way how to conclude this reflection is that before they became Mexicans, they identified themselves as the children of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Nebel 2002: 161).

References Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Belucz, Denis, Markéta Kˇrížová. 2010. Církve a mexický stát v 19. a 20. století. In Mexiko – 200 let nezávislosti, ed. Vendula Hingarová, Sylvie Kvˇetinová, and Gabriela Eichlová, 47–67. Praha: Pavel Mervart. Brading, David A. 2002. La Virgen de Guadalupe. Imagen y tradición. México: Taurus. Brenišínová, Monika, Markéta Kˇrížová, and Kateˇrina Bˇrezinová. 2018. Dˇejiny umˇení Latinské Ameriky. Praha: Nakladatelství Karolinum. Camacho de la Torre, María Cristina. 2001. Fiesta de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Celebración, historia y tradición mexicana. México: CONACULTA.

34 Civil war or rebellion of Mexican people, mostly rural, defending Catholic faith and church against anticlerical and antireligious post-revolutionary government of President Elias Plútarco Calles (Belucz and Kˇrížová 2010: 55–56).

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Eichlová, Gabriela. 2010. Intelektuální pˇredpoklady boje za mexickou nezávislost. In Mexiko – 200 let nezávislosti, ed. Hingarová, Vendula, Kvˇetinová, Sylvie, Gabriela Eichlová, 27–45. Praha: Pavel Mervart. Escamilla González, Juan. 2010. Yolloxóchitl y flor de lis. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, patrona de la monarquía española (1710–1810). In Madre de la Patria. La Imagen Guadalupana en la Historia Mexicana, ed. Martha Reta Hernández, 19–50. México: Museo de Basílica de Guadalupe. Florencia, Francisco de. 1895. La Estrella del Norte de México. Historia de la milagrosa imagen de María Stma. de Guadalupe. Guadalajara: Imprenta de J. Cabrera a Carmen y Maestranza. Hlúšek, Radoslav. 2012. Genéza a význam kultu Panny Márie Guadalupskej. In Ethnologia Actualis Slovaca 12 (2): 60–75. Hlúšek, Radoslav. 2014. Nican mopohua. Domorodý príbeh o zjavení Panny Márie Guadalupskej. Bratislava: Chronos. Lafaye, Jacques. 2006. Quetzalcóatl y Guadalupe. La formación de la conciencia nacional. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mácha, Pˇremysl. 2010. Mexický paradox: Obraz a realita v promˇenách postavení domorodých obyvatel Mexika. In Mexiko – 200 let nezávislosti, ed. Hingarová, Vendula, Kvˇetinová, Sylvie, Gabriela Eichlová, 113–129. Praha: Pavel Mervart. Masferrer Kan, Elio. 1996. Religions in Contact or the Contact of Religions. In Religions in Contact, ed. Iva Doležalová, Bˇretislav Horyna, and Dalibor Papoušek, 203–207. Brno: Masarykova univerzita. Maza, Francisco de la. 1992. El guadalupanismo mexicano. México: Fondo de cultura económica. Nebel, Richard. 2002. Santa María Tonantzin Virgen de Guadalupe. Continuidad y transformación religiosa en México. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Noguez, Xavier. 1995. Documentos guadalupanos. Un estudio sobre las fuentes de información tempranas en torno a las mariofanías en el Tepeyac. México: El Colegio Mexiquense, A.C. and Fondo de Cultura Económica. O´Gorman, Edmundo. 2001. Destierro de sombras. Luz en el origen de la imagen y culto de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe del Tepeyac. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Poole, Stafford, C.M. 1995. Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 . Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Reyes Heroles, Jesús. 1974. El liberalismo mexicano. Tomo III. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Sahagún, Bernardino de. 2000. Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España. Tomo III. México: CONACULTA. Salas Cuesta, Marcela, María Elena Salas Cuesta. 2013. Cayetano Cabrera Quintero, El Escudo de Armas de México y el matlazáhuatl. In Arqueología Mexicana 21 (123): 78–83.

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Sousa, Lisa, Stafford Poole, C.M. and James Lockhart. 1998. The Story of Guadalupe. Luis Laso de la Vega´s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Taylor, William B. 1987. Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain. An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion. In American Ethnologist 14 (1): 9–33. Turner, Victor, Edith Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Wachtel, Nathan. 2003. Los indios y la conquista española. In América Latina en la época colonial. 1. España y América de 1492 a 1808, ed. Leslie Bethel, 153–185. Barcelona: Crítica. Wolf, Eric R. 2008 [1958]. The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol. In A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, ed. Michael Lambek, 160–166. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Web Page https://www.inegi.org.mx/temas/religion/.

CHAPTER 9

The History and Present of Japanese Nationalism: Was Alive Yesterday, Is Alive Today Axel Berkofsky

Introduction Former Japanese Prime Shinzo Abe is a nationalist and revisionist who wholeheartedly1 believes that Japan was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War II. Abe (who governed in Japan from 2012 to 2020), however, is not only a man of words but also one of action who was dreaming of turning Japan into what he and his revisionist and ultranationalist followers hoped will turn Japan from an ‘emasculated’ and ‘weak’ 1 Whether Abe really believes that Japan was not the aggressor but instead the victim of the Pacific War is impossible to verify. The fact remains that the historical facts leave no doubts whatsoever that Tokyo was the perpetrator and the aggressor. Those who claim something else simply display an enormous level of ignorance.

A. Berkofsky (B) Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2_9

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into a truly ‘independent’, ‘dignified’ and ‘strong’ country (Berger 2014). That sounds very ‘dramatic’ but also very awkward. In fact, maybe the former Japanese Prime Minister has somehow missed that, but Japan is already of all of that since the country was transformed from a militarist dictatorship into a pacifist and democratic country in 1947. For decades after the war, Japanese-style nationalism was propagated by a small group of individuals and intellectuals who more often than not came across as a bunch of regulars talking and living out their nationalist and revisionist fantasies in closed-door meetings drinking sake and chanting ‘banzai’ (Conroy 1995). They made some nationalist and revisionist noise every once in a while, but did not get much and/or sustainable support from the country’s political mainstream (Shad 2014). Unfortunately, as will be shown below, that is different today. Nationalists and revisionists in Japan today have added historical revisionism to their repertoire, using militarist wartime propaganda, which in essence suggests that Japan fought the Pacific War in ‘self-defense’ fighting against Western imperialists and colonialists occupying and dominating Asia. This nonsensical narrative is supported and further reinforced by the claim that Japan and its political and military elites were not perpetrators but instead victims of the Pacific War. The scholar Jeff Kingston writes that nationalism in Japan today is embedded in the framework of rhetoric on national identity and values which propagate the (alleged) glories of Imperial Japan. However, luckily there is resistance from within—in fact, imperial resistance, as Kingston explains. Japanese Emperor Akihito,2 Kingston writes, has ‘emphatically distanced himself from that neonationalist agenda during the three decades of his reign.’ Indeed, in 2015 on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender, the Japanese Emperor reminded the Japanese people—and he clearly included the Prime Minister and his revisionist followers—to undertake serious efforts to learn from history. To make it clear that he does not share the revisionists’ false claims that Japan was a victim as opposed to perpetrator in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the Emperor in his 2015 speech mentioned the so-called Manchurian Incident . ‘I think it is most important for us to take this opportunity to study and learn from the history of this war, starting with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, as we consider the future direction of our country.’ That is significant

2 Now former Japanese Emperor. He abdicated in April 2019.

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as the Manchurian Incident of 1931 is the beginning of Japan attacking and occupying China.3 By mentioning the 1931 Manchurian Incident , Akihito refused to subscribe himself to Japanese revisionists’ nonsensical claim that Japan fought a war of self-defense, aimed at what Japanese revisionists refer to as ‘Pan Asian liberation’, i.e., the alleged liberation of Asia from Western imperialism and colonialism. The Japanese Prime Minister, unfortunately, could not disagree more with the Emperor. Abe, Jeff Kingston writes, ‘seeks to rectify the humiliations of the US occupation4 , an abiding nationalist goal that sits uncomfortably with the client state role Tokyo has accepted as the quid pro quo for US security guarantees.’ Indeed, while Abe publicly gives himself obediently committed to the security alliance with Washington (accompanied by the stationing of 50.000 US military troops on Japanese territory), the presence of US soldiers on Japanese soil is or should be—at least from a revisionist’s point of view—the very symbol of Japan not being a truly independent country. While Japanese nationalists and revisionists must be aware of that obvious contradiction, they seem to have chosen to ignore that contradiction, albeit certainly with a ‘heavy heart’ due to ‘tactical’ reasons (Leheny 2019).

Re-writing and Falsifying History The central element of nationalist and revisionist rhetoric and writing is the attempt to re-write, i.e., falsify, Japan’s wartime past. Since the 1990s, an ever-increasing number of revisionist scholars, intellectuals and Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) politicians have demanded to change the historical narrative that portrays Japan as a perpetrator of World War II. In other words: demands to whitewash Japanese World War II history, turning the country from a perpetrator into a victim of the Pacific War. Who are these nationalists and revisionists who occupy Japanese government ministries, the parliament and a number of think tanks and research institutes in Japan? Among them are self-declared scholars and 3 On September 18, 1931, Japanese soldiers detonated a small quantity of dynamite close to a railway line owned by Japanese South Manchuria Railway and blamed China for the explosion as a pretext to stage a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. Half a year later, Tokyo established the puppet state ‘Manchukuo’ (‘The Land of the Manchu’) in Manchuria. 4 Japan was occupied by US military from 1945 to 1952.

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historians who enthusiastically practice historical revisionism damaging the country’s reputation as a liberal and accountable democracy. Ironically, many of those scholars and historians are not at all historians (by training) but rather self-appointed historians, completely unfamiliar with the basic instruments and methods of historiography: typically the kind of historiography facilitating the basis for accurate and verifiable facts and historical science. What we see in Japan today is also referred to as ‘neonationalism’, which until a few years ago was largely confined to the very margins of political debates in Japan. In other words: there was nationalism and ‘neo-nationalism’, but essentially nationalists talked to each other over (too many) drinks and did not ‘go public’ with their ‘opinions.’ Back then proponents of ‘neo-nationalism’ Japanese-style drove around downtown Tokyo in black trucks making lot of noise about re-visiting Japan’s World War II record and re-installing the Japanese Emperor as the head of state (Postel-Vinay 2017). Speeches and nationalist and/or revisionist sound bites were accompanied by chanting and songs glorifying Japanese imperialism and militarism. However, the Japanese ‘black shirts’ in their vans were typically able to attract only very limited interest when noisily cruising through downtown Tokyo. They always looked a bit lost and the number of people who stopped and listened to Japan’s ‘neonationalists’ dressed in black and/or uniform was usually very small. And while Japan’s ‘neo-nationalists’ have undoubtedly more followers today who openly put their support on display, it is not accurate to conclude and fear that ‘neo-nationalism’ Japanese-style has or is about to become a mass movement in Japan (unlike ‘Trumpism’ in the US or anti-immigration movements and parties like the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany or the Lega led by Italy’s anti-immigration and xenophobic former Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini). What makes the Japanese5 version of nationalism, ‘neo-nationalism’ and xenophobia different from their counterparts in Germany, Italy, Hungary, the US, Hungary and Poland is that ‘history’ and not the so-called liberal establishment or liberal elites is the central issue Japanese nationalists and revisionists focus on, i.e., complain about and protest against. ‘History’ in the sense that Japan is—at least in the view of Japanese revisionists—a victim of the so-called victors’ justice. ‘Victors’ justice’ as—at least as far as Japanese nationalists are concerned—practiced during the ‘Tokyo Tribunals’ which indicted

5 The same is true for nationalism and/or xenophobia in China.

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and convicted Japanese wartime political leaders. The sort of tribunal, Japanese nationalists and revisionists today complain, convicted Japanese wartime leaders of crimes which only became crimes through and during the court proceedings and prosecution.6 Hence, it is no surprise that Japanese xenophobia is mainly directed at foreign nationals from countries, which were partially or fully occupied by Japan during World War II: China (partially) and South Korea (fully). Chinese and South Koreans are consequently in nationalist and revisionist circles referred to as ‘historical adversaries’ and hence have no right to reside in Japan.7

Nationalism Taking Off in the 1990s and The Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) In 1997, an organization was established in Japan to provide students with an allegedly ‘correct’ version of Japanese World War II history: The Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho Tsukurukai). That society produced its own history schoolbooks for middle schools. That, however, did not—to put it bluntly—go too well. In the early 2000s, attempts by the Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho Tsukurukai to introduce its own history and civic textbooks to Japanese middle schools resulted in all but complete failure. Less than one percent of Japanese middle schools at the time decided to use the group’s revisionist textbooks, which in turn led Tsukuru-kai to split up. In 2006, the society’s former third president and law professor Hidetsugu Yagi formed his own organization—the Nihon Kyoiku Saisei Kiko (Foundation to Revive Japanese Education). That foundation set up another society in 2007, the Kyokasho Kaizen no Kai (Society for the Improvement of Textbooks ), again attempting to introduce revisionist textbooks 6 The alleged crimes, committed by Japan’s political and militarist leaders and soldiers of Japan’s Imperial Army, the factually ridiculous explanation offered by Japan’s revisionists goes, were not crimes at the time they were committed. Against the background of the well-documented brutality committed by Japan’s Imperial Army (e.g. during the 6-week siege of the Chinese capital Nanjing in December 1937, during which up to 250.000 Chinese civilians were tortured, raped and killed), it is no surprise that complaints about Japan being a victim of ‘victor’s justice’ sound plausible only to Japanese revisionists. 7 Currently, roughly 825.000 ethnic Koreans live in Japan. Close to 75% of them were born and raised in Japan. The number of Chinese citizens living in Japan today is roughly 700.000. The number of Chinese citizens residing in Japan has increased enormously over the last 25–30 years. In 1990, only 150.000 Chinese people lived in Japan.

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in Japanese schools. Those textbooks included instructions on how to educate Japanese schoolchildren on ‘patriotic education.’ In essence, the sort of education that teaches Japanese schoolchildren to learn to whitewash Japanese World War II militarism. However, the attempt to indoctrinate Japanese schoolchildren with revisionist propaganda again ended in failure as only a very small number of Japanese high schools chose to use those schoolbooks. Tellingly, all of the leading figures of the above-mentioned Society for History Textbook Reform were also members of the Liberal-Democratic Party’s so-called History Examination Committee (rekishi kento iinkai) founded in 1993 (Shinzo Abe at the time was a leading promoter of that committee). Among others, the committee assigned itself the mission to reject the statements made by former Prime Minister Mirohito Hosokawa8 who in the early 1990s called Japan’s Pacific War a ‘war of aggression.’ In a breathtakingly ridiculous denial of historical facts, the committee claimed in one of his publications that the Manchurian Incident of 19319 ; the ‘China Incident’10 and/or the ‘Greater Asian War’ were not aggressive Japanese attacks but rather ‘policies of survival’ and ‘self-defense’, defending Japan and the rest of Asia against the ‘white race’ and European colonialism. Also in 1997, the parliamentarians Nakagawa Shoichi and Abe Shinzo put together a group of revisionist politicians with whom they launched the ‘Young Parliamentarians Association Considering Japan’s Future and History Education.’ In May 1997 then, the Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) took Japanese nationalism and revisionism to the next level. The Nippon Kaigi was established as an influential and aggressive lobby group that brings together ‘neo-nationalist’ self-declared scholars (they are often referred to as ‘intellectuals’ in the press, but there is arguably very little of intellectual value in what they say and write), and (seemingly bored) business and media leaders (Surak 2019). Today, Nippon Kaigi has roughly 35.000 members and scholars who have studied the group conclude that it takes pride in his policy to be secretive, perceiving itself as a noble quasi secret society operating in Japan’s best interest.11 In reality,

8 Prime Minister 1993/1994. 9 Japan’s decision to occupy and colonize Manchuria in the early 1930s. 10 Japan’s attack of China in 1937. 11 Tellingly, The Nippon Kaigi webpage is only available in Japanese.

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however, the Nippon Kaigi’s core members have given themselves the mission to whitewash Japanese wartime history and crimes and there is— to put it this way—arguably nothing noble about them. To be sure, they are hiding behind harmless-sounding slogans that are hard to disagree with: ‘We, the Nippon Kaigi, are a civic group that presents policy proposals and promotes a national movement for restoring a beautiful Japan and building a proud nation.’ It is hard to disagree and/or dislike the objective of ‘building a proud nation’ or restoring a ‘beautiful Japan.’ However, listening to the kind of speeches and declaration (noisily and aggressively) uttered by Nippon Kaigi members suggests that the word ‘proud’ as in ‘proud country’ stands for ‘nationalist’ and ‘in denial of its wartime history’ while the word ‘beautiful’ as in ‘beautiful Japan’ stands for ‘racially homogenous’ and ‘xenophobe.’ Shinzo Abe is Nippon Kaigi’s honorary chairman and arguably the group’s ‘poster boy-in-chief.’ Obviously, Abe’s membership and support for the group of die-hard nationalists have supported Nippon Kaigi and its ill-fated cause over recent years. In other words: whereas a few years ago, Nippon Kaigi was considered a group of misguided nationalists who spend their evenings fantasizing about re-stalling Japan’s Imperial Army with the Japanese Emperor as its commander-in-chief, today numerous members of the Japanese government cabinet members are members of Nippon Kaigi (McNeill 2015; Mizohata 2016). Roughly 40 percent of the members of the Japanese parliament (Lower and Upper Houses) and 22 out of 24 of Abe’s 2018 cabinet members were members of Nippon Kaigi. The group is obviously also an ardent defender of Japanese politicians’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine (located in central Tokyo12 ), the last resting place for a number of convicted A-class criminals of war. Finally, Abe and his followers in the Nippon Kaigi and elsewhere advocate the redefinition of Japan’s contemporary identity, propagating an identity that is free from feelings of guilt about the country’s World War II militarism. This is accompanied by the promotion of traditional religious beliefs and patriarchal family values.

12 The Yasukuni Shrine is the last resting place of 14 A-class war criminals, including Iwane Matsui, the officer responsible for the ’Nanjing Massacre’ during which up to 250.000 Chinese civilians were massacred by Japan’s Imperial Army.

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Denying the Undeniable Japan’s revisionists, of course, deny that Japan has attacked China in 1937, deny the ‘Nanjing Massacre’ of December 1937 and claim that Japan fought a just ‘war of liberation’ to ‘liberate’ Asia from Western colonial/imperial powers. To be sure, none of the Asian countries Japan was allegedly seeking to ‘liberate’ during the Pacific War appreciated Japan’s ‘liberation war’, mainly because ‘liberation’ Japanese-style more looked like bad old militarism, imperialism and colonialism—to everybody except obviously today’s Japanese revisionist and ultranationalist circles. Japanese nationalists and revisionists—arguably like their counterparts in many other countries—are unteachable and Japanese revisionists will continue to do what they do best: trash talk in defiance of verifiable facts, figures and ‘conventional’ good sense. When, e.g., former Japanese Defence Minister Tomomi Inada13 was confronted with questions on whether Japanese wartime policies must be referred to as ‘aggressive’ and whether Japan attacking China in 1937 qualifies as ‘invasion’, she at the time answered that it is up to historians to judge on these and other questions related to the quality of Japanese ‘contributions’ to World War II. Sometimes Japanese revisionists speak of the alleged need to study more documents to be able to come to scientific conclusions on whether Japan was an aggressor or—as nationalists suggest—a victim of the war in the Pacific. Only that historians have of course done all of that numerous times and Japanese ‘neo-nationalists’—including former Prime Minister Abe—asking for more evidence sounds like a broken record playing the same lame old revisionist song over and over again.

‘Post-memory Generation’ The taboo of nationalism in Japan, Jeff Kingston writes, is disappearing among what he and others call the ‘post-memory’ generations (Kingston 2019). Indeed, Japanese nationalists and revisionists typically complain

13 Who in July 2017 was forced to resign over allegations that she helped to cover up details of the Japanese peacekeeping mission in South Sudan. Under the Japanese peacekeeping law adopted in 1992, Japanese UN peacekeepers are obliged to withdraw and return to Japan in case of the outbreak of military hostilities between the parties to the conflict. That was the case in South Sudan, but the Japanese Ministry of Defence under Inada’s leadership attempted to keep the outbreak of fighting between government forces and rebels in South Sudan secret.

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that ‘Japan is tired of apologizing,’ which sounds ironic when the country’s revisionists have a long time ago concluded that there is nothing to apologize about in the first place. The scholar Akiko Takenaka points out that the majority of Japanese revisionist scholars and politicians belong to the generations who know World War II through what is referred to as ‘post-memory’, i.e., a memory without direct experience of the war (Takenaka 2016). Takenaka concludes that for Japan’s post-memory generation ‘the inherited trauma of wartime hardship, then, is deeply intertwined with a pressure of feeling guilt. In attempts to rectify the guilt and the resulting trauma, many have come to embrace the victim’s history, in which at least ordinary Japanese are not to be held responsible.’ Revisionism hence as a defense mechanism displaying weakness and lack of self-confidence among policymakers like Shinzo Abe and his revisionist entourage, as Joseph Nye argued already in 2012 (Nye 2012). And then there are the historical falsities and myths around the Japanese Emperor. Nationalists and revisionists often point out that the Japanese Emperor Hirohito was not indicted and is therefore14 not guilty of Japan’s actions and policies during World War II. This in turn means—as the nationalists see it—that the Japanese people—the Emperor’s ‘subjects’ at the time—cannot be guilty either. Hence, the Japanese people—like the Japanese Emperor—became ‘victims’ of World War II and are hence not obliged to apologize for Japanese World War II militarism. Obviously, Japanese revisionists ignore the fact that the Emperor was not indicted thanks to US efforts to resist pressure from the other Allied Powers and China to indict the Emperor and indeed other members of the Imperial family. That took place not because the US and its representative in Japan General Douglas MacArthur thought the Japanese Emperor was innocent but because Washington needed the Emperor to order the Japanese people to tolerate and indeed embrace US occupation policies in Japan. 14 To be sure, many Japanese people—after the end of World War II and today—do not share the conclusion that the Emperor must have been innocent as he was not indicted for his role in Japanese World War II militarism. In fact, there are postwar opinion polls conducted by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun clearly indicating that a majority of the Japanese people understood and acknowledged the Emperor’s responsibility for Japanese World War II militarism and imperialism. For arguably the best account of how Japanese politicians did and (often) did not come to terms with guilt and responsibility in postwar Japan see Dower, John, Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Aftermath of World War II; Penguin Books London 1999.

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Socially Acceptable Xenophobia The Manga Ken Kanryu (Hating the Korean Wave Manga) first published in 2005 preceded a growing number of similar publications, whose main or indeed only message was the invitation and request to despise everything Korean and/or Chinese in Japan. In Japanese bookstores today, the number of books and magazines which feature anti-China and/or anti-Korea sentiments and messages has increased and those who consume such kind of ‘literature’ have, as the scholar Koichi Nakano explains, turned to joining anti-China and/or anti-Korea demonstrations organized and staged by nationalist and revisionist groups (Nakano 2016). The scholar Rumi Sakamoto points out that these are the same people and ‘ordinary’ Japanese, who until recently limited themselves to posting anti-Korea and anti-China messages on the internet (Sakamoto 2011). That invites the conclusion that protesting against the presence of Korean and/or Chinese citizens has in Japan over recent years become socially (more) acceptable, as such protests and discrimination against foreigners are endorsed (or at least not opposed) by parts of Japanese nationalist policymaking elites. That in turn does not mean that Japanese nationalists are in the process of turning masses of ordinary Japanese citizens into furious and violent anti-China and anti-Korea protesters, but the trend of being able to mobilize citizens who until a few years felt that they had to limit themselves to spreading intolerance and hatred in anonymous and/or obscure chat-rooms is nonetheless preoccupying. Latent racism and sentiments of alleged cultural and racial superiority have always been present among Japan’s political elites (above all among politicians and policymakers from the LDP), but it was the first time in Japanese postwar history that Japan’s political leaders—including the former Prime Minister and many of his cabinet ministers—were very openly and through the megaphone noisily embracing xenophobia and nationalism/revisionism (often disguised and distorted as ‘healthy’ patriotism).15 Today, Japan is certainly not alone claiming that what in reality 15 To be sure, Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi in the 1950s and Prime Minister Yasuhiro

Nakasone in the 1980s were nationalists and historical revisionists alright, but they were— at least in public—obliged to suppress their nationalist and revisionist instincts as Japan’s political mainstream was not interested in and indeed opposed to counterproductive nationalist and revisionist rhetoric and policies damaging Japanese interests and reputation abroad at the time.

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is nationalism paired more often than not with xenophobia and/or racism is instead ‘healthy patriotism’ and/or an expression of love for one’s country. If that sounds rather pathetic, it probably does because it indeed is and the term ‘patriotism’ is also used in Japan and elsewhere to convince and engage those who are prepared to be convinced that racism and xenophobia can be called ‘patriotism’ if the word ‘love’ is part of the formula. That is as nonsensical as it gets but has done the trick convincing a group of Japanese people that they are feeling ‘patriotic’ when in reality they sound like racists.

What Do They Want? The historian Sven Saaler writes that Japanese journals known for their nationalist and revisionist propaganda regularly publish so-called special issues (tokushuigo) covering what revisionists call ‘history wars’ (‘rekishi senso’) (Saaler 2016). Revisionists are—at least so it seems to the sober outside observer—at war with reality and verifiable historical facts and data. Japanese nationalists and revisionists are—unlike their counterparts in Europe or the US—much more interested in ‘correcting’ and ‘reinventing’ what is referred to as the ‘self’ as opposed to bashing the ‘other.’ In other words, Japan’s nationalists are much busier re-inventing, re-writing and whitewashing Japanese World War II militarism than, e.g., rendering the life for ethnic Korean and Chinese citizens uncomfortable in Japan. While Japanese nationalists and revisionists claim to be fighting against a ‘masochistic view of history’, what they mean and do is attempting to whitewash and/or deny the crimes committed by Japan’s Imperial Army all over Asia during World War II (Danks 2019). Or: Japan’s nationalists and revisionists urge Japan to stop beating itself up over its World War II militarism and imperialism, as Japan was in reality fighting a ‘war of liberation’ in Asia, liberating Asia from European colonial powers. One might be tempted to say and hope that such views are shared by only a small minority of the Japanese public and electorate, but the fact that Shinzo Abe—together with many of his cabinet ministers over the years—confirmed the alleged ‘accuracy’ of such views— sometimes in public, sometimes behind closed doors—is nonetheless preoccupying. In fact, a disgrace for a democratic country, whose politicians have over decades resisted the temptation to re-visit Japan’s wartime history in order to please a small minority of nationalist and revisionist politicians and scholars. However, doing just that has entered the political

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mainstream in today’s Japan and while a former Prime Minister, minister or high-ranking politician of the ruling party in Germany would not be able to voice views that suggest that Nazi Germany was somehow or in parts fighting a ‘just’ war in Europe from 1939 to 1945, Japanese Prime Minister Abe and his followers allowed themselves to voice the claim that Japan’s war in the Asia–Pacific was not one of aggression but rather a war of defense (against Western colonial powers). Finally, Japanese revisionists insist that the Japanese Emperor must be re-installed as head of state16 and claim that Japan has been ‘emasculated’ ever since it was forced to accept the judgments of the ‘International Military Tribunal for the Far East’, also known as the ‘Tokyo Trials.’ Constitutional revision and getting rid of the US-imposed constitution are—at least as far as Japan’s revisionists are concerned—therefore an act of ’patriotism’ to restore Japan’s full independence and sovereignty. That is one (distorted) way of putting it and one can be forgiven for concluding that Japanese hardcore revisionists tend to create and operate in their own parallel universe(s).

Fully ‘Back’ in 2020 The deadline for constitutional revision, Abe announced numerous times, would be the year 2020 when Tokyo was scheduled to host the Summer Olympics. As we know, that did not happen. Instead, the global pandemic happened and the 2020 Olympics were postponed and held in 2021. However, in empty stadiums as no domestic or foreign spectators were—due to coronavirus restrictions—allowed to watch the games. What Abe and his fellow revisionists wanted at the time was to revise Japan’s war-renouncing Article 9 of the constitution the occupying US ‘imposed’ onto Japan in 1947.17 And for Abe hosting the Olympics in 2020 was clearly not only about sports but an event displaying alleged evidence that Japan had returned to what he announced is ‘great power status.’ ‘I foresee that by 2020 constitutional revision will be done. At 16 Who became a ‘symbol’ of state with no political powers when Japan was de facto obliged to adopt a US-drafted postwar constitution. 17 Japan’s postwar constitution was drafted by the US occupying forces and the

Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, the US Navy general Douglas MacArthur who ordered his staff to make a ‘pacifist’ country out of Japan through the introduction of a war-renouncing clause. That would become the constitution’s Article 9, for Japanese nationalists and revisionists the very symbol of Japan’s lack of independence and sovereignty.

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that stage, I want Japan to fully recover its prestige, and be recognized respectfully for its momentous contributions to world peace and stability in the region. Japan’s higher prestige will restore the balance power in the Asia region.’ Again: that did not happen and it would not have happened even without the global pandemic. Abe’s rhetoric was always overly grandiose, the sort of rhetoric that sounds rather pathetic and does not catch up with reality. Hence, ironically, Japan under Abe—somehow like did China in 2008—was planning to exploit the Olympic Games for a political purpose. For Beijing in 2008, the Olympic Games were meant to be the confirmation that the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party alone was able to organize and host the Olympic Games and present China as a country looking eye to eye with other major countries, above all the US. For Japan, hosting the Olympics was in Abe’s view the event to re-install Japan’s ‘prestige’ and standing as a ‘major country.’ In the Japanese case, the observer outside of Japanese hard core nationalist and revisionist circles cannot but wonder what Japan had in Abe’s view to recover from and how the Prime Minister defined the term ‘prestige’ in this context. Abe, of course, had the answer. Many times in the past has Abe announced to end what he refers to as the ‘postwar regime’ in Japan in order to make Japan ‘strong’ again. This sounded as awkward as it gets and while no serious political scientist or historian would support the claim that Japanese domestic and foreign policies were ever defined or restricted by what Abe and his followers call ‘postwar’ regime, Japanese nationalists and revisionists continue to believe and propagate just that. Further, re-arming Japan and terminating Japan’s status as US ‘client state’ are part of this as far as Japan’s revisionists are concerned (Hashimoto 2016). However, Abe and like-minded Japanese nationalists are very incoherent and simply contradictory: on the one hand, they want Tokyo to become ‘fully independent’ not having to rely on Washington for military protection, while on the other hand they did not oppose to Japan remaining an obedient and reliable junior partner of the security alliance with the US over the decades. If Abe were really committed to reducing Tokyo’s dependence on the US, he would have taken steps to reduce that dependence (by, e.g., obliging Washington to reduce its military presence in Japan).

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Revisionist in-Chief: Shinzo Abe As awkward as it sounded back in 2019, Abe at the time was as mentioned above planning to bring an end to the ‘postwar regime,’ as he calls the political, social and educational system in Japan shaped by the reforms introduced by the Allied occupation between 1945 and 1952. Most notably, he and his like-minded followers wanted a re-interpretation of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial (IMTFE), which at the time appropriately concluded that Japan fought a war of aggression in Asia from 1937 to 1945 (Certainly, what else could the IMTFE have concluded against the background of Japanese militarism and imperialism in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s). Over the years, Abe played a central role in numerous groups and organizations promoting revisionism and Japanese nationalism: The Diet Member Group to Consider Japan’s Future and History Textbooks, the Association of Diet Members Advocating Worship at the Yasukuni Shrine and others. In 2006, Abe published a book18 in which he advocated what he referred to as ‘open nationalism.’ In his book, Abe praised Japanese World War II wartime suicide attacks and defended the policies of his very controversial (and indeed criminal) grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a minister in the wartime cabinet of General Hideki Tojo. Furthermore, Abe has numerous times in the recent past publicly doubted that there is sufficient proof that Japan’s Imperial Army established a system of wartime military prostitution on the Korean Peninsula (occupied by Japan from 1910–1945), forcing women to prostitute themselves for Japanese soldiers. While there is indeed (more than) sufficient evidence that Japanese soldiers—with the approval of their superiors in the field and in Tokyo—made ‘sex slaves’ out of (mostly) thousands of Korean women, Abe and his fellow revisionists have at times suggested that Korean women voluntarily prostituted themselves for Japanese soldiers (in order to make some extra money as it is claimed in Japanese revisionist circles). In 1993, Abe joined the LDP’s ‘History and Deliberation Committee’, which in 1995 published a book calling Japan’s World War II policies and fighting a war of ‘self-defense.’ The committee denied that

18 Titled Utsukushi Kuni e (Towards a Beautiful Country). While it is a book, it is one from a scientific and academic perspective of very little (if any) added value and scientific quality. A essence a nice-sounding pamphlet Abe and his publisher had the courage to call ’book.’

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Japan committed war crimes like the ‘Nanjing Massacre’ and the forced recruitment of the aforementioned Korean so-called ‘Comfort Women.’ In February 1997, Abe formed a group with like-minded revisionists, the ‘Group of Young Diet Members for Consideration of Japan’s Future and History Education’ and became its executive director. Before being appointed as president of the LDP in 2012, Abe signed an ad in a New Jersey newspaper denying that Japan’s military forced Asian women to ‘work’ as prostitutes for the Imperial Army during World War II. In his 2006 book ‘Toward a Beautiful Nation,’ Abe complains about what he calls postwar ‘victor’s justice’ and claims that the conviction of Japanese citizens as war criminals by the Tokyo International War Crimes Tribunal was unlawful as those convicted were not war criminals under Japanese law at the time (Takahashi 2014). Finally, Abe is heading the group called Japan’s Rebirth (Sousei Nippon), a cross-party revisionist group of Japanese lawmakers. Abe’s first cabinet recommended in 2006 that ‘morals’ (‘dotoku’) were to become part of the school curriculum. Since 2007, learning materials have been distributed to elementary school students, which teach the (alleged) importance of ‘tradition’, ‘family’ and ‘manners.’ A reform of the Basic Education Law of Education in 2007 led to the inclusion of what in the law is referred to as the ‘deepening love for the nation’ as a central mission of Japanese school education. When Abe took office as Prime Minister for the second time in December 2012, he seemed determined to conclude his grandfather’s mission— Nobusuke Kishi, Japanese Prime Minister in the late 1950s (1957–1960)19 —to revise the Japanese constitution, which in his view ‘emasculated’ the country in 1947.20 That claim is especially cynical as Kishi—incriminated as A-class war criminal in 194521 —made a name for himself for having raped countless Chinese women when he was stationed in China (as Japanese ‘governor’ in annexed Manchuria) during the Sino-Japanese war. In 2015 the LDP under Abe established another internal committee to discuss ‘historical issues’, this time with the focus on the Tokyo War 19 A very controversial Prime Minister due to his role as Tokyo’s representative over-

seeing the economic development policies in the Japanese-occupied Manchuria throughout the 1930s. 20 When the constitution was adopted. 21 But not convicted, not least thanks to American/CIA intervention. That of course

came at a price. Kishi arguably became Washington’s useful idiot during his tenure as Prime Minister from 1957 to 1960.

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Crimes Trials, referred to by many LDP party members as an example of ‘victor’s justice’ on a disturbingly frequent basis. The committee reported directly to Abe. To be sure, as Prime Minister Abe has sought to avoid making his (most radical) personal views public and has more than once said that ‘judgments about history should be left to historians, and politicians should be humble when dealing with history.’22 However, this is an empty phrase with next to no meaning and repeating it constantly (as Abe and his like-minded followers do) does not make it more relevant, let alone accurate. Not least as historians all over the world have provided ample evidence for what Abe claims has yet to be proven.

Abe’s Friends and Cronies Abe has over the years cultivated ties with fellow and influential nationalists and revisionists and has during his second tenure as Prime Minister from 2012 to 2020 in bad old crony-style appointed a number of followers and friends to influential positions in politics and the media. Naoki Hyakuta, e.g., who was appointed to the board of governors of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK23 ) by Abe. He is the author of the very controversial novel Eien no Zero (The Eternal Zero) in which he claims that the ‘Nanjing Massacre’ of 1937 is a Chinese fabrication. Furthermore, he has more than once claimed that the US fabricated Japanese war crimes in order to cover up atrocities committed by US military during World War II. In 2013, Hyakuta published a book coauthored with Abe. This (so-called) book is a collection of conversations and essays previously published in Japanese weekly and monthly journals. The title of the book, which appears on the cover in English as ‘Japan! Be proud of Yourself in the ‘Center of the World’ urges Japan to overcome what the authors call Japan’s ‘postwar regime.’ After coming to office in December 2012, Abe appointed Hakubun Shimomura as Minister for Education, who in 2012 suggested to Abe to declare that the 1937 ‘Nanking Massacre’ did not take place and that Japan should stop ‘worrying’ about the aforementioned Korean ‘comfort women’, in his view a fabrication aimed at discrediting Japan. And then there is Yoshiko Sakurai, an important (and noisy) representative of Japan’s revisionist movement

22 He said that or something like that on various occasions over the years. 23 Japan’s public broadcasting company.

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since the 1990s. The former television announcer Sakurai is a frequent contributor to revisionist and nationalist journals and still appears on TV as a commentator, particularly on the private TV channel Sakura, a media outlet for a nationalist and revisionist audience. In 2007, Sakurai founded the ‘Japan Institute for National Fundamentals’ and like her fellow revisionists, she is opposed to what she and her followers call the ‘Tokyo Trial view of history.’ Almost needless to say that also she claims that the ‘Nanjing Massacre’ did not take place and that South Korean women were not forced to prostitute themselves for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Other well-known and notorious nationalists and revisionists are Kanji Nishio, scholar of German literature, the scholar Nobukatsu Fujioka, and manga writer Yoshinori Kobayashi (an particularly aggressive type) and business leader Maeno Toru (former CEO of Tokyu Agency). What all of them have in common is a very distorted view of universally acknowledged historical facts and a tendency to present their historical falsities in an aggressive and noisy manner. In essence, people who cannot be helped and are too bullheaded and more importantly too ignorant to give it a try educating themselves using scientific literature and sources as opposed to revisionist and nationalist propaganda and half knowledge.

Conclusion From a distance, Japanese revisionists look like a bunch of stick-in-themud self-declared scholars/historians and politicians who under normal circumstances cannot and should not expect to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, historical revisionism, xenophobia and campaigns to whitewash Japanese World War II militarism and imperialism have become part of the ‘under-normal-circumstances’ equation, so to speak. Or: Japanese revisionists are here to stay, will continue to talk crazy and hammer out historical, nationalist and revisionist rhetoric and propaganda. Fortunately, people—to put it bluntly— with half a brain in Japan can tell propaganda and historical nonsense from actual facts, and the large majority of the Japanese people are proud of and happy with Japan the way it is: pacifist, democratic and quite simply a well-functioning country with tens of millions of hardworking and diligent people. As elaborated above, many of those who next to Abe called the political shots in Japan from 2012–2020—above all former members of Abe’s cabinets—have armed themselves with nationalism and revision to fight a battle against

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good sense and the ability to understand and interprete history. Consequently, when Abe became Japan’s Prime Minister in December 2012, Japanese nationalists, ultra-nationalists and historical revisionists have had a field day. Their (much) more often than not very questionable and outright wrong views and interpretations of Japanese World War II militarism and imperialism have since then made ‘impressive’ comebacks in Japan. Claims—voiced by Shinzo Abe on various occasions in the past— that Japanese World War II militarism and colonialism should be referred to as a ‘war of liberation’ liberating Asia from Western colonial powers and calls to replace the country’s US-imposed postwar constitution with a ‘truly’ Japanese constitution without a war-renouncing clause have— at least within limits—become socially acceptable in Japan. The good news for those who think that Japan’s war-renouncing constitution has served the country’s interests very well over the decades is that constitutional revision any time soon continues to be very unlikely as the Japanese public and electorate do not share the revisionists’ obsession with constitutional revision to make a ‘truly independent’ country out of Japan (Berkofsky 2013). As elaborated above, ‘historical revisionists’ want to change Japan’s educational system in general and replace current history school textbooks with more ‘patriotic’ textbooks in particular. The way history is taught in Japan today, they claim, imposes a ‘masochistic’ view of Japanese history onto Japanese students, allegedly depriving them of their right and duty to be proud of Japan. That is not only nonsensical but also somehow ironic as the Japanese people have had very many things to be proud in postwar Japan. The country has become a very prosperous democracy with a hard-working working population, which turned a devastated country into the world’s second biggest economy in record time. When propagating the above-mentioned historical revisionism, Abe and his followers are in essence—at least for now—preaching to the converted, i.e., talking to those who are already supporting their nationalist and revisionist views and policies. Consequently, Abe and his followers’ attempts to whitewash Japanese World War II militarism and colonialism are not only a waste of resources and political energy but arguably also undemocratic as such views and policies interest only a small fraction of the Japanese public and electorate. By the time of this writing (early 2022) Shinzo Abe is no longer Japanese Prime Minister and his successors—Yoshihide Suga and current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida - refrained from making historical revisionism a central part of their respective policy agendas. Good.

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References Berger, Thomas U. 2014. Why Japan’s New Nationalism Still Creates Problems for the Region and the U.S.-Japan Alliance. A Report for the CSIS Japan Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), October. Berkofsky, Axel. 2013. Japan Under Shinzo Abe: Too Nationalist for the Rest of Asia?. International Relations and Security Network (ISN); ETH Zürich Center for Security Studies, May 9. Conroy, Hilary. 1995. Japanese Nationalism and Expansionism. The American Historical Review 60 (4 July): 818–829. Danks, Edward. 2019. The Heisei Paradox: Emperor Akihito and Japan’s Nationalist Regression. The Diplomat, May 17. Dower, John W. 1999. Embracing Defeat. Japan in the Aftermath of World War II . London: Penguin Books. Hashimoto, Akiko. 2016. Nationalism, Pacifism and Reconciliation. Japan Focus—The Asia-Pacific Journal 14 (October 15): 20. https://apjjf.org/Akiko-Hashimoto/4963/article.pdf. Kingston, J. 2019. Abenesia and Rightwing Nationalism in Japan. A Strained Marriage where Divorce is not an Option. Japon. Debilidad e Fortaleza; Dossier La Vanguardia Numero 71 Enero/Marzo. Leheny, David. 2019. Shinzo Abe’s Appeal to Nostalgia and Nationalism. Washington Post, August 2. Matsumoto, Sannosuke. 1971. The Significance of Nationalism in Modern Japanese Thought: Some Theoretical Problems. The Journal of Asian Studies 31 (1): 49–56. McNeill, David. 2015. Nippon Kaigi and the Radical Conservative Project to Take Back Japan. The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 13 (50) (4) (December 14). https://apjjf.org/-David-McNeill/4409 Mizohata, Sachie. 2016. Nippon Kaigi: Empire, Contradiction, and Japan’s Future. The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus 21 (November 1): 4. https:// apjjf.org/2016/21/Mizohata.html. Nakano, Koichi. 2016. Contemporary Dynamics of Japanese Nationalism. Japan Focus—The Asia-Pacific Journal 14 (October 15): 20. https://apjjf.org/ 2016/20/Nakano.html Nye, Joseph. 2012. Japan’s Nationalism Is a Sign of Weakness. The Financial Times, November 27. Postel-Vinay, Karoline. 2017. The Global Rightist Turn, Nationalism and Japan. Japan Focus—The Asia-Pacific Journal 15 (10): 1. https://apjjf.org/2017/ 10/Postel-Vinay.html Saaler, Sven. 2016. Nationalism and History in Contemporary Japan. Japan Focus—The Asia-Pacific Journal 14 (20) (October 15): 7. https://apjjf.org/ 2016/20/Saaler.html

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Sakamoto, Rumi. 2011. ‘Koreans, Go Home!’ Internet Nationalism in Contemporary Japan as Digitally Mediated Subculture. The Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (10) (March 7): 2. https://apjjf.org/2011/9/10/Rumi-SAKAMOTO/ 3497/article.html. Shad, Nadeem. 2014. Japan’s Back and so Is Nationalism. The Diplomat, December 14. https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/japans-back-and-so-is-nat ionalism/. Surak, Kristin. 2019. Shinzo Abe and the Rise of Japanese Nationalism. The New Statesman, May 19. Takahashi, Kosuke. 2014. Shinzo Abe’s Nationalist Strategy. The Diplomat, February 13. Takenaka, Akiko. 2016. Japanese Memories of the Asia-Pacific War: Analyzing the Revisionist Turn Post-1995. Japan Focus—The Asia-Pacific Journal 14 (20) (October 15): 8. https://apjjf.org/-Akiko-Takenaka/4967/article.pdf

Index

A Abboud, Ibrahim, 80, 82, 83, 86 Abdullah I, Emir of Transjordan, 36 Abe, Shinzo, 147, 149, 152–155, 157–164 Ács, Ilona, 40, 44 Addis Ababa, 93, 95, 109 Aflak, Michel, 45 Ahmed, Abiy, 98, 102, 103 Akihito, 148, 149 al-Assad, Hafez, 35, 46, 47, 49 Alawites, 38 al-Azhari, Ismail, 77, 78 Alexandria, 55 al-Husri,Sati, 44, 58 al-Khouri, Bishara, 63, 66 All Amhara People’s Organisation (AAPO), 99 al-Mahdi, Sadiq, 81 al-Mahdi, Sayyid Abdalrahman, 77, 79, 80 al-Mirghani, Sayyid Ali, 77, 79 al-Muntasir, Sal¯ım, 121

al-Qaramanli, Suleiman, 119 al-Qaramanli, Taher, 119 al-Sa’dawi, Bashir, 110 al-San¯us¯ı, King Idr¯ıs, 7, 111, 120, 122 al-Solh, Riyadh, 40 Amhara, 91, 92, 95–100, 102, 103 Anderson, Benedict, 2, 13, 130–133, 138 Anglo-Egyptian condominium, 76 Arab-Israeli war, 46 Arab League, 67, 118, 120, 124 Arman, Yassir, 83 Asia-Pacific War, 9, 148, 152 B Barrès, Maurice, 57, 58, 61, 62, 65 Beja Congress, 83, 84 Beja people, 83 Benishangul-Gumuz, 91 Berggren, Henrik, 13 Brasil, 40 British Military Administration, 108, 121

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Z´ahoˇr ík and A. M. Morone (eds.), Histories of Nationalism beyond Europe, Palgrave Studies in Political History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92676-2

167

168

INDEX

British Somaliland, 109, 112, 117, 125 Byblos, 54

C Cairo, 44, 78, 116, 118, 122 Cheikho, Louis, 59 Chiha, Michel, 54, 63–67, 69 China Incident, 152 Chinese Communist Party, 159 Christianity, 3, 17, 19, 20, 23, 28, 55, 61, 141 Church of Sweden Mission (CSM), 12, 15, 18–26, 28 Corm, Charles, 53, 54, 56, 61, 69 Creoles, 8, 130–133, 138–142 Cristero war, 143 Cyrenaica, 109, 110, 118, 122, 123

D D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 57 Darfur, 74 De Gasperi, Alcide, 119, 120 Del Boca, Angelo, 108, 114, 119, 120 de Mier, Servando Teresa, 141 Denmark, 13 Déroulède, Paul, 57 de Vizarrón y Eguiarreta, Juan Antonio, 137 Dingane, Zulu king, 22 Dinuzulu kaCethswayo, Zulu king, 15

E Egypt, 42, 47, 55, 76–80, 82, 85, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124 El Djezairi, Abdel Kader, 39 Eritrea, 7, 94, 97, 102, 109–111 Ethiopia, 4, 7, 91–98, 100–103, 108–111, 117

Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 94

F Feisal, Emir, 37, 38 Fezzan, 109, 110, 122, 123 Four Power Commission (FPC), 118 France, 4, 8, 38, 41, 57, 59–61, 94, 107–111, 118, 121, 122, 125, 132 Free National Bloc (Al-Kutlah al-Wataniyyah al-Hurrah), 110, 118 French Revolution, 132, 133 French Somaliland, 112 Fujioka, Nobukatsu, 163

G Garang, John, 87 General Union of the Nuba Mountains (GUN), 83, 84 Germany, 4, 5, 17, 150, 158 Ghanem, Shukri, 58 Golan Heights, 46 Great Somali League (GSL), 116

H Haile Selassie I, 93–96, 101, 109 Hallendorff, Knut, 18–21, 23–26 Hamad, Khidr, 85 Hashemite dynasty, 60 Hawd-Ogaden, 109 Hazelius, Arthur, 14, 21 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 141 Hinnebusch, Raymond, 47, 48 Holmberg, Åke, 21 Hosokawa, Mirohito, 152 Hussein, Haji Mohamed, 116 Huwayyik, Elias, 60, 63

INDEX

I Inada, Tomomi, 154 Islam, 2, 35, 45, 64, 69, 112, 123 Italy, 5, 7, 8, 94, 107–117, 119–121, 125, 150

J Japan, 3, 9, 147–160, 162–164 Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), 162 Japan’s Rebirth (Sousei Nippon), 161

K Khalil, Abdallah, 80 Khartoum, 7, 74–76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87 Khatmiyya, 77, 79, 87 Kienle, Eberhard, 41, 48 Kobayashi, Yoshinori, 163 KwaZulu-Natal, 5, 11–13, 15, 16, 18, 28, 29

L Lagerlöf, Selmax, 14 Lammens, Henri, 40, 57–59, 63, 69 Latin America, 2, 4, 5, 8, 129–131, 133, 140 League of Nations, 94, 109 Lebanon, 4, 6, 36–38, 40, 44, 48, 53–67, 69, 80 Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), 149, 152 Libya, 7, 8, 88, 109–111, 118, 120–125 Libyan Liberation Committee (Hay‘at tahr¯ır L¯ıbiy¯a), 118 Lij Eyasu, 92 Ljungquist, Fredrik, 18, 20, 24–26 Luther, Martin, 13, 21, 23, 130

169

M MacArthur, Douglas, 155, 158 Macha and Tulama Association (MTA), 96 Magwaza, Daniel, 22 Mahdi, 76, 77, 79, 80, 87 Manchurian Incident, 148, 149, 152 Maronites, 42, 60, 61, 67, 68 Menelik II, 92, 93 Mexico, 4, 8, 130–143 Mexico City, 134, 136–140 Middle East, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 49, 53–56, 58, 59, 62, 65, 66, 68, 80 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministero degli Affari Esteri, MAE), 112, 114 Ministry of Italian Africa (Ministero dell’Africa italiana, MAI), 108, 109, 114, 119 Misurata, 119 Morelos y Pavón, José María, 141 Mpande, Zulu king, 22 Muntasir, clan, 119

N Nahua Indians, 136 Nakano, Koichi, 156 Nanking Massacre, 161, 162 National Unionist Party (NUP), 75, 77–81, 84–86 Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), 151–153 Nobusuke, Kishi, 156, 160, 161 Northern Frontier District, 112 Norway, 5, 12–15, 21, 26–29 Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS), 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, 26, 27 Nye, Joseph, 155

170

INDEX

O Oromia, 91, 98, 99 Oromo, 92, 93, 96–99, 103 Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), 96–100 Osman, Aden Abdullah, 85, 116 Østerud, Øyvind, 13, 14 Ottoman Empire, 37, 39, 76 Our Lady of Guadalupe, 8, 130, 134–137, 139–143 Our Lady of Remedies, 136–138, 142

P Perthes, Volker, 49 Pharaon, Henri, 63 Phares, Walid, 68 Posse, Hedvig, 21, 22

R Rabinovich, Itamar, 48 Roberts, David, 37, 44, 45, 48

S Saadeh, Antoun, 40–47, 58 Saaler, Sven, 157 Said, Bashir Muhammad, 84 Sakamoto, Rumi, 156 Sakurai, Yoshiko, 162, 163 San¯ us¯ıyah, 7, 111 Schreuder, Hans Paludan Smith, 15, 17, 18, 22 Sellabi, Abdusalam, 120 Shaka, Zulu king, 22 Shimomura, Hakubun, 162 Shishakli, Adib, 44 Shoichi, Nakagawa, 152 Sidon, 54, 60, 67 Somalia, 7, 8, 109–119, 124, 125 Somali Youth Club, 109

Somali Youth League (SYL), 109, 112–117 South Africa, 4, 5, 11, 15, 17–20, 22, 25, 26 Southern Kordofan, 74 South Korea, 151 South Sudan, 6, 74, 75, 87, 154 Soviet Union, The, 99 Spain, 8, 130, 132, 133, 135–140 Stråth, Bo, 13 Sudan, 4, 6, 7, 73–88 Sudan African National Union (SANU), 82, 83 Sweden, 5, 12–16, 23, 26, 94 Syria, 4–6, 35–49, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66, 80 Syrian Social National Party, 58

T Tabet, Jacques, 55, 59, 67 Takenaka, Akiko, 155 Thorkildsen, Dag, 13, 27 Tigray, 91, 92, 96, 97 Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), 97, 98, 100, 102 Titlestad, Lars Martin, 27 Tojo, Hideki, 160 Tokyo Tribunals, 150 Tokyo War Crimes Trial (IMTFE), 160, 162 Toru, Maeno, 163 Tottie, Henry William, 15–17, 19–23, 25, 28 Trägårdh, Lars, 13 Tripoli, 37, 60, 67, 109, 110, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125 Tripolitania, 109, 110, 119, 122, 123, 125 Tyre, 54, 60

INDEX

171

U United Nations, The, 110, 113, 114, 121 Uppsala University, 16 USSR, The (or the Soviet Union), 107

W Wallelign Mekonnen, 95 World War II, 9, 40, 77, 107, 147, 149–155, 157, 160–164

V Villa, Pancho, 142 Virgin of Extremadura, 136 Virgin of Guadeloupe, 8

Z Zapata, Emiliano, 142 Zisser, Eyal, 45, 48 Zulu, 11, 12, 15–29

Y Yagi, Hidetsugu, 151