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is a loyalty to an “imagined community.” It creates a sense of common identity even among people who have never met one another and probably never will. In large part, that is its function. We speak of American or German nationalism, but not the national identity of Luxembourg or Liechtenstein, where a far higher percentage of the people do in fact know one another. Even in large nations, the issues of who is imagined to be part of the community and who is entitled to do the imagining have often been fiercely contested. Beginning with the Revolutionary War, African Americans have tried to use their participation in major wars to win acceptance of their membership in the national community, while those who founded and sustained that community have tried to exclude them or restrict their participation. By contrast, some white reformers were trying to turn Indians into American citizens at a time when most Indians preferred to be left alone as distinct peoples on enough land to sustain their ancestral ways. The American quest for national identity has shown a pattern toward greater inclusiveness over time, but the stages of that struggle have been marked by some of the most violent confrontations in the history of the country.
In the great age of European nationalism from the French Revolution to World War II, peoples who spoke the same language or shared a common ethnicity fought to build their own nation‐states. The unification of Germany and Italy, and later the achievement of independence by Poland and other East European states, also meant the weakening and eventual destruction of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires. German nationalism took shape in sharp reaction against Napoleonic France, while Italian unity required the repudiation of rule from Vienna. Most historians—always with a nervous glance at Germany from the 1860s to 1945—have assumed that the stronger the nationalism, the greater its ability to prevail.
These nineteenth‐century European models do not help much in trying to understand nationalism in the Americas. The thirteen colonies won independence from Britain without claiming a preexisting common identity distinct from that of the mother country. They certainly had no quarrel with the English language. That pattern recurred a generation later in the Latin American struggles for independence. The Latin revolutionaries, like those in North America, accepted most of the geographical boundaries that had been laid out by the imperial states of Spain and Portugal and continued to use the old imperial languages after independence. In North America in the nineteenth century, only one major nationalist movement failed: the attempt to establish the Confederate States of America. Ironically, at least by European norms, the Confederacy was the most militantly nationalist movement to appear in the Americas. In North America, unlike Europe, the gentler and weaker nationalisms of the United States and Canada have survived, but the Confederacy was crushed.
The United States of America emerged as a separate nation before its citizens had any firm sense of a distinct national identity. In England's mainland colonies in the seventeenth century, most settlers assumed that they belonged to the English “nation,” the first European society to define itself in these terms. An Englishman's identity involved a strong commitment to liberty, property, and “no popery,” although the English quarreled fiercely and sometimes violently over how Protestant, or Puritan, England should be. These quarrels crossed the ocean, but the rival positions tended to take hold in different colonies, which were also founded for different purposes. Moderate Anglicans always controlled Virginia, and over time these values took hold throughout the southern colonies, where the pursuit of wealth energized the settlers far more than the demands of piety. By contrast, Puritanism largely defined what was most distinctive about the New England colonies. In the middle colonies, the competition among denominations in New York and New Jersey, and the Quakers' idealism in Pennsylvania, together guaranteed a regional victory for religious liberty by about 1720. But in this region ethnic and religious pluralism made even a sense of English identity problematic.
Many seventeenth‐century colonists believed that they could create overseas a better society than England was ever likely to become. Then England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 guaranteed a Protestant succession to the throne, annual meetings of Parliament, and toleration for Protestant dissenters. Over the next twenty‐five years, England (which united with Scotland to form the kingdom of Great Britain in 1707) emerged quite unexpectedly as one of Europe's great powers, the one usually best positioned to prevent France, or any other power, from establishing hegemony over the rest. Britons began to celebrate their “mixed and balanced constitution” of king, Lords, and Commons as the great wonder of the age, the foundation for the liberty, property, and Protestantism that made the nation distinct. Colonists joined in this celebration, and in the process of embracing a British national identity also seemed quietly to abandon any ambitions of creating a more just society than Britain's. This trend became most visible during Britain's mid‐eighteenth‐century wars with Catholic Spain and France. Colonial spokesmen proudly proclaimed their loyalty to the world's most successful empire, which by 1763 had expelled France from Canada and Spain from Florida and had taken control of everything east of the Mississippi River except New Orleans.
In one of history's most astonishing reversals, triumphant Britain then alienated the colonists so totally over the next twelve years that war broke out between the two sides in April 1775. Britain's policies included two major attempts to tax the settlers without their consent—the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764–65, and the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. At first the revenue was to be used only to pay part of the costs of North America's military establishment; but by 1767, some of it was designed to make royal governors and judges independent of the financial support of the colonies' elective assemblies. To North American settlers, the insistence on “no taxation without representation” marked a demand for traditional English property rights, not a quest for something distinctively “American.”
For decades British spokesmen had predicted that eventually the American colonies would be strong enough to throw off all subjection to Britain. The reforms of 1763–67 were designed, at least in part, to postpone that terrible day. Colonists found this fear misconceived and even dangerous. Acutely aware of how different the colonies were from one another, they repeatedly affirmed their loyalty to Britain and their admiration for the British constitution. They denied that they harbored any desire for independence, and many of them doubted that any viable union of such disparate colonies was even possible. In short, “America” began as Britain's idea. Into the 1770s, almost nobody on either side of the Atlantic actively favored the creation of a separate American nation.
Fifteen months of terrible warfare, beginning at Lexington in April 1775, changed these sensibilities. The Second Continental Congress long insisted that it was fighting only to restore English rights to the settlers under the traditional government of the empire. But when George III refused even to receive Congress's very moderate Olive Branch Petition and instead proclaimed the colonists rebels in August 1775, sentiment began to shift, more obviously at first in private correspondence than in public statements. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a call for both independence and American union. An English immigrant who had been in Philadelphia for only fourteen months, Paine saw an “American” nation around him, where other settlers were able to perceive only separate colonies. His eloquence was infectious, however, and Common Sense persuaded many colonists that both independence and union were attainable. In July 1776 Congress concluded that independence was necessary, but union remained another matter.
Many things seemed self‐evident to the patriots of 1776, but the benefits of a unified nation‐state were not among them. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania believed that the colonies were strong enough to resist even Britain's military might, but the prospect of success terrified him. Where “shall we find another Britain, to supply our loss?” he asked. “Torn from the body to which we are united by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relation, language, and commerce, we must bleed at every vein.” Even though he refused to sign the Declaration of Independence, he did become the principal draftsman of the Articles of Confederation, which Congress did not send to the states until late 1777, and which failed to win ratification by all thirteen states until March 1781. Charles Thomson, secretary to Congress from 1774 until 1789, doubted that the American Union could long outlast the war. Even though Congress prevailed in the long struggle for independence, scored two diplomatic triumphs in the French alliance of 1778 and the Peace of Paris in 1783, and designed an imaginative and expansionist western policy culminating in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, it provided little focus for popular loyalty and won little respect, even among its own members. By 1786–87, with Daniel Shays's Rebellion disrupting rural Massachusetts and with Congress itself ominously divided over the proposed Jay‐Gardoquí Treaty, which would have surrendered the navigation of the Mississippi for twenty‐five years in exchange for commercial privileges within the Spanish empire, talk of disunion became serious and even erupted into the newspapers. Southern states blocked the treaty because it would have privileged northeastern merchants at the expense of southern planters.
In May 1787, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and, by September, produced a charter for a radically new form of federal government, one that lodged sovereignty in the people themselves while permitting them to delegate sovereign powers to both their state and national governments. One of the most thoughtful delegates, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, declared that the United States was not yet a nation, but that the Constitution would create a framework to make that transition possible. “As we shall become a nation, I trust that we shall also form a national character; and that this character will be adapted to the principles and genius of our system of government.” He based that expectation, not upon the shared memories of a largely mythical past (the kind of thing that shaped English nationalism), but upon popular expectations for a glorious and prosperous future in a vast continent with enormous resources.
Without the Constitution, the Union would probably not have survived the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. American national identity would have died in infancy. But the Constitution by itself could not guarantee the success of the Union, or even define the form that American political culture would assume.
The struggles between the Federalists and the Democratic‐Republicans after 1790 reshaped American political culture and, indeed, American identity. “A nation without a national government is, in my view, an awful spectacle,” proclaimed Alexander Hamilton in the last of The Federalist Papers. He and other Federalists believed that creating a national government capable of holding its own against the great powers of the Atlantic world required funding the Revolutionary War debt at par, collecting sufficient revenue to meet other national objectives, empowering a vigorous executive, creating an efficient army and navy, and establishing an activist federal court system—measures that made the United States resemble a transplanted Britain, lacking only a royal court and an hereditary aristocracy. His opponents insisted that Americans had fought Britain to become something quite different. Once they captured power in 1801, they began to define what such a nation could become.
Jeffersonians set out to pay off the national debt as soon as possible, reduced the army and navy to token forces, repealed all internal taxes, and did their best to tame the federal judiciary. Especially after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, they began to seek a combination of goals that no other movement or nation, anywhere else in the world, had yet put together. Under their leadership, the United States would repudiate the balance‐of‐power politics that prevailed in Europe. Within the Atlantic world, Jeffersonians favored trade with all of Europe's maritime powers but alliances with none. They believed that American commerce was so important that a mere threat of withholding it could force the great powers to respect American rights without resort to war, a policy that revealed its limitations when the United States finally declared war on Britain in the War of 1812. But on this side of the ocean, the new republic would achieve hegemony within the western hemisphere—that is, it would be stronger than any combination of enemies that could be aligned against it—without the need to create standing armies or impose heavy taxes. The energy of the people, especially their determination to settle ever more western lands, would achieve this hegemonic goal with little more than mild supervision from Washington, while avoiding the class conflicts of Europe. The Jacksonian era saw this process become the ideology of “manifest destiny,” whose apologists saw almost no limit to how large the United States might become (some even favored the annexation of Ireland!), provided that most governmental activities remained decentralized to the state level.
Liberty and empire remained compatible so long as the free and slave states could agree on how to share the spoils of western lands. By the 1830s, the Jeffersonian formula for hemispheric hegemony had won wide acceptance. As Abraham Lincoln argued in one of his earliest speeches, “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined … could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” Any threat to the Union, he insisted in 1838, “cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
When Lincoln wrote, the “imagined community” of the United States was still restricted to white men. Its success depended on the republic's ability to deprive Indians of nearly all of their land, usually without significant compensation or any willingness to incorporate Indians into the polity. Enslaved African Americans were not part of the polity either. During the Revolution, most blacks south of New England in a position to choose sided with the British, not the American republic. Partly because Federalists pushed harder for abolition in northern states than did their opponents, the Jeffersonian triumph magnified these trends. In 1807, when the Democratic‐Republicans took control of New Jersey (the only state that permitted some women to vote), they righteously disfranchised women, Indians, and free blacks, thus announcing to the world that their brand of democracy applied to white men only.
The early 1830s largely defined the extremes that would shape American politics and national identity for the next three decades. Northern evangelical Protestants launched a vigorous abolitionist movement that increasingly alarmed the South. South Carolina nullified the tariff in 1832 and threatened secession if President Andrew Jackson resorted to force. Jackson pushed a “Force Act” through Congress but also agreed with Congress's decision to lower the tariff by stages over the next decade. Disillusioned nullifiers began to envision an independent southern nation taking shape, united in the defense of slavery. Jackson's supporters, for the first time in the history of the republic, insisted that the Constitution had created a “perpetual union,” one that could not be destroyed. Many of Jackson's northern opponents agreed. As Daniel Webster put it in 1830, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” But after the Mexican War, North and South could not agree on how to digest America's enormous conquest, nor even on how to divide between them the remaining unsettled portion of the Louisiana Purchase. Expansionism, instead of solving the nation's problems, was tearing it apart. The two ideas, of a southern nation and an indestructible union, finally clashed when the Civil War erupted in April 1861.
Both sides did their best to appropriate the principles of 1776. Confederate apologists insisted that they were the true heirs of the Revolution, much as the patriots of that era had claimed to be defending English liberty against a government bent on destroying it. Lincoln insisted well into 1862 that he was fighting only to preserve the Union that the founding fathers had created.
Despite these similarities between the Revolution and the Civil War, the differences are even more compelling. In 1775–76, the colonists went to war and fought for fifteen months before Congress finally proclaimed American independence. In 1860–61, seven Southern states seceded from the Union, created the Confederate States of America and then began a war against the United States by firing upon Fort Sumter. When President Lincoln responded with a summons to arms, four more states seceded and joined the Confederacy. In other words, the Revolutionary War preceded the creation of an American nation, but the Confederate nation preceded the Civil War. Some “fire‐eaters” had been agitating for a southern nation for nearly three decades by then, a movement without parallel in the colonies before 1776. The Confederacy was, in short, very much the product of an active and aggressive nationalism in a way that the original American Union had not been.
At first, both sides tried not to interfere with the constricted sense of American identity that Jeffersonians had bequeathed to them. But the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, boldly offered freedom, citizenship, the duty to bear arms, and suffrage to black males while ignoring the demands of the early women's suffrage movement. This mobilization of blacks contributed immensely to Union victory by 1865. But the failure of Radical Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow legislation throughout the former Confederate and border states deprived nearly all black men of the ability to vote by the early twentieth century. Blacks were free but not equal. The warring sections of the republic achieved reconciliation around principles of liberty, union—and white supremacy. While disfranchising blacks, they enfranchised white women, beginning in several western states near the end of the nineteenth century and culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution during World War I.
World War II marked the next watershed. The Pacific War became a merciless contest between two racial ideologies—Japan's determination to make the divine Yamato race prevail throughout Asia and the Pacific versus the white supremacy of the Western powers, led by the United States. By contrast, the United States fought to destroy Nazi racism in the European theater; and in the aftermath of the war and during the onset of the Cold War, the attack on racism became a major force in domestic politics as well. President Harry S. Truman began the desegregation of American armed forces on the eve of the Korean War. Over the next two decades, the American defense establishment (along with the world of professional and intercollegiate sports) led all other sectors of American society in the quest for equal opportunity regardless of race. Ironically, while the rest of the world largely condemned American intervention in Vietnam as a ruthless manifestation of arrogant racial supremacy, the United States fought the Vietnam War with the most completely integrated military establishment the nation had ever possessed. Colin Powell, an African American who fought in Vietnam as a junior officer, would become by the 1990s the most powerful military officer in the land, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By then, women had also won far broader opportunities for military careers than had ever been available to them before.
What it means to belong to the American nation is still hotly contested, but at the end of the twentieth century that identity has become far more inclusive than ever before.
[See also Culture, War, and the Military; Internationalism; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Patriotism; Religion and War; Women in the Military.]
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n. 1. patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts.
2. an extreme form of this, especially marked by a feeling of superiority over other countries.
3. advocacy of political independence for a particular country: Palestinian nationalism.
See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.
The feeling of belonging to a group linked by common descent, language, and history, and with a corresponding ideology which values the nation-state above everything else, expecting supreme loyalty from its citizens. Associated with this is the belief that nations which are not nation-states should have the right to determine their own futures, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a number of actual and potential struggles for nations to be independent.
Term applied to the movement in music, about the middle of the 19th century, in which composers became eager for their music to embody elements that proclaimed its nationality. The expression of nationality in music is much older than this; 17th- and 18th-century theorists and composers, for example, were keenly aware of aspects of their music that reflected nationality, and by the late lath century, composers in Britain in particular were incorporating folk melodies (or supposed ones) in their music. However, the purpose of the nationalist movement of the mid- 19th century was more selfconsciously assertive of national tradition. It manifested itself in the music of Chopin, who was not the first but was the best composer to embody Polish dance rhythms in his music. Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar (1836) (now known as Ivan Susanin), with its nationalist topic as well as its use of folk music, is considered an important landmark in the nationalist movement, as are the operas of Musorgsky and Borodin and many orchestral works of the Five. In Bohemia, there were manifestations of nationalism as early as the 1820s, in the operas of Škroup, but it was only with the work of Šebor, Smetana and Dvořák that Czech nationalism made a strong impact; its growth was connected with the Czechs desire to free themselves from Austrian domination. Other east European countries were similarly motivated and created such nationalist works as Moniuszko's Polish opera Halka (1848) and Erkel's Hunyadi László (1844), though Hungarian nationalism took fire only with Kodály and Bartók. Nationalism, though less motivated by political events, is also found in Spain (Albéniz, Granados), northern Europe (Grieg, Sibelius) and England (Vaughan Williams, Holst). It would be misleading, however, not to note the nationalism of the central countries in the European musical tradition: in Germany, from Schumann and Brahms (who used German folksong) and Wagner; in Italy, from Verdi (whose operas are assertively Italian, whatever their topic) and even France, where Debussy was anxious to create a national music. Nationalism takes somewhat different forms in the Americas: in South America the emphasis has been on the use of dance rhythms of local significance, while in the USA the national spirit has been most strongly expressed in such characteristically American forms as jazz and the musical (though distinctively American idioms have also been used within European-based musical forms).
Nationalism turns devotion to the nation into principles or programmes. It thus contains a different dimension from mere patriotism, which can be a devotion to one's country or nation devoid of any project for political action.
Most ‘nationalists’ have a programme for their own particular nation; but do not necessarily hold views about the significance of nationality elsewhere. It is in this sense that nationalism has been described as an ideologically empty bottle with strength and shape, but no particular content. Thus, the nationalism of the Congress Party in India before independence was able to incorporate such varied figures as Jawaharlal Nehru, a modernizer and believer in rational planning, Krishna Menon, a Marxist, and M. K. Gandhi, an anti-industrial Hindu ascetic.
The general feature of universal principles of nationalism is an assertion of the primacy of national identity over the claims of class, religion, or humanity in general. One strain can be loosely labelled ‘Romantic’ nationalism. It is particularly associated with German reactions to the universalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. In this view people can be better understood in terms of the linguistic, cultural, and historical factors which bind them to a particular territory than by reference to their general human capacities.
The economic dimension of such nationalism is the belief that the ownership and control of important resources should be maintained firmly within the nation itself. The political application is the principle of self-determination which seeks to base political life on the nation-state, a sovereign entity dominated by a single nation. One advantage of nation-states is that their authority, as a natural embodiment of the identity and will of the citizens, creates a firm base for legitimate government. Another is that, as the American poet Robert Frost put it, ‘good fences make good neighbours’: peoples who are secure, economically and culturally, behind their own borders can negotiate with each other fairly and amicably. The great disadvantage of this idea of the nation-state is that it does not correspond to reality. The populations of the world are not distributed on clear-cut national territories and there are always minorities whose presence in the national state is difficult and potentially disruptive. Even such massive and painful demographic movements as the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey after the 1914-18 war and the expulsion of Germans from (re-defined) Poland after the 1939-45 war have barely alleviated the problem. In particular, the German, Russian, and Turkish peoples are distributed across the Eurasian land mass in such a way as to defy any attempts to draw boundaries for self-determination. The implementation of the principle of self-determination by the Treaty of Versailles 1919 created states which were too small for successful defence or economic management, regimes which were oppressive and illiberal, and ethnic grievances which have proved persistent. The same argument would suggest that such multinational entities as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and (later) the Soviet Union have important advantages over nation-states.
What it is particular nationalisms seek to achieve can vary considerably. In the ‘classic’ cases, in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, the core of the nationalist project was to establish political unity and independence. But nationalists can also seek to maintain a cultural identity: according to almost all the protagonists of Welsh nationalism, the preservation of the Welsh language and culture is the defining project of the movement. Nationalists may also seek to extend territory or to protect the interests of extraterritorial nationals. Equally, the issue can be the maintenance of cultural or political autonomy. For instance, ‘English nationalism’ is rarely thought of per se and references to ‘British nationalism’ are almost unknown. But where England or Britain is threatened by integration into a larger, European, entity and/or by disintegration, then it becomes possible to talk not only of English nationalism, but also of British nationalism.
The varieties of nationalism are determined in large part by the broad and indeterminate range of the term ‘nation’. The word exists in English and in all the Latin languages with a root related to birth as in ‘natal’ and ‘native’. But nationem in Latin referred to units much more like ‘tribe’, ‘clan’, or ‘family’ than the large, territorially based groupings which we think of as nations today. In eighteenth-century English there were references to ‘nations’ of Smiths, Hebrews, and gypsies or ‘the royal nation’ (meaning the royal family or dynasty). The idea that a ‘nation’ refers primarily or solely to something like England or France is a relatively recent development in the use of the term.
The question of what constitutes the common characteristics of nationality, and therefore the distinguishing criteria of membership of a nation, has diverse and confusing answers. It is no longer the case that the criteria must be related to birth, since one can acquire nationality; indeed, some modern nationalities, like American or Israeli, consist mainly of people who have, or whose known ancestors have, transferred from another nationality. Some of the classic arguments for nationalism, those of such German nationalists as J. G. Fichte and the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, and of Welsh nationalists, insisted that common language was the key to nationality since it was possession of the language which related people to history, legend, and territory in the way that defined nations. This triadic relation between language, territory, and myth/shared experience constitutes probably the most coherent and developed theory of nationality, but it is incapable of explaining such multilingual nationalities as the Swiss, Indians, and Belgians and fits oddly to a modern reality in which many different nationalities speak Spanish or English as a first language.
The phrase ‘the age of nationalism’ has been applied most often to post-Napoleonic Europe and to the movements which culminated in German and Italian unification. The particular importance of this period was that it established influential paradigms and approaches in the understanding of nationality. But distinctly nationalist sentiments can be detected in England and France centuries earlier and Shakespeare put such sentiments into the mouths of many of his medieval characters, including King John, Henry V, and (paradoxically) John of Gaunt. The late twentieth century can also be described as an age of nationalism; indeed, some of the assertions of nationality among the ‘hundred nations’ of the former Soviet Union following its collapse 1991 might be described as nationalism ad absurdum.
— Lincoln Allison
For more information on nationalism, visit Britannica.com.
Nationalism is a sense of shared identity and loyalty, based upon common history, language, culture, and traditions. Though it has much in common with religious and local loyalties, it may be distinguished since it almost invariably aims to be the basis of government.
The tendency of recent scholarship has been to see the roots of European nationalisms deep in the past rather than regarding them as essentially 19th-cent. phenomena. A sense of English nationalism seems to have developed during the campaigns to drive back the Danes, though for centuries mistrust between Northumbria, Wessex, Mercia, and East Anglia persisted. It was reinforced after 1066 by resentment of Norman-French domination. The thrust of Norman advance into other regions of the British Isles stimulated rival nationalisms in turn. The military campaigns led by Wallace and Robert I Bruce culminated in the declaration of Arbroath (1320), and those in Wales led by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd and Glyndŵr gained wide popular support because they convinced many people that they fought to liberate Welshmen from English oppression.
From the personal union of England and Scotland in 1603, and more particularly from the governmental union in 1707, strenuous efforts were made to encourage a sense of British nationalism. While accompanied by military success, imperial achievement, and economic growth, it flourished. In the 20th cent., and especially after 1945, as economic and political problems multiplied, the concept of British nationalism faltered and Celtic nationalist parties began to have some success.
Ireland always presented particular problems for the idea of a British people to parallel a British state. The link between protestantism and Britishness made governments reluctant to let the catholic majority in Ireland share the rights upon which popular Britishness became based, while the willingness of some catholics to look to Spain, France, or Germany for assistance encouraged the English to regard them as potential traitors.
Concessions to the Irish catholics after the Act of Union of 1801 (‘too little, too late’ is the easy cliché) failed to prevent the growth of a more militant Irish nationalism, which in turn led to the development of protestant resistance to
In Wales, the survival of the Welsh language has given a cultural focus to nationalism. In the 19th cent. dissatisfaction with the power of Anglicized landlords and the privileged position of the Anglican church was used by the Liberal Party to mobilize a Welsh-speaking population already undergoing a cultural revival. The Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, inhibited at first by the predominance of English-speaking in south Wales, made considerable inroads in the 1990s, returning four MPs to Westminster at the general election of 1997, and claiming twelve seats in the 60-strong Welsh Assembly in 2003.
Nationalism in modern Scotland emerged as the autonomy of civil society and local government obtained by the Act of Union of 1707 began to be eroded by the increased speed of communications, the integration of the British economy, and the expansion of the Westminster government's powers of intervention. The resentment of Whitehall, found in many regions, could take a nationalist form in Scotland. But although agitation secured the re-establishment of a Scottish secretary in the cabinet (1885) and led to the foundation of a Scottish Home Rule Association (1886), Scottish nationalism did not mobilize the masses. Conservative and Labour lack of interest in Home Rule led to the foundation of the National Party of Scotland (1928), which metamorphosed into the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 1934.
Increasing dislike of economic and political centralization, and optimism that North Sea oil could provide a rosy future, led the SNP to shock by-election victories at Hamilton (1967) and Govan (1973). At the October 1974 general election, the SNP took 30 per cent of the Scottish vote and eleven seats. Although the SNP's challenge declined after the inconclusive devolution referendum in 1979, the Thatcher years were widely seen in Scotland as government by an English nationalist. The SNP gained six seats at Westminster in the general election of 1997, and 35 seats out of 129 in the Scottish Parliament, elected in 1999.
Nationalism Is a concept that arose in the 19th c. among peoples who became aware of their national identity without having a national state; in these cases nationalism had first to be affirmed linguistically and culturally, then be given political embodiment. In France, the state came first, and over the centuries created the nation, so that the roots of national self-consciousness can be traced long before the concept or word existed. French nationalism was clearly one of the driving forces of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, but the word nationalisme appeared in a dictionary only in 1874.
It is significant that this was after the French defeat of 1870-1 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. France now felt herself to be a multilated nation. It was at this time that, in order to refute German claims to the lost provinces, Renan delivered his seminal lecture, ‘Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?’ (1882). Barrès subsequently gave widespread currency to the word and the idea (Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, 1902). Political groups developed: the Ligue des Patriotes (1882), Ligue de la Patrie Française (1899), and Action Française (of which Maurras soon became the leader). These are collectively referred to as the nationalist movement.
The impulse for revanche against Germany soon took second place, however, and the nationalist groups focused on domestic forces that were seen as sapping national strength. Thus, rather than uniting the nation against a foreign enemy, the nationalist movement became divisive, above all in its lost battle against the defenders of Dreyfus, whose campaign was seen as a threat to the army. In the course of this conflict, nationalism, which from 1789 to 1885 had been associated with the Left, was adopted by the Right. It thus became intertwined with the main theme of Left-Right conflict, the battle between the Catholic Church and the Republic. Elements of the nationalist movement that had originally been anticlerical became absorbed in this traditional conflict of the ‘two Frances’, and the specifically nationalist aspect of their programme was attenuated.
However, the ‘union sacrée’ of 1914-18 showed that when the foreign threat materialized in earnest, the disputes of nationalists against republicans were submerged in a united patriotic effort. This union was symbolized by the government of the ex-Dreyfusard Clemenceau, who became ‘Père-la-Victoire’ and was panegyrized by Action Française. After 1918 the specific sense which nationalism had acquired fades out, although some extreme-Right movements of the inter-war period are referred to as nationalist Ligues. An echo of this terminology is the self-description of the Vichy regime as ‘la Révolution nationale’ [see Occupation and Resistance].
[David Watson]
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A set of beliefs and symbols expressing identification with a given national community.
Nationalism is the ideological apparatus by which citizens and the nation-state find common loyalties and identification. While citizens may discern a generalized vision of government, nationalism spurs them to identify with a particular country. Because the United States is a secular, free society, the components of nationalism arise from rituals and symbolic images that change in meaning over time and are relentlessly politicized. Rituals such as those performed on the Fourth of July and personalities such as George Washington originated with the founding of the United States in 1776, but have values and uses that rise and fall and change according to the era and the section of the country in which they are celebrated. This essay combines the creation of American nationalism with attention to the time and place of the use of imagery and ritual.
Roots of Nationalism
Nationalism may have been born in Europe with the modern nation-state, but it reached its broadest flowering in the multicultural United States. The American Revolution transformed loyal colonialists into patriotic Americans. It also changed monarchial identification into love for the first president, George Washington, and charged ritual commemoration of revolutionary events and figures with quasi-religious passion. In 1783, after the peace treaty legitimized the boundaries of the new nation, Americans had the requisite qualities to establish their own ideology. Americans were highly literate and had a burgeoning number of newspapers and book publishers. The desire to commemorate the American Revolution inspired fledgling historians to write chronicles of the conflict and create a hagiography of heroes. Most literature was written in English, which became the predominate language after the Revolution. Building upon monarchial and religious holidays, Americans celebrated the great events and accomplishments of the Revolution to instill patriotism. Americans high and low adopted Europeans' conceptions of republicanism to inscribe a self-sacrificing love for the new nation and the responsibilities of citizenship.
The Constitutional Procession of 1788 is a good example of how these values coalesced across the classes. After a spirited national debate in newspapers, pamphlets, and public orations over the contours of the new Constitution, American white male freeholders voted to adopt it. In city after city, Americans celebrated the adoption of the Constitution with orderly marches replete with occupational banners praising the agreement and the financial plans of the "Good Ship Hamilton." In the New York City procession, butchers participated by herding two oxen down Broadway. One ox had a banner with the word "Anarchy" between its horns; the other was emblazoned with "Confusion." The butchers themselves held a banner that proclaimed, "The Death of Anarchy and Confusion Shall Feed the Poor." After the parade, the butchers slaughtered the oxen and fed them to the poor. The butchers were making a point about their daily contribution to the health of the new nation, showing the importance of their productive labor, and demonstrating their political clout. In the same procession over 1,000 cart men demonstrated their loyalty to the Constitution, a number no politician could ignore. In Philadelphia, organizers conducted a "temperance" march as an alternative to the inebriated parades elsewhere as a demonstration that clear-minded citizens were free of the diabolical powers of rum. Among all, the process emphasized civic responsibility for the "middling class" of people. Women may have watched these proceedings from the sidelines but soon learned to claim the mantle of virtue as their own. Similarly, African Americans instilled holidays with their own frustrated claims for citizenship, creating alternative political festivals.
America's Founding Fathers and the Birth of the Hero
As American white males gained universal suffrage by the early 1820s, they coalesced a variety of symbols into a nationalism based upon revolutionary unity. The United States became personified by eidolons, or ideal figures in human form. As Americans softened their memories of the violence of the American Revolution and saw their liberty as fragile and in need of protection, Miss Liberty stood for such values. Brother Jonathan, who stood for the country bumpkin whose crudeness disguised a cunning and ambitious mentality, had a brief popularity. Uncle Sam, whose red, white, and blue top hat shaded shrewd eyes, replaced Brother Jonathan in the 1840s. As Wilbur Zelinksy observes in his book Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (1988), Uncle Sam came to personify the American state, a concept that transcends the bureaucratic apparatus of government. Uncle Sam's lanky body resembles President Abraham Lincoln, who was both the savior of the American nation and the formulator of the modern American state.
The revolutionary era inspired national heroes. George Washington personified all that was good about America. The first president and hero of the Revolution, Washington became a charismatic hero who, as Zelinsky notes, inspired devotion through his physical bearing, character, and mind. Washington is credited with tying together the fractious thirteen colonies-turned-states and surviving military defeats to best the hated British. As the name of the national capital indicates, Washington's memory is imprinted upon the national landscape in the decades after his death; scores of counties and towns adopted his name. His image became ubiquitous on currency, statues, newspapers, and an infinite variety of media. Although some scholars comment about Washington's loss of place in contemporary society, the plethora of commemorations ensure at least memory of him. His freeing of his slaves also gives him a cachet denied to the more intellectual founding father Thomas Jefferson, whose popularity seems in decline. Benjamin Franklin soon joined Washington in the pantheon. Franklin's humble visage inspired a generation of clubs devoted to the meaning of his memory. Franklin stood for wisdom, thrift, humility, and a restless, striving intellect. Alexander Hamilton personifies the commercial, political American, especially in those decades when businessmen are in charge of government.
Americans perceived the French statesman and officer Lafayette as an example of the American mission and the spread of republican principles throughout the world. When Lafayette made his triumphal return to the United States in 1824, he made special contact with African Americans, as if to emphasize the incomplete nature of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson is among the most controversial of the early national heroes. Viewed grudgingly as the "sage of Monticello," he held little meaning for antebellum Americans. His standing fell sharply in the Gilded Age. When Franklin D. Roosevelt enshrined Jefferson to push his New Deal in the decades after the 1930s, Jefferson became a national hero, with emphasis on his sharp intellect and philosophic probing. Jefferson's writings have gotten him into trouble, however. Antebellum racists sized upon his allegations on the intellectual inferiority of African Americans as proof of the need for slavery. In a twenty-first-century multicultural society, they seem mean-spirited. Combined with the proof of his paternity of a child with Sally Hemmings, his black servant, Jefferson's writings have sent his reputation downward again.
The antebellum period gave birth to fewer American saints. Davy Crockett, though a real person and congressman, became closer to an eidolon that stood for frontiersmen who maintained an unsteady relationship, often through women, with civilization. Crockett's image, together with Daniel Boone and, later, Buffalo Bill, is tailor-made for popular American literature, film, and television. More substantial an image is that of Andrew Jackson, who redirected the American presidency from the neo-colonial Virginia dynasty into a modern, political machine replete with patronage. Jackson's presidency combines the support of the common (white) man with the fierce, combative individual vision of the imperial presidency. A link between Washington and Lincoln, Jackson was profoundly popular after Word War II because of the connection between a strong president and popular support. However, Jackson's popularity has taken a dive because of his race prejudices. As some scholars have shown, Jackson's administration did not open economic doors for the common man; reconsideration of the frontier myth has had a side effect emphasizing Jackson as an irrational, murderous Indian-hater.
Holidays, National Events, and Conflicts
Americans celebrated their heroes and the memory of the American Revolution on the Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day. A day of parades and barbecues, the Fourth of July remains the paramount American political holiday. While Americans enjoyed fireworks and food for generations, they listened carefully to commemorative orations and to a ritualized, moving reading of the Declaration of Independence. In the twenty-first century, the Fourth of July is more of a holiday for workers and a time for eating hot dogs; however, the Declaration is still printed in full in most American newspapers. Other American holidays from the first decades of the nation have not fared as well. Evacuation Day, when the British troops turned over New York City on 25 November 1783, was marked by a festival for about a century, but finally fell into disuse after the United States and England became allies in the 1880s.
American nationalism was not restricted to drums and barbecues. The completion of the stalemated War of 1812 with England saw an upsurge of nationalism. Despite the sour memory of the New England Federalists who endorsed secession, Americans such as Albert Gallatin viewed their fellow citizens as "more American, they feel and act more like a nation; and I hope the permanency of the Union is better secured," as the statesman wrote to his friend Matthew Lyon in 1816. Other observers were more cautious. George Templeton Strong, the New York diarist, concluded that Americans "are so young a people that we feel the want of nationality."
There were sizable obstacles to a national consensus. Federal power was relatively weak. From the 1830s on, controversies over slavery wracked the nation. North and South found support in religious arguments. Northerners determined that it was impossible to be a slaveholder and a good Christian; southerners found justification for chattel bondage in the Bible. That split played out in Manifest Destiny, by which the United States extended political and military authority over much of North America. As God's chosen people, Americans had a divinely inspired right to expand across the continent. Southerners in turn viewed expansion, as Susan-Mary Grant argues in her book, The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations (2000), as an insurance policy to sustain slavery and combat the encroachments of centralized power. Americans increasingly saw an inevitable conflict. Southerners in particular came to see their section as "The South," a kind of "southern nationalism." These divergent conceptions of national purpose yawned wider after the bloody clashes in Kansas-Nebraska and the Supreme Court's disastrous Dred Scott decision of 1857.
The watershed event was the Civil War. The last major conflict fought solely in the territorial United States, the Civil War cost more lives than any other American war. Out of its ashes came a new American saint, Abraham Lincoln, and retirement of the American Revolution as the engine of nationalism in favor of a new understanding of American nationalism based upon a disciplined, organized nation-state with immense power and capabilities. A brilliant orator, whose speeches encapsulated the need for a Union at a time of treasonous rebellion by the South, Lincoln became the symbol of this new nationalism. Aside from Franklin and Washington, Lincoln remains paramount among American heroes. Lincoln rose from Davy Crockett's frontier to take on the imperial power of Washington, the sagacity of Franklin, and the racial ambivalence of Jefferson (Lincoln favored colonization, or repatriation of blacks to Africa). Lincoln guided the North through the bloody years of the Civil War, rose to the occasion by stating the Emancipation Proclamation, and enrolled thousands of black troops and sent them into the South to vanquish their former oppressors. His deification was completed by his assassination on Good Friday after the Union had been redeemed by great blood sacrifice. At each stop, tens of thousands of Americans viewed his funeral procession up through the northern states and out to the Midwest for burial. Zelinsky refers aptly to this event as a "religious catharsis."
After his death, Lincoln was commemorated in every conceivable way. As with Washington, his birthday became a national holiday; every genre of literature dealt with his manifold meaning. Even more than Jackson, Lincoln is credited with the creation of the ennobling of the presidency and the placing of the national trust in the nation's chief executive. Lincoln's death joined him with the tens of thousands of other men who gave their lives for the Union. Constitutionally, Lincoln's legacy was stamped into the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments that ended slavery, gave the vote to African American males, and endorsed a new concept of national citizenship. No longer was it permissible to say that one was a South Carolinian or New Yorker first. Now, the term "American" became foremost. The Civil War also saw the stars and stripes become the true national flag.
Lincoln's and the Civil War's legacy was evident in the decades that followed. Politicians of every stripe tried to identify themselves with Lincoln and "waved the bloody shirt," to pair their candidacy or program with the sacrifice of the fallen soldiers. Contesting the meaning of the Civil War and citizenship sharpened in late nineteenth century. As southerners used terrorism and northern indifference to reaffix African Americans into a form of bondage through sharecropping and the rapid construction of penal institutions, they took away the citizenship rights of blacks and left a legacy of racial and sectional bitterness that continues to divide the American landscape.
Nationalism in the Twentieth Century
Notwithstanding the politicized conflicts over nationalism, Americans at the onset of the twentieth century adapted its multiple symbols. The flag became mandatory; the Great Seal was everywhere. Organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic commemorated the Civil War. The new media of film and recorded popular music permitted widespread and rapid nationalist messages. In 1915 D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation combined a new southern view of the Civil War and American destiny with a racial view of the conflict.
At the same time, Americans began to shift their gaze from political to business heroes. Theodore Roosevelt combined intellectual activism with physical fitness to become the archetype of twentieth-century presidents. Roosevelt's devotion to fitness gave sports a national heritage. Baseball became the "national pastime," and its championship round is called the "World Series," though no teams from Japan, Korea, Mexico, or Latin America, all hotbeds of baseball, are eligible to take part. Teddy's fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, became the "Lincoln" of the Great Depression era by devising Hamiltonian programs to lift the nation out of economic despair. But more and more, Americans found equal meaning in inventors such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. The publisher Henry Luce attempted to persuade Americans of his brand of nationalism through his widespread newsmagazines, including the ever-popular Time. Franklin D. Roosevelt may have epitomized the strong presidency, but after him the office took a great fall. Able if ruthless politicians such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon became villains in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, Ronald Reagan and George Bush campaigned against the office of the presidency, even if their actual policies further extended the reach of government power.
As human heroes proved vulnerable, the imprint of nationalism spread across the country. Beginning with the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, the federal government spawned post offices in every town. The Tennessee Valley Authority became the first federal utility. Physical representation of the national government became evident everywhere in bland, mammoth regional offices of federal bureaucracies. Federal prisons and military bases dotted the landscape. In front of each was the requisite American flag.
The Twenty-First Century
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, historical American nationalism was represented by pageantry and the rise of a heritage industry. Re-creations of colonial days in Williamsburg, Virginia, were matched by the huge popularity of Civil War reenactments in which men and boys in copycat uniforms mimicked the battles fought in the mid-1800s. Their enthusiasm for such representation of American nationalism was a reflection of a stronger military comprehension of nationalism. The American military presence was felt globally as American soldiers resided on bases around the world. The war on terrorism ensured that, if anything, the American military presence globally would increase rather than decline. The acts of terrorism committed on 11 September 2001 were followed by a huge upswing in nationalist sentiment, symbolized by the ubiquity of American flags and the swoop of a bald eagle at the start of nearly every major sporting event.
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Books, 1993.
Fousek, John. To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Grant, Susan-Mary. "From Union to Nation? The Civil War and the Development of American Nationalism." In The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations. Edited by Susan-Mary Grant and Brian Holden Reid. London: Longman, 2000.
Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Zelinsky, Wilbur. Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Nationalism is a comparatively recent phenomenon, probably born with the French Revolution, but despite its short history, it has been extremely important in forming the bonds that hold modern nations together. Today it operates alongside the legal structure and supplements the formal institutions of society in providing much of the cohesiveness and order necessary for the existence of the modern nation-state.
Necessary Conditions for Its Development
For people to express nationalism it is first necessary for them to identify themselves as belonging to a nation, that is, a large group of people who have something in common. The rise of centralized monarchies, which placed people under one rule and eliminated feudalism, made this possible. The realization that they might possess a common history, religion, language, or race also aided people in forming a national identity. When both a common identity and a formal authority structure over a large territory (i.e., the state) exist, then nationalism becomes possible.
In its first powerful manifestation in the French Revolution, nationalism carried with it the notion of popular sovereignty, from which some have inferred that nationalism can occur only in democratic nations. However, this thesis is belied by the intense nationalism that characterized the German Empire and later Nazi Germany. Where nationalism arises, its specific form is the product of each particular nation's history.
History
Early Developments
Although nationalism is unique to the modern world, some of its elements can be traced throughout history. The first roots of nationalism are probably to be found in the ancient Hebrews, who conceived of themselves as both a chosen people, that is, a people as a whole superior to all other peoples, and a people with a common cultural history. The ancient Greeks also felt superior to all other peoples and moreover felt a sense of great loyalty to the political community. These feelings of cultural superiority (ethnocentrism), which are similar to nationalism, gave way to much more universal identifications under the Roman Empire and with the Christian Church through its teaching of the oneness of humanity.
As strong centralized monarchies were built from petty feudal states, as regional languages and art forms were evolved, and as local economies widened, popular identification with these developments became increasingly strong. In areas such as Italy, which were not yet single nations, recurring invasions led such thinkers as Niccolò Machiavelli to advocate national political federation. The religious wars of the Reformation set nation against nation, though the strongest loyalty continued to adhere to the sovereign. In the 16th and 17th cent. the nationalistic economic doctrine of mercantilism appeared.
The growth of the middle classes, their desire for political power, and the consequent development of democratic political theory were closely connected with the emergence of modern nationalism. The theorists of the French Revolution held that people should establish governments of equality and liberty for everyone. To them the nation was inseparable from the people, and for the first time in history a people could create a government in accordance with the nation's general will. Although their aims were universal, they glorified the nation that would establish their aims, and nationalism found its first political expression.
The Nineteenth Century
It was in the 19th cent. that nationalism became a widespread and powerful force. During this time nationalism expressed itself in many areas as a drive for national unification or independence. The spirit of nationalism took an especially strong hold in Germany, where thinkers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte had developed the idea of Volk. However, the nationalism that inspired the German people to rise against the empire of Napoleon I was conservative, tradition-bound, and narrow rather than liberal, progressive, and universal. And when the fragmented Germany was finally unified as the German Empire in 1871, it was a highly authoritarian and militarist state. After many years of fighting, Italy also achieved national unification and freedom from foreign domination, but certain areas inhabited by Italians (e.g., Trieste) were not included in the new state, and this gave rise to the problem of irredentism. In the United States, where nationalism had evinced itself in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, national unity was maintained at the cost of the Civil War.
In the latter half of the 19th cent., there were strong nationalist movements among the peoples subject to the supranational Austrian and Ottoman empires, as there were in Ireland under British rule, and in Poland under Russian rule. At the same time, however, with the emergence in Europe of strong, integrated nation-states, nationalism became increasingly a sentiment of conservatives. It was turned against such international movements as socialism, and it found outlet in pursuit of glory and empire (see imperialism). Nationalist conflicts had much to do with bringing on World War I.
The Twentieth Century
The early 20th cent., with the breakup of Austria-Hungary and of the Ottoman Empire, saw the establishment of many independent nations, especially through the peace treaties ending World War I. The Paris Peace Conference established the principle of national self-determination, upheld by the League of Nations and later by the United Nations. While self-determination is a nationalist principle, it also recognizes the basic equality of all nations, large or small, and therefore transcends a narrow nationalism that claims superiority for itself.
It was exactly this latter type of nationalism, however, that arose in Nazi Germany, preaching the superiority of the so-called Aryan race and the need for the extermination of the Jews and the enslavement of Slavic peoples in their “living space” (see National Socialism). Italian fascism was in a similar manner based on extreme nationalist sentiments. At the same time, Asian and African colonial territories, seeking to cast off imperial bonds, were developing nationalist movements. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Indian National Congress, which struggled for Indian independence for over 60 years. After World War II nationalism in Asia and Africa spread at such a fast pace that dozens of new “nations” were created from former colonial territorial holdings.
Although interdependence and global communications interconnected all nations by the 1990s, nationalism appears to have grown more extreme with the breakup of the Soviet empire, the growth of Muslim fundamentalism, and the collapse of Yugoslavia. Xenophobic, separatist movements are not necessarily confined to newly independent states; they appear in many European nations and Canada, as well as India, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and many others. International organizations, such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of American States, and the Organization for African Unity, represent attempts to curb extreme nationalism, stressing cooperation among nations.
Bibliography
See H. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (1944, repr. 1967) and Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (rev. ed. 1965); E. H. Carr, Nationalism and After (1945); L. L. Snyder, The Meaning of Nationalism (1954, repr. 1968); A. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (1971); A. D. Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (1979); B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983); E. A. Tiryakian and R. Rogowski, ed., New Nationalisms of the Developed West (1985); J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (1985); L. L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (1990).
A people's sense of its political identity or a movement to achieve such identity.
The word nationalism refers to the feeling of political unity or of identity and patriotic sympathy that a people usually focuses on its own language or culture or on a land that it regards as its own. It also refers to that component of various political ideologies according to which this feeling is held to be essential to the existence of a state or to a political movement's aspirations to statehood. Finally, it is used in the arguments advanced by historians, ideologues, and politicians to justify actual or proposed actions on behalf of the people they see as embodying the nation.
Evidence of nationalism, in any of these related senses, is difficult to discern in the Middle East prior to the nineteenth century. Individuals often felt affinity with their coreligionists, but it was assumed that whatever the religion of the ruler might be, the state was not exclusively defined by religion. Tolerance of religious plurality was the norm, even though the ruler's coreligionists usually enjoyed greater official favor than people of a different religion. Language similarly served as a bond between people and as a dividing line between groups, but no state was linguistically homogeneous or disposed to regard language as the defining quality of a ruler's subjects. As for territory, strong feelings of identity with places of origin, particularly cities and their environs, were much in evidence in such guises as folk sayings, humor, and local traditions, but they were seldom accorded a political valuation.
As in most other parts of the world, the appearance of elements of national feeling in the Middle East preceded formal nationalist statements or political manifestos. Historians have debated the degree of indebtedness (certainly heavy) that various Middle Eastern nationalist writers and political leaders owed to European models in seeking to express their nationalism, but it would be an over-simplification to consider these models the sole source of nationalism in the region.
Greek Nationalism
The earliest nationalist movement manifested itself in the Greeks' war to obtain independence from the Ottoman Empire (between 1821 and 1832). The earlier revolt of the south Slavs (between 1804 and 1830) that culminated in the creation of an autonomous principality of Serbia had been a manifestation of widespread discontent with Ottoman maladministration and military disorder. Its leaders did not articulate nationalist positions, however, and the Slavs would presumably have been content with a return to competent Ottoman rule.
In Greece, however, despite a patchwork leadership ranging from bandit chiefs to Greek intellectuals educated in western Europe, a distinctly nationalist ideology came in time to be accepted as the best expression of the people's will. This ideology, however, was associated with a revolutionary organization called the Philike Hetairia that was based in Greek communities outside Greece (the most important one was in Odessa). Nationalist ideology followed rather than preceded the Greek rebellion, and many Greeks fought to escape Ottoman rule without being aware of any ideology. Many of the ideologues were more familiar with conditions and ideas in western Europe than in the Peloponnesus. Rhigas Pheraios, for example (who wrote in his immensely popular "War Hymn": "How long, my heroes, shall we live in bondage,/alone like lions on ridges, on peaks?/ . . . Better an hour of life that is free/than forty years in slavery!"), had a personal history of involvement with numerous revolutionary groups in western Europe dedicated to the ideals of the French Revolution.
Independent Greece not only fostered a revival of classical language and a glorification of ancient greatness - both common practices in later examples of Middle Eastern nationalism - but also developed the Megali Idea, an ideology that harked back to the Byzantine Empire and whose proponents visualized a broad Balkan realm extending to Istanbul (then Constantinople) in which people of various languages and ethnic groups would be led by Greeks. This approach to nationalism, manifesting a vision of the Greek people as a political entity rather than a geographical entity, reflects the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other French ideologues rather than the German vision of complete identity of people and land. The concept of one people dominating others within a specified territory later becomes commonplace in Middle Eastern nationalism.
Turkish and Arab Nationalism
Although other nationalist stirrings in the nineteenth century were not consciously patterned on the Greek example, they had some common features. Many advocates of Turkish and Arab political and linguistic distinctiveness, for example, were educated in Europe or were familiar with European ideas. Namik Kemal, whose Turkish drama Vatan (Fatherland) helped establish that word (watan in Arabic) as an element of nationalism, spent three years in exile in Europe; and the Lebanese Christian Butrus al-Bustani, one of the most industrious advocates of a revived Arabic literary language, worked closely with American Protestant missionaries. Like the Greeks, the Turks and Arabs encountered difficulty in harmonizing their particularist views with a history of pluralistic empire. Just as adherents to the Megali Idea could visualize, on the Byzantine model, an ethnically plural state dominated by Greeks, the Arabs and Turks aspired mostly to a revival or assertion of ethno-linguistic identity within the pluralistic Ottoman Empire.
One difference between Greeks and other nineteenth-century nationalists was the association of religion with a people's identity. All Greeks were orthodox Christians, even though not all orthodox Christians were Greek, nor all Greek clergy nationalist in sympathy. By contrast, Christian Arabs were prominent in the protonationalist Arab literary revival, and the Turkish protonationalists supported the religiously plural Ottoman system. Therefore, even though the great majority of Turks and Arabs were Muslims, Islam did not from the outset become an integral element of nationalist thought.
Written expressions of nationalist views among Turks and Arabs circulated during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Religion, however, remained a problem. The foremost Turkish ideologue, Ziya Gökalp, concentrated his analysis of Turkish identity on language and folk customs and dismissed Islam as a transitory civilizational attribute that should not stand in the way of the adoption of European customs. The Arab Abd al-Rahman alKawakibi, on the other hand, called for a revival of the caliphate under an Arab of the prophet Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh, instead of under the despotic Ottoman sultan Abdülhamit II.
Rise of Nationalism
The Committee for Union and Progress, a group of military officers that took control of the Ottoman Empire through a coup d'état in 1908, espoused Turkish nationalism and mandated the use of the Turkish language in certain administrative offices that had previously used local languages. Resentment against such Turkizing measures contributed to the formation of small Arab nationalist groups in Syria and Istanbul. Most of these Arab nationalists remained wedded to the concept of an Ottoman Empire, however, until the outbreak of World War I.
Ottoman defeat and the publicizing of Woodrow Wilson's advocacy of self-determination of peoples encouraged an outpouring of nationalist expressions throughout the Middle East. Kurds and Armenians, as well as Arabs whom Britain had encouraged in a nationalist revolt against the Ottomans during the war, tried to influence the peace negotiations in their favor. The most successful nationalist movement of the period, however, was that of an Ottoman army officer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who established a Turkish republic that was ideologically rooted in the ideas of Gökalp. The new Turkish state expelled a Greek expeditionary force from western Anatolia; it also abolished the offices of sultan and caliph, and legislated the most strenuously secular form of nationalism known in the region.
Nationalism dominated Middle East politics from the end of World War II until the Iranian revolution of 1979. Arab nationalism flourished once the collapse of the Ottoman Empire resolved the question of whether or not to remain loyal to an ethnically plural state. Although some Muslims pushed for reestablishment of the caliphate, most nationalists were caught up in the tide of secularism, actually anticlericalism, that had engulfed Turkey. The Baʿth Party was founded in 1947 on a platform of Arab national unity and separation of religion from public affairs. Some other groups, such as the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, espoused an Arab nationalism based on a single country. The Arabic term qawmiyya (from qawm, group of people) distinguishes this type of nationalism from wataniyya, which calls for political unity of all the Arab peoples. Gamal Abdel Nasser, considered by many the most popular and effective Arab nationalist leader, strove for Arab unity but also inspired Egyptians with the feeling that Egypt was the center of the Arab world.
Zionism, a Jewish nationalist movement that originated in Europe and embodied many European ideas, came into bitter conflict with Arab nationalism, whose leaders viewed the Zionist community in Palestine as a manifestation of European colonialism. The basic elements important to Zionism - language, religion, land, and identity as a people - differed little from those that are important to Arab nationalism.
Being farther removed geographically from European cultural influence, Iran did not manifest a strong nationalist identity until the post - World War I period. Earlier anti-imperialist actions, such as the Tobacco Revolt of 1891 to 1893, engaged religious feelings as much as they did patriotic feelings. When the military commander Reza Khan assumed the throne as Reza Shah in 1925, he took the surname Pahlavi to indicate continuity with the pre-Islamic imperial past, since the word is normally used to designate the form of the Persian language spoken at that time. The Pahlavi dynasty promoted a nationalist ideology focused on the person of the ruler and the historical sequence of imperial Iranian dynasties. It emphasized the dominant role of Persians and of the Persian language in a multiethnic kingdom.
In 1950, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh became the focus of a strong nonroyal nationalist movement. Suppression of this movement on the shah's behalf by U.S. and British intelligence agencies detoured na
