Drawing from three areas (Africa, East Asia, India, Latin America, or Europe), first define and explain nationalism, and then compare and contrast the ways in which nationalism operated in different areas and among different peoples of the world

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Nationalists claimed that a people who shared the same language, historic experience, and sense of identity made up an indissoluble unit, linked (to quote a Finnish nationalist) by "ties of mind and soul mightier and firmer than every external bond." Nationalists believed that everyone must belong to a nation of this kind, and that every nation had to assert its identity, pursue its destiny, and defend its rights. Almost all European states contained more than one nation, and many European nations straddled the borders of states. Nationalism was therefore disruptive. German nationalists yearned to unite all German-speaking people in a single state. French nationalists wanted to meld France's historic communities into a unified force and secure what they claimed to be France's natural frontiers—incorporating all the land west of the Rhine and north of the Alps. Spain remained, as a British visitor observed, a "bundle" of nations—including, notably, Castilians, Catalans, Basques, and Galicians—unsure whether they wished to become a single Spanish nation. British statesmen kept talking about England, forgetting that the English, Irish, Scots, and Welsh were all supposed to have combined in a new British nation. Italian nationalists wanted to convert their peninsula from a "geographical expression" into a state. In Central Europe the Habsburg monarchy juggled quarrelsome minorities, privileging Germans, Hungarians, and, to some extent, Poles in areas where they predominated, acknowledging in various ways other groups that had more or less distinct homelands, such as the Slovenes, Croats, and Czechs. Beyond Europe, nineteenth-century nationalism is hard to distinguish from patriotic resistance against European imperialism. Rebels proclaimed arbitrary "nations"—such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Algeria, and India—that had never existed before and that housed many different peoples, with nothing much in common except European rulers. The first such proclamations were in Latin America during the wars of independence fought against Spanish rule between 1810 and the 1820s. Though the creole elites shared a common identity as "Americans," their desire to exercise power in states of their own creation exceeded their willingness to remain united. In sub-Saharan Africa, the nationalist idea was implanted, at least in part, from the United States. It started in Liberia, a colony of ex-slaves founded by philanthropists in 1821, with help from racists who wanted to rid the United States of black people. Liberia proclaimed independence in 1847, with a constitution based on that of the United States, but more radical in its insistence on "national rights and the blessings of life." North of the Sahara, meanwhile, nationalism emerged among communities forced into self-definition as the Ottoman Empire retreated and European imperialism threatened. In the second half of the century, Egyptian intellectuals began to give the Arabic word watan—which originally just meant something like "birthplace"—the sense of the European term nation, with the same romantic associations. To some extent, Western empires deliberately encouraged nationalism around the world, regarding its spread as the fulfillment of Westerners' supposedly civilizing mission. Alongside Western models of nationalism, other influences were at work. Toward the end of the century, Japan became a model for Asian nationalists because its success demonstrated that Asian nations could rival or surpass Western powers. Vietnamese nationalism, meanwhile, fed on memories of age-old resistance to the Chinese as well as on opposition to the French. Chinese nationalism was itself an expression against the ruling Qing dynasty, even though the emperors' Manchu origins were now a long way in the past.