Write an essay that outlines and compares common features that contributed to nationalism in Japan, Germany, and the United States

Question

Explain how these similar factors could be accompanied by such extreme differences in state formation and national direction in the early twentieth century.

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: 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. The new states of the nineteenth-century Americas rapidly bred a sense of nationhood in at least some of their citizens. 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. Whether monarchical or republican, constitutional or absolutist, nineteenth-century states tended to become more centralized. Industrialization and militarization made it possible, as never before, to enforce unity and exact obedience from areas remote from a country's capital. Germany, Japan and the United States overcame traditional provincial, regional, and communal loyalties by promoting a common sense of allegiance to the state. Governments increasingly used universal military service to create a statewide sense of political community, usually in combination with efforts to cultivate nationalism and spread nationalist feelings. The most spectacular cases of state power restructured in war were those of Germany, the United States, and Japan. First, the wars unified countries that were either fragmented or in danger of fragmentation. Germany and Italy had long been divided among many different and often hostile states. In Japan power over remote provinces had slipped out of the central government's control in the early nineteenth century. The U.S. constitution had never really settled a crucial issue: whether the separate states had irrevocably renounced their sovereignty in favor of the federal government. Moreover, the wars in all four places pitted relatively industrializing or industrialized regions against largely agrarian communities. In Germany and the United States, the stories of the wars were similar: Broadly speaking, industrializing regions overcame unindustrialized ones, though in Germany the divisions were less clear-cut than in the American case. The effects of consolidation were similar in all four cases. Germany emerged instantly as a major power. In 1870–1871—only four years after the creation of a superstate in which most German states joined—the new Germany crushed France in a test of strength that lasted only a few months. Little more than a decade later, the German Empire—as it was now called—was contending for colonies in Africa and Asia. Political unity also had a stimulating economic effect, and Germany's economy began to rival Britain's as the most industrialized and productive of the time. Italy, Japan, and the United States were slower to emerge as potential superpowers after their wars of unification, but by the end of the century, they were all beginning, at least, to display the same characteristics: rapid industrialization, military efficiency, and colonial expansion. Finally, in all four countries, the leaders appealed, with varying sincerity, to conservative values to justify centralization. In Japan, the term "Meiji Restoration" described the centralizing revolution, on the spurious grounds that, by abolishing the shogunate in 1868, the new regime "restored" the Meiji emperor (r. 1867–1912) to his rightful place at the head of the empire. In Germany, the victors nostalgically called their new state an "empire," while adopting truly radical measures, including an aggressively secularist campaign against the social influence of the Catholic Church, and the introduction of the world's first state-run social insurance scheme. In the United States, the victorious North invoked the country's Founding Fathers and claimed to defend the Constitution, while undertaking profoundly radical policies, including the emancipation of all slaves and "Reconstruction," which was really an attempt to enforce, in the defeated South, policies of racial equality that many of the Northern states themselves did not practice.