Nationalism by Anthony D. Smith

Author:Anthony D. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

5

Histories

There is a widely accepted ‘history of nationalism’, and it is one that is decidedly modernist.

It starts in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, from the Partitions of Poland and the American Revolution through the French Revolution to the reaction to Napoleon’s conquests in Prussia, Russia and Spain. Nationalism, according to this view, was born during these forty years of revolution. Subsequently, it spread in fits and starts to other parts of Europe – Serbia, Greece, Poland (again) – as well as among the creole elites of Latin America, from 1810 to the 1820s. The first great wave of nationalisms culminated in the 1848 Revolutions in Europe – the so-called ‘spring of peoples’ – and its main achievements were the unification of Germany and Italy, under Prussian and Piedmontese auspices, and the elevation of Hungary within the Habsburg empire. In the latter third of the nineteenth century, a second wave of nationalisms burgeoned in Eastern and Northern Europe – Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Norwegian, Jewish – along with a few nationalisms outside Europe – in Meiji Japan, India, Armenia and Egypt. The latter were soon joined in the first decades of the twentieth century by a variety of ethnic nationalisms in Asia – Turkish, Arab, Persian, Burman, Javanese, Filippino, Vietnamese and Chinese – and the first stirrings of nationalisms in Africa – in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. By the 1930s and 1940s, there was hardly a corner of the globe that had not been touched by the nationalist onslaught, while the same period saw the apogee of nationalism in Europe, culminating in Nazism and the genocide of the Second World War, on the one hand, and the subsequent anti-colonial ‘liberation’ nationalisms in Africa and Asia.1

There is an uneasy coda to this story. When it was widely assumed that it had ‘spent its force’, nationalism seemed to spring to life once again in the movements for ethnic autonomy in the West in the 1960s and 1970s – in Catalonia and Euzkadi, Corsica and Brittany, Flanders, Scotland and Wales, and Quebec – only to die down, apparently, in the 1980s, and then be revived, when perestroika and glasnost encouraged the nationalisms of the titular republics of the Soviet Union after 1988, which in turn contributed to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this heady atmosphere of expectancy, we have witnessed new tragedies of ethnic nationalism in the last decade of the twentieth century – in the Indian sub-continent, in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, in Rwanda, in the Caucasus, above all, in the Yugoslav wars and their uncertain aftermath.

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