Nationalism in Africa and Asia as a Mass Movement - Essay Example

 Nationalism in Africa and Asia as a Mass Movement One of the central issues raised by Nairn’s analysis is the social composition of the ideological movement of nationalism. For many, nationalism is a movement of the intellectuals, or more broadly, the intelligentsia. They occupy a pivotal role in the analyses of Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, J.H.Kautsky, Peter Worsely and Anthony D. Smith and by implication, Benedict Anderson, providing both the leadership and the main following of the movement, as well as being the most zealous consumers of nationalist mythology. The book, After the Tamerlane: the rise and fall of global empires, 1400-200 by John Darwin, is an impressive example of the macro narrative approach to the history of the world that has been (Anderson, 2006, p170). The writer provides a well argued, nuanced yet so clear, and highly informative overview of more than half a millennium of interaction cross-continentally and exchange, which he relates to his main theme-the rise and fall of global empires. Starting with a well produced survey of the state of various Asian empires circa 1500, the writer sets out to decentre the overwhelmingly European-focused macro narrative that has dominated thinking and writing about the rise and fall of expansive colonizing polities for centuries (Anderson, 2006, p183). The writer is able to sustain this shift in perspective quite well through the early chapters, which converge in his discussion the factors leading to the ‘great divergence’, which has received a considerable deal of concentration on the fraction of the world’s historians in the recent years (Anderson, 2006, p190). As European nation empires outflank and begins to encircle the Islamic gunpowder empires and eventually China and Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, transformations in Western Europe and European enterprises overseas inexorably reclaim their familiar position at the heart of the writer’s global narrative (Anderson, 2006, p183). He is able to offset his trend somewhat by adopting a second, more original perspective altering strategy that consists of well focused and perceptive discussions of the weaknesses and failures of European colonizing enterprises and their persisting dependence on colonized peoples for all manner of imperial endeavors, from trade and war to the governance of conquered territories. Darwin’s attention to the weakness and vulnerability of even empires on the increase or at the climax of their global power considerably enhances his superb discussions of what he uses as key factors that favor some empire minded societies over others (Anderson, 2006, p178). In the course of the nineteenth century, especially in its latter half, the philological lexicographic revolution and the rise of intra-European nationalist movements, themselves the products, not only of capitalism, but of the elephantiasis of the reigning states, formed increasing culture, therefore, supporting and complex for many dynasts (Anderson, 2006, p180). The legitimacy of most of these dynasties had nothing to do with nationals. Romanov ruled over the Tatars and Letts, Germans and Armenians, Russians and Finns. Habsburgs were perched high over Magyars and Croats, Slovaks and Italians, Ukrainians and Austro-Germans (Anderson, 2006, p182). Hanoverians presided over Bengalis and Quebecois, as well as Scots and Irish, English and Welsh. On the continent furthermore, members of the same dynastic families often ruled in different, sometimes rivalrous states. What nationality should be assigned to Bourbons ruling in France and Spain, Hohenzollerns in Prussia and Rumania, Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and Greece? Essentially, the administrative purpose these dynasties had, at different speeds, settled on certain print-vernaculars as languages of state-with the choice of language essentially a matter of unselfconscious inheritance or convenience (Anderson, 2006, p186). The flexographic revolution in Europe, however, formed and gradually extended the certainty that verbal communications (at least in Europe) were, so to articulate, the personal possessions of quite exact groups-their day by day speakers and readers- and furthermore that these crowds, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals (Heydemann, 2000, p216). The philological incendiaries thus presented the dynasts with a disagreeable dilemma which did not fail to sharpen over time. Nowhere in this dilemma is clearer than in the case of Austro-Hungary. When enlightened absolutist Joseph ӀӀ decided early in the 1780s to switch the language of state from Latin to German, ‘he did not fight, for instance, against the Magyar language, but against the Latin…. He thought that, on that basis of the mediaeval Latin administration of the nobility, no effective work in the interest of the masses could have been carried on. The necessity of unifying the language connecting all parts of his empire seemed to him a peremptory claim. Under this necessity he could not choose any other language other than German, the only one which had a vast culture and literature under its sway and which had a considerable minority in all his provinces’, (Heydemann, 2000, p202). Indeed, the Habsburgs were not a consciously and consequentially Germanizing power since there were Habsburgs who did not even speak German. Even their emperors who sometimes fostered a policy of Germanization were not led in their efforts by any patriotic point of analysis, except their dealings were said by the intent of the union and generalism of their kingdom (Heydemann, 2000, p189). Their main aim was Hausmacht. Germany increasingly acquired a double status after the middle of the nineteenth century: particular national and universal imperial. The more the dynasty pressed German speaking subjects, and the more it aroused antipathy among the rest. It was in October 1947, where the strike of the African railway workers began, and, it was an event of epic dimensions since it implicated 20,000 employees and their kin, close down nearly all rail travel all through French West Africa, and, lasted in several regions for five and a half months (Anderson, 2006, p164). As if the chronological event were not powerful enough, it has been imprinted in the awareness of West Africans and others in the novel of Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Wood. The author performs a powerful strike attempt weakened by the unfriendly approach of operation unionists, by the seductions of French teaching, and by the gluttony of local leaders. The strike is converted by its transformation hooked on a truly popular association dynamized by ladies, climaxing in a ladies’ march on Dakar guided by someone from the boundaries of society and resulting to a togetherness of African neighborhood against the powers of colonialism (Heydemann, 2000, p145). The writer’s novel both complicates the task of the historian and lends its importance: written epic may manipulate oral proof, yet the imaginary account improves the sense of members that their events shaped history (Sueur, 2003, p244). Some informants, when visited by a group of Senegalese graduates, expressed resentment of Sembene for turning ‘our strike’ into the novel. However, what needs mainly to be unpacked is the relationship of the labor association to the independence struggle (Sueur, 2003, p256). The strike had got to be understood in the background of a French administration anxious to find an innovative basis of authenticity and control in a period when political and social movements in the settlements were declaring themselves with new energy. These two procedures shaped one another: as African actions sought to revolve the government’s requirement for economic growth and order into statements entitlements and representation, bureaucrats had to reorganize their strategies in the countenance of new African confrontations (Sueur, 2003, p273). The truly program setting movement of the abrupt post warfare existence was the Senegalese universal strike of 1946. The French sociology of Africa, up to that point admitted to only two groups, evolues and paysans. Officials hoped to attain economic growth by getting rid of forced work, reducing the tax load on the peasants, and humanizing infrastructure devoted to farming, and to achieve political stability by yielding evolues a modest quantity of participation in the leading institution of France itself (Sueur, 2003, p287). Although the field, of African history has not abounded in raging historical controversy (being perhaps too new and too concerned to uncover the past), the study of 19th and 20th century of South African history is particularly a spirited one. The energizing part of this field has been provided by a group of young British leftists, mainly Marxists, who have taken exclusion to what they regard as to be prevailing liberal tenets of South African history (Sueur, 2003, p315). Focusing on the articulation and implementation of segregationist and apartheid programs, they argue that these policies were not primarily inspired by the Boer population whose mentality was performed in the earlier pre-modern racist milieu, but originated at the very heart of South Africa’s capitalist and mining economy. They claim that apartheid will not dissolve as capitalism and foreign investment increase, but is embedded in South Africa’s peripheral system of capitalism (Sueur, 2003, p329). Observing through the lens of warfare and food crisis rather than the competitor histories of Arabism, material inducements, rather than Sharifian status, determined the path of Hussein’s revolt. The Ottoman admission into the war resulted to naval blockage and the disturbance of food brought in Syria and the Hejaz (Sueur, 2003, p335). The impact of these shifts is supply diverse with the prototype of growth in the late Ottoman period, but in grain-deficient regions like the Hejaz and southern Transjordan, people such as the Huwaytat were left exposed than more self-sufficient tribes-people north of the Mujib line. The looming threat of hunger provided a level that the Hashemites’ British allies used to choose the southern Bedouin and construct the northern rungs of the ladder of tribal allies that took Aqaba in July 1917 (Sueur, 2003, p354). However, Transjordans from the north side of al-Karak, where grain provisions were more protected and the Ottoman existence more forbidding, favored to straddle the barrier until the last period of warfare, and, it was Allenby’s triumph and the Turkish crumple, rather than the powers of the revolt that approved Fasial into Damascus in 1918 (Heydemann, 2000, p272). Recent articles on one aspect or another of this subject appear in a broad range of scholarly and public affairs journals, among which the most prominent are foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East journal, Middle Eastern Studies (especially for high-quality, detailed article on modern Middle Eastern historical subjects, including many on diplomatic history), Orbis and World politics (Heydemann, 2000, p284). The best way to locate scholarly articles may be too recent to appear in standard bibliographical list is by reference to the Middle East Journal, which contains every issue (published quarterly) a territorially and topically arranged “Bibliography of Periodical Literature.” This quarterly bibliographical service has the added advantage of including journal articles from Arab countries, Israel and Turkey, as well as Europe and America (Heydemann, 2000, p298). The Middle East Journal is also the most thorough in reporting- and usually reviewing- new books on Middle Eastern subjects. In the narrower field of Middle Eastern international relations, the review coverage of new books the Middle East journal and Foreign Affairs is unlikely to miss the notice of any serious new work on Middle Eastern international relations (Dirlik, Bahl & Gran, 2000, p315). The Middle East Studies Association (the leading North American scholarly society of those from all disciplines concerned with the Middle East) sponsors the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Its articles and reviews are of high quality, but since it covers the Middle East during the entire Islamic period (with attention to languages and literatures as well as, history and the social sciences), articles and reviews on Middle Eastern international politics are limited (Dirlik, Bahl & Gran, 2000, p320). In the late twentieth century, both socialism and capitalism as originally conceived have run their course, leaving, it appears, only fascism as a still unexhausted ideology for approaching the problems generated by industrial and postindustrial technologies (Dirlik, Bahl & Gran, 2000, p338). Will more technology continues to seem the easy though costly answer to social problems and moral confusion? In the high-speed fragmentation of life and meaning, will inhumane elimination of difficult problems become an acceptable solution if presented as short-term nastiness for long-term good? This time, who will educate students to the dangers of a new totalitarianism that synthesizes Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Huxley’s Brave New World? The bitterness and tragedy of much of history would have to be fully recognized before I could be turned toward alternative, sustainable, and humane visions, whether they be mosaic or celestial in nature (Dirlik, Bahl & Gran, 2000, p345). Work from this perspective could generate a foundation for historical understanding that would place center-front some difficult truths we already sense in shadows of world news and daily life. Perhaps then we could begin a story of humanity that charts us away from what Thomas Berry has called a civilization that bases its economy on burning the timbers of its lifeboats. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York: Verso, 2006. Arif Dirlik, Vinay Bahl, Peter Gran. History after the three worlds: post-Eurocentric historiographies. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Steven Heydemann, Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East. War, institutions, and social change in the Middle East. California: University of California Press, 2000. Sueur, James D. Le. The decolonization reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Read More