Nationalism Around the World 

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Nationalism in the Middle East

Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

• The empire of the Ottoman Turks—which once had included parts of eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa—had been growing steadily weaker since the end of the eighteenth century.
  • The empire’s size had decreased dramatically.
  • Much of its European territory had been lost.
• In 1876, Ottoman reformers seized control of the empire’s government and adopted a constitution aimed at forming a legislative assembly.
  • However, the sultan they placed on the throne, Abdulhamid II, suspended the new constitution and ruled by authoritarian means.
  • Abdulhamid paid a high price for his actions—he lived in constant fear of assassination.
• The final blow to the old empire came from World War I.
• The nationalists were aided by the efforts of the dashing British adventurer T. E. Lawrence, popularly known as “Lawrence of Arabia.”
• In 1916, the local governor of Makkah, encouraged by Great Britain, declared Arabia independent from Ottoman rule.
• During the war, the Ottoman Turks had alienated the Allies with their policies toward minority subjects, especially the Armenians.
  • Within seven months, six hundred thousand Armenians had been killed, and five hundred thousand had been deported (sent out of the country).
• By September 1915, an estimated 1 million Armenians were dead.
  • They were victims of genocide, the deliberate mass murder of a particular racial, political, or cultural group.
  • (A similar practice would be called ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian War of 1993 to 1996.)
• By 1918, another four hundred thousand Armenians had been massacred. Russia, France, and Britain denounced the Turkish killing of the Armenians as “against humanity and civilization.”
• At the end of World War I, the tottering Ottoman Empire collapsed.
• The invasion alarmed key elements in Turkey, who were organized under the leadership of the war hero Colonel Mustafa Kemal.

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The Modernization of Turkey

• President Kemal was now popularly known as Atatürk, or “father Turk.”
  • Atatürk’s changes went beyond politics.
  • Atatürk also took steps to modernize Turkey’s economy.
  • Perhaps the most significant aspect of Atatürk’s reform program was his attempt to break the power of the Islamic religion.
• The caliphate was formally abolished in 1924.
• Women were forbidden to wear the veil, a tradi- tional Islamic custom.
  • New laws gave women marriage and inheritance rights equal to men’s.
  • In 1934, women received the right to vote.
• The legacy of Kemal Atatürk was enormous.

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The Beginnings of Modern Iran

• A similar process of modernization was underway in Persia.
• Under the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925), the country had not been very successful in resolving its domestic problems.
  • The growing foreign presence led to the rise of a native Persian nationalist movement.
• During the next few years, Reza Shah Pahlavi tried to follow the example of Kemal Atatürk in Turkey.
  • Unlike Kemal Atatürk, Reza Shah Pahlavi did not try to destroy the power of Islamic beliefs.
• Foreign powers continued to harass Iran.

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Arab Nationalism

• World War I offered the Arabs an opportunity to escape from Ottoman rule.
• Because Britain had supported the efforts of Arab nationalists in 1916, the nationalists hoped this support would continue after the war ended.
• For the most part, Europeans created these Middle Eastern states.
• In the early 1920s, a reform leader, Ibn Saud, united Arabs in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
  • At first, the new kingdom, which consisted mostly of the vast desert of central Arabia, was desperately poor.
  • Its main source of income came from the Muslim pilgrims who visited Makkah and Madinah.
  • During the 1930s, however, U.S. prospectors began to explore for oil.

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The Problem of Palestine

• The situation in Palestine made matters even more complicated in the Middle East.
• The British promised that the Balfour Declaration would not undermine the rights of the non-Jewish peoples living in the area.
• In the meantime, the promises of the Balfour Dec- laration drew Jewish settlers to Palestine.
• The British, fearing aroused Arab nationalism, tried to restrict Jewish immigration into the territory.

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Nationalism in Africa and Asia

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Movements toward Independence in Africa

• Black Africans had fought in World War I in British and French armies.
• The peace settlement after World War I was a great disappointment.
• After World War I, Africans became more active politically.
• Reform movements took different forms.
  • In Kenya in 1921, the Young Kikuyu Association, organized by Harry Thuku, a telephone operator, protested the high taxes levied by the British rulers.
  • A struggle against Italian rule in Libya also occurred in the 1920s.
• Although colonial powers typically responded to such movements with force, they also began to make some reforms.
  • Calls for independence came from a new generation of young African leaders.
• Those who had studied in the United States were especially influenced by the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey.
  • Du Bois, an African American educated at Harvard University, was the leader of a movement that tried to make all Africans aware of their own cultural heritage.
  • Garvey, a Jamaican who lived in Harlem in New York City, stressed the need for the unity of all Africans, a movement known as Pan-Africanism.
  • His Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, issued in 1920, had a strong impact on later African leaders.
• Leaders and movements in individual African nations also appeared.
• Educated in Great Britain, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya argued in his book Facing Mount Kenya that British rule was destroying the traditional culture of the peoples of Africa.

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The Movement for Indian Independence

• Mohandas Gandhi had become active in the movement for Indian self-rule before World War I.
• By the time of World War I, the Indian people had already begun to refer to him as India’s “Great Soul,” or Mahatma.
  • Gandhi left South Africa in 1914. When he returned to India, he began to organize mass protests to achieve his aims.
  • A believer in nonviolence, Gandhi protested British laws by using the methods of civil disobedience—refusal to obey laws considered to be unjust.
• In 1919, the protests led to violence and a strong British reaction.
• In 1935, Great Britain passed the Government of India Act.
• Gandhi, now released from prison, returned to his earlier policy of civil disobedience.
  • Nonviolence was central to Gandhi’s campaign of noncooperation and civil disobedience
• Britain had introduced measures increasing the salt tax and prohibiting the Indian people from manufacturing or harvesting their own salt.
• In the 1930s, a new figure entered the movement.
• Jawaharlal Nehru, the son of Motilal Nehru, studied law in Great Britain.
  • The independence movement split into two paths.
  • The one identified with Gandhi was religious, Indian, and traditional.
  • The other, identified with Nehru, was secular, Western, and modern.
• In the meantime, another problem had arisen in the independence movement.
  • Hostility between Hindus and Muslims had existed for centuries.
  • By the 1930s, the Muslim League, under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was beginning to believe in the creation of a separate Muslim state of Pakistan (meaning “the land of the pure”) in the northwest.

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The Rise of a Militarist Japan

• In the Japanese economy, various manufacturing processes were concentrated within a single enterprise called the zaibatsu, a large financial and industrial corporation.
• The concentration of wealth led to growing economic inequalities.
• With hardships came calls for a return to traditional Japanese values.
  • In the early twentieth century, Japanese leaders began to have difficulty finding sources of raw materials and foreign markets for the nation’s manufactured goods.
• The United States was especially worried about Japanese expansion.
• During the remainder of the 1920s, the Japanese government tried to follow the rules established by the Washington Conference.
  • Japanese industrialists began to expand into new areas, such as heavy industry, mining, chemicals, and the manufacturing of appliances and automobiles.
• During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Japan moved toward a more democratic government.
  • The rise of militant forces in Japan resulted when a group within the ruling party was able to gain control of the political system.
• During the early 1930s, civilians formed extremist patriotic organizations, such as the Black Dragon Society.
  • Members of the army and navy created similar societies.
• One group of middle-level army officers invaded Manchuria without government approval in the autumn of 1931.
  • The Japanese government opposed the conquest of Manchuria but the Japanese people supported it.
  • Japanese society was put on wartime status.
  • A military draft law was passed in 1938

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Nationalism and Revolution in Asia

• Before World War I, the Marxist doctrine of social revolution had no appeal for Asian intellectuals.
  • That situation began to change after the revolution in Russia in 1917.
  • In 1920, Lenin adopted a new revolutionary strategy aimed at societies outside the Western world.
• At the Comintern’s headquarters in Moscow, agents were trained and then returned to their own countries to form Marxist parties and promote the cause of social revolution.
• In some countries, the local Communists were briefly able to establish a cooperative relationship with existing nationalist parties in a common struggle against Western imperialism.

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Revolutionary Chaos in China

Nationalists and Communists

• Two political forces began to emerge as competitors for the right to rule China: Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, which had been driven from the political arena several years earlier, and the Chinese Communist Party.
• In 1921, a group of young radicals, including several faculty and staff members from Beijing University, founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the commercial and industrial city of Shanghai.
  • Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Nationalists,  welcomed the cooperation.
• For over three years, the two parties overlooked their mutual suspicions and worked together.
• Tensions between the two parties eventually rose to the surface.
  • In April 1927, however, he struck against the Communists and their supporters in Shanghai, killing thousands in what is called the**Shanghai Massacre. \n **The Communist-Nationalist alliance ceased to exist.
• In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek founded a new Chinese republic at Nanjing

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The Communists in Hiding

• After the Shanghai Massacre, most of the Communist leaders went into hiding in the city.
• Some party members fled to the mountainous Jiangxi Province south of the Chiang Jiang.
• They were led by the young Communist organizer Mao Zedong
  • Chiang Kai-shek now tried to root the Communists out of their urban base in Shanghai and their rural base in Jiangxi Province.
  • Chiang Kai-shek then turned his forces against Mao’s stronghold in Jiangxi Province.
  • Chiang’s forces far outnumbered Mao’s, but Mao made effective use of guerrilla tactics, using unexpected maneuvers like sabotage and subterfuge to fight the enemy.

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The Long March

• In 1934, Chiang’s troops, using their superior military strength, surrounded the Communist base in Jiangxi.
• Moving on foot through mountains, marshes, and deserts, Mao’s army traveled almost 6,000 miles (9,600 km) to reach the last surviving Communist base in the northwest of China.
  • One year later, Mao’s troops reached safety in the dusty hills of North China.
• To people who lived at the time, it must have seemed that the Communist threat to the Nanjing regime was over.
• To the Communists, however, there remained hope for the future.

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The New China of Chiang Kai-shek

• In the meantime, Chiang Kai-shek had been trying to build a new nation.
  • In keeping with Sun’s program, Chiang announced a period of political tutelage (training) to prepare the Chinese people for a final stage of constitutional government.
• It would take more than plans on paper to create a new China, however.
• A westernized middle class had begun to form in the cities.
• Chiang Kai-shek was aware of the problem of introducing foreign ideas into a population that was still culturally conservative.
• Thus, while attempting to build a modern industrial state, he tried to bring together modern Western innovations with traditional Confucian values of hard work, obedience, and integrity.
• With his U.S.-educated wife Mei-ling Soong, Chiang set up a “New Life Movement.”
• Chiang Kai-shek faced a host of other problems as well.
• The Nanjing government had total control over only a handful of provinces in the Chang Jiang Valley.
• In spite of all of these problems, Chiang did have some success.
• In other areas, Chiang was less successful and progress was limited.
  • Because Chiang’s support came from the rural landed gentry, as well as the urban middle class, he did not press for programs that would lead to a redistribution of wealth, the shifting of wealth from a rich minority to a poor majority.
• The government was also repressive.
• Fearing Communist influence, Chiang suppressed all opposition and censored free expression.

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Nationalism in Latin America

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The Latin American Economy

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Latin American economy was based largely on the export of foodstuffs and raw materials.
• Beginning in the 1920s, the United States began to replace Great Britain as the foremost investor in Latin America.
• The fact that investors in the United States controlled many Latin American industries angered Latin Americans.
  • A growing nationalist consciousness led many of them to view the United States as an imperialist power.
• The United States had always cast a large shadow over Latin America.
• The United States made some attempts to change its relationship with Latin America, however.
• In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the Good Neighbor policy.
• The Great Depression was a disaster for Latin America’s economy.
  • The Great Depression had one positive effect on the Latin American economy.
• With a decline in exports, Latin American countries no longer had the revenues to buy manufactured goods.
• Often, however, the new industries were not started by individual capitalists.
• Because of a short-age of capital in the private sector, governments frequently invested in new industries.

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The Move to Authoritarianism

• Most Latin American countries had republican forms of government
  • This trend toward authoritarianism increased during the 1930s, largely because of the impact of the Great Depression.
• Argentina was controlled by an oligarchy, a government where a select group of people exercises control.
  • In 1916, Hipólito Irigoyen, leader of the Radical Party, was elected president of Argentina.
  • The military was also concerned with the rising power of the industrial workers
• During World War II, restless military officers formed a new organization, known as the Group of United Officers (GOU).
• In 1889, the army had overthrown the Brazilian monarchy and established a republic.
  • By 1900, three-quarters of the world’s coffee was grown in Brazil.
• The Great Depression devastated the coffee industry.
• In 1930, a military coup made Getúlio Vargas, a wealthy rancher, president of Brazil.
  • Faced with strong opposition in 1937, Vargas made himself dictator.
  • Vargas also pursued a policy of stimulating new industries.
• Mexico was not an authoritarian state, but neither was it truly democratic.
• The government was democratic in form.
• However, the official political party of the Mexican Revolution, known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled the major groups within Mexican society.
• A new wave of change began with Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940.
  • Cárdenas also took a strong stand with the United States, especially over oil.
• The U.S. oil companies were furious and asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to intervene.
• Eventually, the Mexican government did pay the oil companies for their property.
• It then set up PEMEX, a national oil company, to run the oil industry.

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Culture in Latin America

• During the early twentieth century, European artistic and literary movements began to penetrate Latin America
• Latin American artists went abroad and brought back modern techniques, which they often adapted to their own native roots.
  • Many artists and writers used their work to promote the emergence of a new national spirit.
• An example was the Mexican artist Diego Rivera.
  • Rivera had studied in Europe, where he was espe- cially influenced by fresco painting in Italy.
  • Rivera sought to create a national art that would portray Mexico’s past, especially its Aztec legends, as well as Mexican festivals and folk customs.

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