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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nationalism in Africa and Asia

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.

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.

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

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.

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.
    **The Communist-Nationalist alliance ceased to exist.

• In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek founded a new Chinese republic at Nanjing

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.

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.

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.

Nationalism in Latin America

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.

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.

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.