nationalism, rise of

nationalism, rise of. Nationalism is a policy of putting the interests of one's own nation before the interests of all other nations, and the common interests of mankind.

From 1939 to 1945communism, Nazism, capitalism, colonialism, anti-imperialism, fascism, and other ideologies fought it out around the world. But the ‘ism’ that caused the war, the one that rallied people everywhere to make the necessary sacrifices to carry on the conflict, the one that caused the most difficulties within the Axis and Allied alliances, and the one that had the most staying power, was nationalism.

That this was so is hardly surprising. Nationalism predated all the other ‘isms’. Political ideologies come and go; nationalism remains, because it is based on a common heritage, culture, language, and religion. It is usually, although not always, closely aligned with racism, the belief in the superiority of a particular race over all others. Nationalism and racism were synonymous in Germany, Italy, and Japan; they were closely allied in the Russian-dominated USSR; they were only loosely connected in the UK, composed as it was of English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish; they were hardly connected at all in the USA, with its many races, nationalities, and religions.

In the countries of diverse origin and make-up, a reverse racism fed nationalist sentiments—hatred of the enemy race. In the USA, it was fully expressed in the universally used expression ‘Jap’. Everything Japanese was despised, even though Japanese-Americans fought, with honour, for the USA in Europe. And though about one-third of the white population of the USA was German in origin, the Germans too were despised. General Eisenhower said he was ashamed of his name, and in a letter of 1945 told his wife, ‘God, I hate the Germans’. Soviet feelings were, if anything, stronger. As the Red Army prepared to enter Germany, Stalin told his troops in an Order of the Day, ‘Remember, in Germany only the unborn are innocent.’

National feelings, always strong, were reinforced during the war by a variety of methods, by all sides. The centralization of power, whether in Berlin or London or Washington or Tokyo or Moscow, combined with newly discovered means of manipulation of the masses, especially through radio and motion pictures, to make it possible for central governments to extol the virtues of the Motherland or the Fatherland, to appeal to the unique natural greatness of the nation's people, and to present the other side as beasts. This propaganda blast, already present in the First World War, of course, rose to previously unimaginable levels after 1939, thanks in large part to the new technology.

The barrage of nationalistic propaganda, from which none was immune, made a major contribution to the excesses of this, the most savage war ever fought. The bombing of the cities, the use of atomic bombs against civilians, the slaughter of the Jews (see Final Solution), the barbarous conduct of Japanese soldiers in China (see China incident) and the Philippines, and the other horrors of the war (see atrocities) could not have happened without the constant reiteration of the theme that ‘we, us, our side’ was all good, while ‘they, them, the enemy’ was inhuman.

Nationalism fired up and inspired troops around the globe, swelling pride and fanning hatred. It caused jealousies, disagreements, and suspicions among allies, at the expense of the common cause. It often dominated strategic decisions, and always dictated the political bargaining when leaders got together at summit meetings.

A notable feature of the war was that even in the most ideological states, propaganda emphasized not the ideology but the nation. This was true in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the capitalist USA, and the USSR, where men died by the millions to defend not communism but Mother Russia.

Another phenomenon: leaders everywhere recognized the power of nationalism and ruthlessly exploited it within their own countries, but in general failed to take advantage of nationalist stresses and strains in the other camp. The most obvious example was Hitler, who again and again showed that while the Germans make excellent soldiers, they are terrible occupiers and even worse politicians. In Poland, Hitler could have appealed to a nationalist sentiment that was at least as anti-Russian as it was anti-German. In France, he could have appealed to a nationalist sentiment that was traditionally anti-British—exacerbated by the British evacuation at Dunkirk at the height of the fighting which led to the fall of France in June, 1940 and then by the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir—and strongly anti-communist.

Instead, Hitler annexed much of the western part of Poland directly to the Third Reich, then created a General Government for the remainder, under the command of governor-general Hans Frank (see Poland, 2(b)). His punitive rule aimed at the enslavement of the Poles and the extermination of the Jews, rather than the building of an anti-Soviet army (see Soviet exiles) and a genuine Polish nation. In Czechoslovakia, Hitler created the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, first under von Neurath, then under Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most notorious of all the Nazi criminals. The result of Heydrich's misrule was to heighten Czech nationalism and increase hatred of all things German.

German policy in central and eastern Europe, and in the occupied parts of the USSR, was based on Nazi racial theory, which held that Jews were not human at all, and that Slavs were Untermenschen, or subhumans, who were to be either exterminated or enslaved. In western Europe, the Nazi concept was that there were first- and second-class Aryans (insulting to people such as the Dutch, who were assigned second-class status), a concept that made occupation policy difficult.

In France, the Nazis did seek out those willing to become involved in collaboration with them (and found many who were willing to help them), and they allowed the government of unoccupied southern France, in Vichy, a certain degree of independence. The Vichy government (see France, 3(c)), under Marshal Pétain, did appeal to French nationalism, but with little success, partly because it was so obviously a tool of the Nazis, partly because of the counter-appeal of General de Gaulle in London. In late 1942, following the Allied invasion of French North Africa (see North African campaign), the Germans occupied the whole of France and the pretence came to an end.

In the Netherlands, Artur Seyss-Inquart, an Austrian Nazi, ran the country as Reich Commissioner for occupied Holland. More than 5,000 Dutchmen served in the Waffen-SS; but many others joined the underground to resist. In Norway the Nazis ruled through a native politician, Vidkun Quisling, who was Minister President and leader of the Nasjonal Samling (National Union) Party. His pathetic appeals to Norwegian nationalism brought him only scorn; in October 1945 he was tried and executed by the post-war Norwegian government.

Throughout occupied western Europe, the Germans—who claimed to be creating a united Europe—exploited the people in every imaginable way, most directly by sending them to Germany to work as forced labour in war factories, under appalling conditions. Perhaps never in human history has an occupying force been so hated, or done so much to strengthen the nationalist feelings of the oppressed.

In another irony Hitler, who wanted to kill all the Jews, created a powerful Jewish nationalism that found its fullest expression in the post-war emergence of Israel. In his own perverted way, Hitler did more for Zionism than any Jewish leader had ever managed to do.

Hitler might have attempted to exploit national sentiments in Scotland and Wales, but did not. He did make some clumsy efforts to rouse Irish nationalists to carry on acts of sabotage against the UK (see Irish Republican army), but without much effect.

Most of all in the USSR did Hitler have opportunities to appeal to the nationalism of the subject states, as Alexander the Great had done so successfully in the Persian Empire, or Cortés in Mexico. In 1941 the USSR seethed with nationalist unrest, in the Baltic States (seized by the Soviets in 1939), in the Ukraine, in Moldavia (see Bessarabia), in Azerbaijan, in Soviet Armenia, in Georgia, and elsewhere. When the German armies marched into those Soviet republics, the people of these disaffected nationalities greeted them with flowers and songs. The oppressed thought they were being freed, only to discover that they had merely exchanged one brutal dictator for another. Soon they formed guerrilla bands to fight behind the lines, against Hitler and for Stalin. Many students of the war believe that it was there that Hitler lost his Soviet gamble.

The Japanese made similar mistakes. Although they proclaimed a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, in which all Asians would be equal, in fact they imposed a system in which some Asians were more equal than others, namely the Japanese. To them other Asians, especially the Chinese, were the Untermenschen. In the Philippines, in French Indo-China, in the Netherlands East Indies, the Japanese could have encouraged genuine local rule, closely aligned to Japan, of course, but still independent. They chose, instead, to set up puppet regimes that claimed to be nationalist but fooled no one. Local armies that might have been raised to fight with some degree of enthusiasm on the Japanese side hardly ever emerged; instead, as in the occupied areas of the USSR, guerrilla bands harassed the Japanese and forced them into man-wasting occupation duties.

In Manchuria, the Japanese did try to exploit a breakaway nationalist sentiment. Manchuria had long been dominated by China, but when the Japanese Army seized it in 1931 they re-named the region the nation of Manchukuo and placed Pu-Yi (who had abdicated the Manchu throne of China as an infant in January 1912) on the throne. But they treated Pu-Yi with a mixture of embarrassing condescension and brute force, and made no friends for themselves, much less an enthusiastic ally.

In French Indo-China, the Japanese kept the former colonial masters in nominal command. French police and soldiers maintained order, while the Japanese gave the orders. At the very end, in March 1945, the Japanese gave limited encouragement to Vietnamese nationalism by replacing the French with a royal puppet government under the Bao Dai (b.1913) and declaring Vietnamese independence. The only effect was to establish Ho Chi Minh's communist guerrillas in temporary—and eventually permanent—power.

In the Philippines, it was the former colonial masters who appealed successfully to nationalist sentiment, while the Japanese, who might have presented themselves as liberators, became brutal and hated oppressors. Although there were some collaborators with the Japanese, mainly old men who had been leaders of the struggle against the Americans four decades earlier, far more Filipino activists joined anti-Japanese underground forces. General MacArthur skilfully utilized Filipino nationalism against the Japanese, helped considerably by a promise the US government had already given to the Filipinos, that they would have full independence on 4 July 1946.

The French had made no such promise in French Indo-China, so there the guerrillas were as concerned with preventing the return of French rule as they were with fighting the Japanese. To a large extent this was also true in the occupied British colonies, though the greatest of these, India, was not overrun by the Japanese. India provided men and materials to aid the British cause. Nevertheless, it was the source of much difficulty for the British, as a result of nationalist sentiment. By the time the war began, the great Indian leader Gandhi had spent more than 20 years fighting for Indian independence. The Indian Congress Party (see India, 3) demanded independence from the UK as a condition of Indian cooperation in the war. When the country appeared threatened by the Japanese in 1942, Gandhi argued that the Japanese were unlikely to attack a free India, but if they did, he said the attack must be met with the kind of civil disobedience that had been used against the British. He was arrested and undertook one of his famous prison fasts which forced the British to release him from gaol in May 1944, because of his physical frailty.

Indian nationalism was two-sided, and religious in its essence. So long as the Hindus and Muslims had a common British enemy, they could co-operate; when the British granted independence in 1947 the country had to be partitioned into India (mainly Hindu) and Pakistan (mainly Muslim), leading to a civil war that was the bloodiest in history.

The Japanese failed to recognize, much less appeal to, Chinese nationalism. They thought they knew all about China; in fact they knew next to nothing. They wanted to run the country, in their own way for their own benefit, without understanding it. They offered no alternative to Mao Tse-tung and the communists, or Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, other than their own oppression. Mao and Chiang, for their own reasons, did tap Chinese nationalism, but each was more concerned with the triumph of his own leadership and cause than with a genuine Chinese nationalism. Thus they concentrated on struggling against each other rather than co-operating to fight the common enemy. They never did drive the Japanese Army from their country, but they did position themselves for post-war conflict.

Many philosophers, and some politicians, argued at the end of the war that nationalism had to be tempered by regional and worldwide organizations if war were to be avoided in the future. The world could no longer afford the international anarchy that is inherent in the nation-state system. To Americans, this meant the revival of Woodrow Wilson's idea of collective security through the League of Nations (now succeeded by the United Nations), the creation of regional security through such alliances as the Organization of American States, and the building in Europe of a United States of Europe.

The latter idea had deep roots, going back to the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. It had more recent encouragement; in 1940, on the eve of the fall of France, Churchill (a strong nationalist himself, but the leader of a nation in desperate trouble) proposed a common citizenship for the British and French. This remarkable proposal got nowhere at the time, but it remained in men's minds.

Towards the end of the war, the victors founded the United Nations at the San Francisco conference. But the members were united in name only. None gave up the sovereign power to make war, conclude treaties, enter into economic, political, or military alliances, or any other of the rights of a nation state.

In Europe, despite the efforts of such men as Jean Monnet of France and Eisenhower, no union emerged from the ashes. Instead, Europe divided into two camps, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact. The USA dominated the former, the USSR the latter. These alliances were economic and military; they were not designed to promote political unity. But by the end of the 1980s, some limited and halting steps towards political unity had been taken in western Europe, while in central and eastern Europe the events of the autumn of 1989, and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, demonstrated that the communist attempt to create an international socialist system that would make nationalism a thing of the past had utterly failed.

Nationalism caused the Second World War, it dominated the way the war was fought, it survived the war. Even in those countries where nationalism was most devilish and brought on the worst catastrophes—Germany and Japan—nationalism remained a powerful force. The war showed that nationalism is the most dangerous of all the ‘isms’, and the most persistent, because it is the most human. See also origins of the war.

Stephen E. Ambrose

Bibliography

Fussell, P. , Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Oxford, 1989).
Way, A. , Europe Since 1939 (New York, 1966).