Hey all:
I found this article while browsing through Encarta when I was in english class. Two things caught my eye about it. First, it is an article on the history and reason for nationalism and the nation-state and that it was written by Michael Ignatieff who is currently in the race to be become the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. It is a very interesting and gripping article for me, but I'm a huge geek.....enjoy!
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The Need for National Belonging
In the late 20th century nationalism has served as a driving force in world affairs, fueling political conflicts around the globe, from the Middle East to the former Yugoslavia. In this article, writer Michael Ignatieff provides insight into this phenomenon by examining the causes and characteristics of nationalism, its historical development, and its emotional basis as the human desire to belong.
The Need for National Belonging
By Michael Ignatieff
The faces of the Jewish refugees arriving by ship in Palestine in 1947 are unforgettable. They press against the railings on deck and stare across the water at their new homeland, with expressions of hope and relief, joy and apprehension. In the 50 years since 1948—the year the state of Israel was proclaimed—millions of Jews from Western Europe and the United States, from the Arab lands of North Africa and the Middle East, from Ethiopia, and from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its satellite nations have begun a new life in Israel. They have come to escape persecution, to bring up their children in a country that is their own, and to know what it is to belong.
Israel is among the most significant, and most controversial, examples of nationalism at work in the 20th century. For centuries, Jews faced persecution in nations controlled by other peoples. This persecution culminated in the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than 6 million Jews and other peoples during World War II by Germany’s Nazi regime. The refugees who came to Palestine after the war believed that if they had a state of their own to protect them they could be sure that a similar catastrophe would never befall their children. However, the Jews were not the only people, or nation, with a claim to the land of Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs had lived there for thousands of years before Israel’s founding, and since 1948 they have fought for the right to call the land their own.
Defining Nationalism
What is nationalism and why do peoples—not just Palestinians and Jews, but hundreds of other national groups—fight so hard to create a state of their own?
The human population on the globe is divided into several thousand national groups, people who speak the same language or dialect and share common customs (including diet, dress, and holidays and festivals), as well as a common history. Sometimes, but not always, these national groups share a common racial identity, and sometimes they share a common religious background. What defines a nation, even more than these shared characteristics, is that the individuals who comprise it feel that they are one people.
Of these thousands of nations, only a few hundred possess their own states. The French, German, and Italian peoples, for example, live in nation-states of their own. Most other peoples share a state with another national group, as the Québécois (French-speaking residents of Québec Province) share Canada with English-speaking Canadians. Other peoples live as minorities within a nation-state that is ruled by other national groups, as is the case with the Kurdish people in Turkey.
When national groups within a nation-state are treated equally—when there is no discrimination on the basis of ethnic or national origin—they usually share that state in peace. An important condition for the successful sharing of nations is civic equality, which is usually secured by representative democracy. In successful nation-states, where ethnic and national groups benefit from equality, groups can share in a common sense of belonging called patriotism, or national pride.
However, where these conditions are not met—where one national group dominates the political and economic life of a nation-state to the exclusion of other national groups—nationalist resentment can simmer and explode. While patriotism can be understood as the love of a country that you can call your own, nationalism is the love of a country that is not yet yours—a country that you feel is being occupied or oppressed by another national group. This is why nationalism can be a dangerous emotion: It asserts a claim to territory on behalf of one national group that may be resisted by another group that believes it has an equal right to be there. This is the case in the area of historic Palestine, between Jews and Palestinians. It is also the case in southeastern Turkey, where the Kurdish minority believe they have a right to national self-determination over the land they call Kurdistān, but the Turkish people believe this land is an integral part of the Turkish state. In Sri Lanka, an island off the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent, rebel forces demanding independence and autonomy for the Tamil people are engaged in a bloody civil war against the Sinhalese majority who control the state.
Where democracy and the rule of law are absent or have been stunted, national groups do not learn to trust democracy and to work peacefully with one another. Such was the case in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, which had existed as a single-party Communist dictatorship since the mid-1940s. When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, Serb nationalists in the republic began battling for territory; the Serbs, a minority group within Bosnia, feared domination by the Muslim majority. The result was a vicious civil war that pitted Serbs, Muslims, and Croats against one another. Using nationalism as a justification, paramilitary units drove civilians out of areas of Bosnia where they had lived for centuries in order to create “ethnically cleansed” areas under the domination of a single national group.
The Development of Nations
The idea that each nation has its own identity and the right to statehood was invented by the German Romantic poets and thinkers of the late 18th century, who sought to defend the pride and self-confidence of the German people in relation to their European neighbors, particularly the French. At that time, France was a united nation-state, while Germany was fragmented into a number of small principalities. Following the unification of Italy and then Germany in the latter half of the 19th century, nationalist revivals broke out among peoples held in subjugation by the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. After the military defeat of these empires in World War I (1914-1918), the idea of national self-determination was proclaimed at the Treaty of Versailles, and a number of nations—including Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania—secured their independence. Thus the force of nationalism effectively remade the map of Europe.
A second wave of nationalism began after World War II (1939-1945), when Asian and African peoples demanding national self-determination rose up in revolt against European colonial rule. India and Pakistan secured their independence from Britain in 1947. Over the next 15 years, the Vietnamese and the Algerians both fought bloody wars to secure their independence from the French. What drove these revolts against colonialism was the desire of peoples to be ruled by members of their own national groups, rather than strangers of another race, religion, or ethnicity. By the l960s most of the peoples of Asia and Africa had embarked on the difficult adventure of running their own national states.
The third great wave of nationalism has followed the collapse of the last major European empire: the USSR and its satellite states in the Communist system. Since l991 national groups that were formerly under the control of the Soviet government and other Communist regimes—such as the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Slovenes, and a number of Central Asian peoples—have created nation-states of their own. In some cases, such as Ukraine, the transition to post-Communist rule has been peaceful. In others, as in parts of the former Yugoslavia, this transition has been bloody. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Asia and in Africa, regimes that once had the support of the Communist empire have collapsed, and new national governments are being created.
Nationalism and Belonging
What is the fundamental motive for nationalism, the reason that so many peoples have fought and died for the right to a state of their own? Perhaps the primary motive is to be safe from persecution. Many minority groups feel that they will only be secure if they control the levers of state power. A second motive underpinning nationalist efforts is the need of human beings to belong to something larger than themselves, to be part of a community—of language, customs, tradition, and history—that gives a purpose to their striving as individuals. Belonging to a nation gives human beings a sense of being safe, of being understood, and of being free to create their futures as they see fit. These are deep and understandable longings. The challenge for peoples undertaking nationalist movements is that to achieve these goals, they must face the choice of whether to drive another national group from its land, or learn, if possible, to share that land in peace.
About the author: Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian writer who has written extensively on nationalism, most notably in Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism and The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience.
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