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Nationalism and the World Wars
Ryan Renfro
For those celebrating the turn of the century on January 1, 1901[1] in the streets of London
and Cologne, New York and Moscow the world must have seemed a
relatively peaceful place. No major power had fought
another outside of its own region since 1815 and it had had been
thirty years since one had sent an army across a hostile border
within Europe (Hobsbaum 1994: 1-2). The nations of Europe,
however, were developing a strong sense of nationalism that would
continue until 1914. Ready and willing to prove their
greatness by defeating their rivals and gaining colonies if they
did not already posses their share of them, the major powers of
Europe, spurred on by ideals of nationalism and bound by
alliances, declared war on one another in the days following July
28, 1914. The war they got, and the second that inevitably
followed it a mere twenty years later, was, however, nothing like
the war anyone could have expected. The astronomic casualties
inflicted by mechanized warfare and the resources necessary to
maintain such an undertaking were beyond the grasp of the
nineteenth-century mind. Both the products of European
nationalist fervor, the total warfare of the First and Second
World Wars completely transformed the world inherited from the 19th-century
and the nature of nationalism by fashioning it into a Global
phenomenon: The first by breaking down the old order of politics
and society in Europe and weakening imperial structures, and the
Second by globalizing the concept of nationalism by spreading it
to the states emerging out of the collapsing European empires.
Spirit, moral, and nationalism was at a high at the onset of the First World War. The exalted expectations of 1914, however, soon ground to a halt as the front in the West did. The employment of poor military tactics, owing much to the publication of Karl von Klauswitz’s unfinished On War, along with the introduction of such horrific new weapons on a large scale such as the machine gun and poison gas, lead to previously unheard of numbers of casualties. Advancements measured in yards could not rationally justify the resources poured into the war by the competing sides, to say nothing of the deaths of thousands of young men in battles such as those at Verdun and Somme. The countries of Europe and to an extent their colonial possessions soon learned that total war meant not merely the mobilization of the army, but indeed the entire country as economies strained under the weight of fighting a war beyond their means to support. For the Western Allies and the Central Powers, an end became the only thing worth fighting for.
This stalemate in the West was preferable for France and Britain when compared to the losses of the Russians in the East. Previously humiliated in 1906 by its the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the backwards Tsarist regime was unable to handle the pressures of total warfare and soon buckled under a revolution by the poor, half-starved Russian populace. The provincial government set up in its place in the March Revolution of 1917 began to work towards a Western-style democracy, granting universal suffrage and civil liberties. However, the provincial government, not wanting to abandon Russia’s allies and lured on by the possibility of gaining a Meditaraininan port, failed to come to a separate peace with the Central Powers, a fatal flaw given the strong antiwar sentiment of the Russian populace (Noble 1994: 1007). The Bolsheviks stood for peace, not only because of the high casualties among the proletariat inflicted by this “bourgeois war,” but because peace with Russia would hasten peace elsewhere and possibly leading to other revolutions. Now under the strong leadership of Lenin, who was recently returned from exile by Germany in the hopes the he would make peace, the Bolsheviks seized control of Russia and promptly ended the war in the East. With Russian resources freed from the battlefield, the soviets soon turned towards their higher aim- global proletariat revolution. It was this idea of universal, worldwide revolution which threatened the sovereign states of the world, nationalist in by nature, particularly Western Europe and the United States and to which they actively if not openly sought to subvert.
Although German forces were freed from a two-front war, the entrance of the United States and its seemingly unlimited resources of men and munitions into the killing fields of Western France soon lead to an armistice on November 11, 1918. With the Bolsheviks in power in Russia and pushing for revolution in other nations, particularly in Germany and Eastern Europe, the Allied peacemakers saw that they were obligated to act decisively if they were to contain this socialist revolutionary fervor to Russia. In fact, even during the peace discussion between Germany and Russia in January 1918 a string of anti-war demonstrations and strikes occurred throughout the East, spreading from Vienna to Budapest and Germany. Facing the possibility of world revolution, the Allies required a cordon sanitaire (Hobsbaum 1994: 32) or a buffer zone comprised of states with strong nationalist sentiments surrounding the new worker’s paradise. They did this by aiding nationalist movements in Eastern Europe in creating new nation states in the East.
Among the effects of World War One was the disintegration of empire in Eastern Europe. The Russian Revolution toppled the Tsarist empire, which by the time of peace had already lost large amounts of territory to the advancing German armies. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s weaker partners, had completely collapsed by the end of the war, giving way to a power vacuum in the area. Fighting erupted between nationalist movements by the different ethnic groups formerly comprising those empires, and the socialist movements, now backed by the Russian Communists demanding revolution Russian-style. American President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for the right to self-determination for all peoples; however, other diplomats from France and elsewhere saw the need to create larger states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia which possessed the possibility of continued existence and which could serve as a buffer zone for both German aggression and Communist subversion. Despite the fact that these new nations were violated in that they had large ethnic minorities living both within their borders and in neighboring nations, they were sufficiently anti-Bolshevik to resist subversion during the World Wars.
Although the Great War did not lead to the collapse of the worldwide European empires such as the British or the French, it did much to weaken them. The myths of European superiority and invincibility had been severely damaged, making the continuity of the empires appear less and less probable in a world less Euro-centered and Euro-determined (Hobsbaum 1994: 34). It became evident that European empires such as Britain’s were not eternal entities but bound within the constraints of time as circumstance just as those of Rome or Persia and that the sun would one day set on the British Empire. With nineteenth-century structure soon to fall apart, Wilson’s League of Nations defined the manner in which postwar political units would settle their differences. It did this specifically through a league of nations, not empires or global proletariat union. The establishment of the League, which was able to settle a few minor disputes, ultimately failed at preventing another war; however it is significant not because it lived up to Wilson’s expectations but because it defined the nation as the standard sociopolitical unit in the upcoming post-imperial world. This new standard, along with the idea of all peoples having the right to self-determination, sowed the seeds for nationalist movements and revolution for the rest of the century.
The greatest problem with the Paris peace settlement, specifically with the Treaty of Versialles, was that it was unfair to the Germans. Not negotiated but dictated by the Western Allies, the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to let go of not only all their conquests but some of their territory from before the war, including Alsace-Lorraine and the city of Danzig, limit its military to 100,000, demilitarize the Rhineland, and pay reparations due to its “responsibility” for the war as established in Article 231 (Nobel 1994: 1020). Although the weak Weimar Republic established in the wake of the war was enough to hold off revolution by Soviet and homegrown Communists, whose primary goal it was to spread the revolution to Germany, it proved ineffective in controlling the runaway inflation of the postwar period and would soon give way to the most poignant and well-defined nationalist movements the world has ever seen.
Historically on the edge of “civilized” Europe and forced to bear the responsibility for a war not lost nor solely caused by their country, the relatively newly united Germans were ripe for a nationalist movement. Isaiah Berlin writes that “Nationalism is an inflamed condition of national consciousness which can be, and has on occasion been, tolerant and peaceful. It usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation” (Berlin 1992: 245). Although certainly the product of humiliation, the nationalist sentiment which developed in Germany following the war became anything but peaceful. Those out of Germany’s large veteran population who were not turned completely against total warfare were able to take from their experience an inner strength which they soon turned against the humiliation, as they saw it, of the peace accord.
It was within these circumstances that a young lance corporal named Adolf Hitler, whose nationalist rhetoric ignited the Volksgeist of the German people, won election in 1933. Anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, and for restoring German pride and territory lost by the Treaty of Versailles, Austrian-born Hitler and his National Socialist party set to work to bring Germany its rightful place in the sun. He set about to do just that by creating one of the most clearly defined nationalist movements in history.
Without a long past of dominance either culturally or militarily, Hitler and other nationalistic German romantics turned inwards to a hypothetical deep, pure, creative spirit (Berlin 1992: 246). They rejected the influences of other societies and the notion of their superiority, celebrating that which was German: Wagner, heroic tales of Siegfried and an “Arian” heritage. These were the ties that bound the “German” people together. Unfortunately, the German nation was violated in a number of ways. First of all there was a fairly high number of foreign nationals working inside Germany, as well as other ethnic groups such as the Jews and the Gypsies. These groups were tolerated, even invited in to increase trade and growth during the Holy Roman Empire in the case of the Jews, during times of relative prosperity; however, during hard times such as those of the late twenties and early thirties, xenophobia and resentment towards those deemed foreigners greatly increased. Similarly, large minorities of Germans lived within the young nations of Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to say nothing of the German-speaking country of Austria. Hitler used this excuse of Germans living in these regions to annex Austria and the Czech lands and eventually to divide Poland between himself and Stalin and thus begin the Second World War in Europe.
Although undeniably related to the First World War, in fact some historians even few them as one war with an twenty-year cease fire or a single era of war (Hobsbaum 1994: 52), the Second World War was to prove much more destructive and was waged over vastly different terms. Fueled by nationalist sentiment on all sides, the Great War was a traditional war of conquest between rival European empires, not unlike those of Napoleon or other nineteenth-century wars. World War II on the other hand, although also the result of nationalist fervor in Germany at least, was fought to reorder the entire power structure of the world. Germany sought not only Lebensraum, roughly the equivalent of their “place in the sun” only this time in the East, but to crush France in revenge for the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler saw it as the destiny of the Arian Übermensch to rule over an empire of lesser peoples in which some groups were not even deemed worthy of living. Within a matter of months from the beginning of the blitzkriegs it seemed likely that Hitler might achieve all since much of Europe now lay within his hands. On the opposite side of the world it the Japanese, the third member of the Axis along with Germany and Italy, conquered vast portions of the European Colonies, all but abandoned due to Hitler’s success in Europe, in Southeast Asia and even threatened British India and Australia. Defeating the Axis took all of the might and manpower of the remaining Allies, including the vast resources of the United States.
Just as in the First World War, the Second drew in virtually all free states and colonies as well. All were heavily impacted by this affair due to the nature of total warfare, which not only involves all citizens by requiring them to work in a economy sidetracked to produce war materials, but mobilizes a great many of them as well. The strange effect of impersonal total warfare is that it leads to a democratization of war; since civilians working in factories and living in main cities become the main targets of mass destruction, all members of society are drawn into the war instead of merely those enrolled in the military (Hobsbaum 1994: 49). Furthermore, many members of colonies and other states are drafted into the military, that ancient equalizer of men, and sent off to a different corner of the earth to fight. Indians in the British military and other colonial forces during both wars must surely have found a sense of equality with their English and Scottish comrades, undermining any belief in European superiority and fueling the desire for independence.
By the end of the war in 1945, the global political power structure had been completely rearranged, although not in the manner in which the belligerent states had desired it to be. Japan, which surrendered unconditionally, lost all wartime gains, yet still managed to fair better than Germany, which was divided between the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Britain and France, who lost many colonies both in North Africa and in Southeast Asia to the Axis Powers, were completely incapable of regaining total control over their empires, resulting in a period of decolonization.
All new political units arising out of this period of anti-imperialist movements chose to define themselves along national terms, terms learned from their imperial conquerors, instead of another non-nationalist form of community. India and Pakistan won independence from Britain in 1947, followed by Indonesia from the Netherlands in 1949 and the vast majority of Africa throughout the 1950s and 60s. Independence for these new nations was only a possibility after the war because of the breakdown of European colonial power, and while nationalist movement tended to define themselves as “other” from those existing powers, the nonetheless chose to define themselves under the western category of nations. In fact every prevailing revolution since the Second World War has been under the idea of a nation. Territories define themselves as nations with set boundaries and citizens, not as cities or empires. This springs from a particular mindset stating that this is to be the standard political unit and it is nearly incomprehensible, with common bonds held through such places as the United Nation, that any viable group could define themselves in any other manner. This was the death toll for Marx’s global proletariat revolution in which the working classes would unite as one, since even communist revolutions define themselves in nationalist terms- The People’s Republic of China or Cuba.
Eric Hobsbaum writes that “Revolution was the child of twentieth-century war” (Hobsbuam 1994: 54), and although Marxist revolution in Russia threatened to restructure the world along class lines, decolinization, a result of the all-encompassing warfare of the World Wars and influenced by Wilsonian ideas, has lead to the self-determination of many of the world’s peoples, as long as they define themselves in nationalist terms. What is to follow, however, is still up in the air. The future of nationalism is as undetermined as ever, facing both internationalism with such entities as the European Union and the growing power of the United Nations, as well as factionalism and regionalism as seen in places such as former Yugoslavia and several African nations. The imagined nature of nationalism means that it will exist only when people think it to exist.
Bibliography:
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Berlin, Isaiah. 1992. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. New York: Vintage Books.
Chatterjoe, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hobsbuam, Eric. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century, 1914-1991. New York: Pantheon Books.
Noble, Thomas F. X. 1994. Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
[1] The turn of the century occurs between the years 00 and 01, not between 99 and 00 as is commonly believed.