What is nationalism?

Nationalism is the belief that a group of people who share an identity form a 'nation' that deserves its own state, loyalty and self-determination.

A nation is an imagined community: its members will never meet most of their fellow citizens, yet they feel they belong together. Nationalism turns that feeling into a political demand - the right to rule themselves in a state of their own.

Historians often distinguish two types. Civic nationalism defines the nation by shared citizenship, laws and values, so anyone can join. Ethnic nationalism defines it by shared descent, language, religion or culture, which can exclude outsiders. Most real movements mix the two.

• It usually rests on a shared language, religion, history or sense of common ancestry.
• It is often sparked or hardened by a shared grievance - defeat, poverty, discrimination or foreign rule.
• It builds unity by defining an 'us', but in doing so it also defines a 'them'.

Five questions to ask of any nationalism

Use the same lens on each movement so you can compare them fairly.

Afrikaner nationalism: defeat, poverty and revival

Afrikaner nationalism grew out of humiliation in the South African War (1899-1902) and the poverty many Afrikaners faced afterwards.

Defeat by Britain, the death of women and children in concentration camps, and the loss of the Boer republics left many Afrikaners feeling that their volk (people) was under threat. In the following decades tens of thousands became 'poor whites', pushed off the land and into the cities.

Leaders used language, religion and history to rebuild pride. Afrikaans was standardised and promoted; the Dutch Reformed Church stressed the Afrikaners as a chosen people; and the story of the Great Trek became a founding myth of a people struggling for freedom.

• The Afrikaner Broederbond (founded 1918) built a secret network to advance Afrikaner interests in politics, business and culture.
• Cultural bodies and the 1938 centenary of the Great Trek stirred mass emotion.
• The National Party channelled this identity into a bid for state power.

1948: Afrikaner nationalism captures the state

In 1948 the National Party won power and turned Afrikaner nationalism into the official policy of apartheid.

Led by D.F. Malan, the National Party won the whites-only 1948 election on the promise of apartheid ('apartness'). Afrikaner nationalism now controlled the state and used it to protect Afrikaner jobs, language and power - and to enforce white domination over the black majority.

• The state expanded Afrikaans schooling, the civil service and state-owned industry to uplift Afrikaners.
• Apartheid laws classified people by race and reserved power and privilege for whites.
• This is a case of a nationalism that achieved self-determination for one group by denying it to others.

African nationalism: unity against exclusion

African nationalism grew in response to conquest, land loss and exclusion from the Union of South Africa formed in 1910.

The Union of South Africa (1910) united whites but shut Africans out of political power. In 1912 educated African leaders founded the South African Native National Congress - renamed the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923 - to unite Africans across ethnic and regional lines and to demand rights in one common nation.

The 1913 Natives Land Act, which reserved most of the country's land for whites, showed why unity was urgent. Early African nationalism was moderate: it used petitions, deputations and the law to appeal for inclusion.

• It aimed to overcome ethnic divisions and build a single African, and later non-racial, South African nation.
• It defined the nation by shared citizenship and rights - a more civic vision.
• Its early methods were constitutional; frustration would later drive it towards mass action.

A new generation: the ANC Youth League

By the 1940s a younger generation demanded a bolder, mass-based African nationalism.

Frustrated by decades of polite petitions, young leaders formed the ANC Youth League in 1944. Its first president, Anton Lembede, argued that Africans must free themselves through pride, self-reliance and mass organisation rather than waiting for white goodwill.

Africa is a black man's country... Africans are one. Out of the heterogeneous tribes there must emerge a homogeneous nation. Anton Lembede, 'Some Basic Principles of African Nationalism', 1945

• The Youth League's 1949 Programme of Action embraced strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience.
• Figures such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo rose through its ranks.
• This assertive African nationalism would drive the mass struggle against apartheid in the 1950s.

Two nationalisms, one country

Afrikaner and African nationalism grew side by side, each shaping the other.

Zionism: a homeland for the Jewish people

Zionism was the nationalist movement calling for a Jewish homeland, largely in response to centuries of persecution in Europe.

Faced with violent anti-Semitism - pogroms in the Russian Empire and the Dreyfus Affair in France - Theodor Herzl argued in The Jewish State (1896) that Jews would only be safe with a state of their own. The First Zionist Congress met at Basel in 1897, and Jewish migration to Palestine grew.

In the Balfour Declaration (1917) Britain announced support for 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine - a land that was then overwhelmingly Arab. Britain ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate after 1920, and tensions between Jewish and Arab communities rose.

• Zionism blended ethnic and religious identity with a modern demand for statehood.
• It was driven by real and deadly persecution, above all the Holocaust of 1941-1945.
• But the land it claimed was already home to an Arab population with its own national feeling.

1948: independence and catastrophe

The same event of 1948 is remembered by two peoples in opposite ways.

After the Holocaust and rising conflict, the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On 14 May 1948 Jewish leaders declared the State of Israel. War with neighbouring Arab states followed at once.

Israelis remember 1948 as their War of Independence - the achievement of a safe homeland. Palestinians remember it as the Nakba ('catastrophe'): an estimated 700 000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled and were not allowed to return. One land, two nations, two irreconcilable memories.

• For one nation, 1948 meant self-determination and survival.
• For the other, it meant dispossession and exile.
• This unresolved clash still shapes the Middle East today.

Arab nationalism: unity and independence

Arab nationalism sought to free Arabic-speaking peoples from foreign rule and, for some, to unite them into one nation.

As the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, Arab lands were divided into British and French mandates. Arab nationalists resented this foreign control and the borders drawn by Europeans, and increasingly opposed Zionist settlement in Palestine.

The movement peaked under Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. When Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and faced down a British, French and Israeli invasion, he became a hero across the Arab world and a symbol for anti-colonial movements throughout Africa and Asia.

• It was built on a shared Arabic language, culture and (for many) Islam.
• Pan-Arabism dreamed of uniting all Arabs, briefly joining Egypt and Syria in 1958.
• It was strongly anti-colonial and inspired African independence struggles.

Two nationalisms, one land

Like South Africa, the Middle East saw two nationalisms claim the same territory.

Nationalism: a force that unites and divides

Across all four cases, nationalism gave people identity and freedom - and drew lines that led to conflict.

1. 1897 First Zionist Congress, Basel
2. 1912 SANNC (later ANC) founded in South Africa
3. 1917 Balfour Declaration on a Jewish 'national home'
4. 1918 Afrikaner Broederbond founded
5. 1944 ANC Youth League radicalises African nationalism
6. 1948 National Party wins power; State of Israel declared / the Nakba
7. 1956 Nasser and the Suez Crisis: peak of Arab nationalism

Review: comparing the nationalisms

Use the five-question framework and the comparisons to answer the questions below.

In this lesson we defined nationalism, distinguished civic from ethnic nationalism, and compared four movements: Afrikaner and African nationalism in South Africa, and Zionism and Arab nationalism in the Middle East. In both regions two nationalisms claimed the same land, with far-reaching consequences.