by Kevin Reilly
Ironically, this separatism, so threatening to existing nation-states, derived in part from the ambiguities of nationalism itself. The national idea after all had no clear answer to a fundamental question: Who precisely are the people that deserve an independent state? To what groups should self-determination apply? If the colonial territory of Nigeria in West Africa merited independence from Britain, why not the Igbo people, whose many millions inhabited its southeastern region? By the 1960s, they had come to see themselves as a separate people—a nation in the making—oppressed and discriminated against by the more numerous and culturally different northern Nigerians. Their demand for independence as the state of Biafra triggered a terrible civil war that cost several million lives in the 1960s before their military defeat and reintegration into a restructured Nigeria. Much the same logic applied to Tamils in Sri Lanka, Zulus in South Africa, Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, Welsh and Scots in Great Britain, French speakers in Canada, Croats in Yugoslavia, Tibetans in China, and many others. Thus, nationalism has cut several ways, providing a basis for unity within a state but also legitimating a proliferation of separatist movements in the name of self-determination.
The emergence of separatist movements had a wide range of causes. The disappearance of the common enemy of colonial rule or oppressive communist regimes allowed for the expression of ethnic, linguistic, religious and historical antagonisms within particular states. Rapid urbanization everywhere threw various peoples together in crowded and competitive settings, where their differences were magnified. Unequal levels of economic development within states often led to intense rivalries for economic resources and political representation. Elections were frequently contested in terms of ethnically based parties, and some political leaders were more than willing to mobilize support on the basis of ethnic, linguistic, or religious identity. And the ideology of nationalism and “self-determination,” which acquired global prestige in the twentieth century, legitimated claims for autonomy or independence. Furthermore, the very forces of globalization sometimes enabled separatist movements. Many of the new and sharply defined ethnic identities were propagated by the most modern of means—radio, tape cassettes, and Internet sites. The murderous effort to eliminate the Tutsi people of Rwanda in 1994, for example, was preceded by a carefully orchestrated campaign of hatred in local newspapers and on the radio. The complexities of the world economy offered at least the hope that even small breakaway states might find a niche in the global marketplace.
Challenges to the National Idea: World Government . A third challenge to the idea of nation-states with complete sovereignty lay in efforts to construct some form of global government able to maintain world peace and to contain the excesses of nationalism. Growing out of the devastation of World War I, the League of Nations (1919-1940) was the first such attempt, but its many weaknesses and the unwillingness of the United States to join the organization made it unable to prevent World War II. A more sustained effort in the form of the United Nations arose in 1945, supported by the victorious powers in that war. Dominated and often paralyzed by rival superpowers during the Cold War, the United Nations was unable to prevent the many conflicts of the century’s second half. Nevertheless, it took the lead in eradicating smallpox, in providing relief and humanitarian assistance to refugees, and in addressing issues of children’s health and welfare. Furthermore, its adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 registered a growing international consensus on a number of human rights issues, including slavery, torture, equality before the law, and the right to freedom of opinion, food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Despite frequent violations of these rights, the UN Declaration established a standard by which the behavior of all nations could be measured. The organization also provided a forum in which Third World countries could articulate their concerns about decolonization and the inequalities of the world economy. Following the end of the Cold War, the United Nations became more actively involved in peacekeeping operations within rather than between severely divided nations, such as Cyprus, Yugoslavia, and Cambodia. By 1994, some 18 separate operations making use of 80,000 peacekeepers from 82 countries engaged the United Nations around the world. Whatever its limitations, the United Nations embodied a recognition that beyond individual states lay the interests of the world community as a whole.
Despite these challenges, the territorial nation-state has in most cases survived with some 200 of them structuring global political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But the triumph of the national idea in the twentieth century coincided with challenges to its dominance. Larger loyalties and networks, such as communist internationalism, regional groupings like the European Union or panAfricanism, religious identities such as Islam, international organizations such as the United Nations, and the various processes of globalization—all these have countered the claims of the nation. So too have those smaller and often more compelling loyalties associated with ethnic, religious, or linguistic identity, such as being Igbo in Nigeria, Kurdish in Iraq, Muslim or Tibetan in China, or Basque in Spain. Together, these forces, operating both outside and within particular countries, illustrate the fragility of nation-states despite their apparent universality and strength.
The Democratic Idea:
Challenged and Triumphant?
The other global political trend of the twentieth century was democracy. Its promise was participation in the public life of nationstates through competitive elections involving ever-larger groups of people. Here, at least in theory, was an opportunity for ordinary people to shape their lives through a peaceful political process of selecting their own leaders and debating alternative policies. Based on the novel idea of the equality of citizens and their freedom to speak, write, and organize, it has meant limitations on the power of authoritarian states and traditional elites that had for centuries governed much of humankind.
Modern Democracy . While earlier forms of democracy had characterized many hunting and gathering, pastoral, or village-based agricultural societies, modern parliamentary democracy has been a recent phenomenon in world history, developing largely in the nineteenth century and limited to a small number of European and North American countries and to several British settler colonies, such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These early examples of modern democracy grew out of the ideas and practices of the European Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions and were associated with the growing influence of the “middle classes” in these modernizing societies. But they were limited democracies, and only very gradually and with much struggle did poor men, people of color, and women gain voting privileges. Not until 1945 were women in France granted the vote, while effective participation of African Americans in the United States came only in the mid-1960s and that of black Africans in South Africa in 1994.
Gains and Setbacks . Nonetheless, the progress of democracy by the early twentieth century and the victory of the most democratic countries in World War I persuaded many that democracy was the wave of the future, “a natural trend,” as one observer put it.15 But the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s witnessed instead the sharp contraction of democracy. In Italy, Germany, Spain, and much of eastern Europe, fascist or right-wing movements came to power in the chaos following World War I and the Great Depression and effectively eliminated the new, fragile, and often corrupt democracies. The military victories of the Nazis put an end to many others, such as those in Austria and Czechoslovakia. In Nazi thinking, democracy was associated with Germany’s defeat in World War I, with the punitive Treaty of Versailles that ended the war, with political division and mediocrity in government, and with an emphasis on individualism that undermined a strong state. The triumph of communism in Russia following the revolution of 1917 likewise ended the modest democratic innovations that the tsar had recently and reluctantly established. To communists, Western-style parliamentary democracy was an illusion, benefiting only people of property while leaving the working classes and peasantry at their mercy. Na
zi success in overcoming the terrible unemployment of the Great Depression in Germany and Soviet success in promoting rapid industrialization in the 1930s seemed to confirm the effectiveness of authoritarian states and to underline the weakness and fragility of the remaining democracies.
Democracy after World War II . The defeat of the Nazis and of Japanese imperialism in Asia provided an opening for a further wave of democratization following World War II. West Germany, Italy, and Japan joined or rejoined the ranks of victorious democracies. The prestige of democracy pushed Turkey, Greece, and much of Latin America in that direction as well. Furthermore, most of the colonies becoming independent after World War II—dozens of them in Africa alone—emerged, at least initially, with democratic institutions created by their departing European rulers and welcomed as a sign of equality and modernity by their new political leaders. Democratization, it seemed, was back on track.
Democracy in Decline . By the 1960s and 1970s, however, much of this democratic “progress” lay in tatters. Military takeovers in Turkey, Greece, South Korea, Indonesia, and many Latin American and African countries ended modest democratic experiments. When the army took power in the West African country of Ghana in 1966 and chased its once popular leader Kwame Nkrumah into exile, no one lifted a finger to defend the democratic system with which the country had come to independence only nine years earlier. In many places, democracy was discredited by its association with economic failure or with corruption and ethnic conflict. Military leaders claimed that only they had the discipline and resources to maintain order and ensure conditions for economic growth. Some intellectuals and political leaders in Asia and Africa argued that democracy was a Western import and a legacy of colonialism, unsuited for the needs of their developing societies. In culturally diverse nations, they claimed, it created conflict and disunity as political parties focused on particular ethnic or religious groups. And if Europeans had not begun their modernizing processes with democratic institutions, why should Asian or African countries be expected to do so? Strong states, unimpeded by the conflicting demands of democratic pressures, were necessary for the difficult transition to modern industrial societies. Finally, they argued that the individualism that underpinned Western democracy was at odds with the communal or collective values of their cultures.
The abandonment of democracy in much of the Third World led in many places to political systems even more repressive than colonial rule. Right-wing death squads, associated with conservative military governments, preyed on opposition groups in many Latin American countries. In much of Africa, massive corruption, harsh suppression of political opposition, sharp restrictions on a free press, and the enrichment of small elites seemed to betray the social promise of national liberation. The epitome of this pattern occurred in Zaire (the Congo), whose President Mobutu (1965-1997) reportedly accumulated a personal fortune in the several billions of dollars (enough to pay off his country’s national debt), built himself 11 palaces, some connected by four-lane highways, and acquired a series of chateaus and estates throughout Europe.
National liberation movements leading to independence had been accompanied everywhere by the expectation of an end to oppression. While the racial oppression of colonial rule largely ended, allowing indigenous cultures to flourish, various forms of dictatorship and authoritarianism all too often restricted human freedom even more sharply. And much of this occurred with the encouragement of the Soviet Union and the United States, both of which eagerly supported dictators who took their side in the Cold War.
A major exception to this widespread abandonment of democracy in the Third World took shape in India following its independence in 1947. There, a Western-style democracy, including regular elections, multiple parties, civil liberties, and peaceful changes in government, turned India into the world’s largest democratic state. The experience of that huge country suggested that democracy was not everywhere perceived as alien and that it could take root in non-Western societies.
A Resurgence of Democracy? The appeal of democracy has found further expression in the most recent wave of democratic experimentation, which, since the mid-1970s, has assumed global dimensions. Dozens of countries made a transition from highly authoritarian or military rule to multiparty systems with contested elections: Spain, Portugal, and Greece in southern Europe; most of Latin America; the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia in Asia; a number of African countries; and the former communist states of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. In most cases, the process was relatively peaceful and was often initiated from within the old system itself under varying degrees of pressure from society.
What accounts for this revival of democracy? In many countries, economic growth, together with increasing levels of urbanization and education, created larger middle classes that sought a greater role in national life. Churches, students, and women’s groups organized to demand democratic change as a means to a better life. In some Asian, African, and communist countries, ideas of human rights and democracy came increasingly to be seen as universal values, applicable to themselves, and no longer so uniquely associated with the West. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and of apartheid in South Africa, both of them opposed in the name of democracy, marked a failure of authoritarian politics and opened the way for democratic alternatives, while the end of the Cold War removed the incentive of the rival superpowers to support “their” dictators.
The global “revolution of democracy” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries put an end, at least temporarily, to any number of oppressive regimes and permitted millions of people to live in greater freedom. But how real are the changes, and how long will they last? Critics of the process have argued that much of democratic practice, even in the more established democracies, is a charade that cloaks the continuing interests of military, business, religious, or bureaucratic elites. And what happens when democratic elections bring to power those who are fundamentally opposed to continuing the democratic experiment? The experience of the past century suggests that democracy is no sure thing, that it ebbs and flows as circumstances change. Whether this most recent surge of democracy will be more lasting and widespread than the others remains to be seen.
Cultural Globalization
If economic relationships and political institutions have been “globalized” in the past century, so too have many cultural patterns. Driven by the modern communications revolution, information, ideas, and impressions traveled rapidly, sometimes instantaneously, around the planet. People everywhere were more easily able to compare their own lives to what they learned from abroad. Such comparisons, often derived from shortwave radio broadcasts, led many Russians to realize what they were missing under Soviet communism and contributed much to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Political and cultural leaders of all kinds—Hitler, Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Osama bin Laden—could now mobilize large numbers of people on behalf of their various causes.
Popular Culture/Global Culture
The most visible expression of cultural globalization lay in the worldwide spread of certain aspects of Western and particularly American culture. Fast food, blue jeans, and American music and movies assumed global dimensions. Basketball, an American game, became international, thanks largely to television. By the early 1990s, American films commanded almost 70 percent of the market in Europe, while McDonald’s restaurants—some 20,000 of them in more than 1 00 countries—served 30 million customers a day.16 Many intellectual critics decried the erosion of national cultures in an overwhelming tide of cultural imports.
Consumerism and advertising likewise took hold around the world, bringing status and temporary satisfaction to those who could afford to shop and frustration and envy to those who could not. For many millions of newly prosperous Chinese, awash in consumer goods following the reforms of the post-Maoist era, the restrained and sacrificial values of revolutionary socialism gave way to a selfserving and unabashed materialism. A popular slogan suggested that life
in modern China required the “Eight Bigs”: a color television, a refrigerator, a stereo, a camera, a motorcycle, a suite of furniture, a washing machine, and an electric fan. In addition, a man needed the “three highs” to attract a suitable wife: a high salary, an advanced education, and a height of more than five feet six inches. The pursuit of such a life was encouraged in the media by stories celebrating individual entrepreneurs who took advantage of the new opportunities to become wealthy. Chinese writers and filmmakers, like their counterparts the world over, explored the tension between prosperity and mindless consumerism and asked penetrating questions about the loss of older values of simplicity, equality, family, and nature in the rush to achieve and to consume.
Other aspects of Western culture likewise spread widely, at least initially under colonial rule. French became a second language of many educated West Africans and Southeast Asians. Even more so, English assumed the role of an international language with perhaps 1.5 billion speakers by the end of the century, second only to Chinese and far more globally dispersed. Beyond these imperial languages, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian also spread widely, even as many local languages died out. Of more than 1,000 Indian languages in Brazil in the nineteenth century, only 200 survived to the end of the twentieth century. In 1982, just 10 speakers of Achumawi survived in northern California.17
Christianity also spread widely in the past century, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where it became “Africanized” in thousands of independent church movements that broke away from Western missionary “parent” churches. At the end of the twentieth century, Christianity seemed to be growing in China as well, where it had been subject to severe restrictions during Mao’s lifetime. Some 82 million Chinese, about 7 percent of the population, professed some kind of Christian affiliation, most of them in “house churches” outside any official religious structure.18 Catholicism, long dominant in Latin America, faced growing competition from evangelical Protestantism, which attracted some 20 percent of the population in Brazil and Chile by the 1990s.
