Ovi Magazine Issue #24: Nationalism - Published: 2013-01-31

Theme
and soon, with wonderful celerity, invading and
defeating state after state in a long series. One can
say that France under Napoleon went from being a
nationalist unit to an imperial one. It was Napoleon
who overthrew the Directory (the last of the popular
governments) and gathered all power to himself. He
had an infinite lust for power, and imagined himself in
a Roman toga, rival to the Caesars. Thus he was the
primary imperialist of his age. But gradually, despite
a long series of victories over German and Italian foes,
he found that closure had eluded him. His final push,
against Russia, proved his downfall, thus making of
Russia a nationalist foe! The exercise was repeated in
Spain. The pincer movement of England on the one
side and Russia on the other led to Waterloo.
What this means is the impossibility of defining
“nationalism” eo ipso. Events dictate these definitions,
and there is no telling who will be the imperialist, who
the nationalist, in the next phase of history.
It seems that there are three basic models of the
relation between a national group that is not able to be
assimilated by the dominant group of a nation state.
The first strategy is to claim that the newly conquered
peoples will be made into citizens in every sense by
the superior power. This was the French model of
Imperial expansionism in North Africa. All the Arab
schoolchildren are to be treated as though they were
born in France itself. Provision was made after 1870
for representation of these newly-minted citizens in
the national legislature, it was never a realistic solution
for either party, despite some heroic efforts to make it
happen. The real reason was that the nations were too
much different to assent to assimilation in a foreign
land with foreign ways very different from the subject
nation’s.
The Algerian men who fought in World War II were
not likely to give up their idea that they had earned
a right to self-determination, a common opinion in
nations that had been subject to occupation by French.
Moreover, in a moment resembling The Sicilian
Vespers, atrocities broke out in Algiers and many
surrounding towns, the Algerian population fell upon
the pied noirs and cut their throats. Retaliation on the
part of the pied noirs was more bloody, if anything,
and no solution could ever be found to the dilemma
this revealed, even though the governments in Paris
tried out all kinds of tactics, from repression to
accommodation, to verbal agreements that carried no
power with them.
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