Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the first half of the twentieth century, Middle Eastern nationalisms were lumped together and treated as part of an undifferentiated phenomenon sweeping across the entire length of the continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa. More importantly, these nationalisms were seen to be no more than political responses of western-educated elites to European expansionism and colonialism. Moreover, French and British colonial scholarship tended to frown upon such nationalisms, deeming their emergence to be either unfortunate, or undesirable in both their aims and methods. By contrast, American scholarship tended, at least in the initial stages of its development, to be more charitable, assigning to nationalism positive cultural connotations and political significance, thereby holding it to denote an earnest desire to join the modern world of independent nations. The subtle, but problematic, European differentiations of various types of nationalisms, often introduced for purely political purposes, tended to be blurred or assigned no particular importance. Thus, the distinctions between liberal patriotism, territorial nationalism and ethnic allegiances were all placed along the same spectrum of positive human loyalties. However, by the early 1930s a more nuanced approach began to be deployed in order to account for the apparent persistence and growth of a number of Middle Eastern nationalist ... log in or subscribe to read full text