Nationalism and the New Nations
WALLERSTEIN, IMMANUEL
Nationalism and the New Nations From Empire to Nation. By Rupert Emerson. Harvard. 466 pp. $7.75. Reviewed by Immanuel Wallerstein Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University THE...
...Emerson does not limit himself to the reasons empires have fallen and nations risen to take their places...
...Such a possibility, Emerson believes, was fore-shadowed in China, where Chiang Kai-shek's return to Confucianism was related to Mao's rise...
...These new elites, responding perhaps less to oppression and neglect than to their broadened horizons, demanded equal rights as individuals and as spokesmen for nations...
...The reader who knows very little will learn much, but so will the reader who knows much...
...The occasional lack of rigor in his analysis is well compensated for by the quality and the scope of his insights...
...Emerson is no easy optimist and knows the task of modernization will be "long and hazardous, accompanied by as much backsliding as advance...
...Also, the split between the intellectuals and the mass movement, which we see in most countries of Asia and Africa today, is scarcely adumbrated...
...Though the book suffers from repetition, it is at least of themes worth repeating...
...He is not sanguine about the achievement of either and believes both the U.S...
...As for democracy, he warns that its premature "overabundant" exercise can destroy the foundations on which a future successful democratic society can be built...
...Thus, Asian and African nations have turned inward to their past to find new supports...
...He traces the rise of unity movements and sees such phenomena as exaltation of the African personality as elements in the battle of Africans against acceptance of their inferiority by themselves and others...
...Still, he argues, we should not be diverted from the basically just demand of colonial peoples to govern themselves...
...But Emerson notices the risks here, for the glorious past is also the tribalist past, and its revival may undercut the nation...
...Emerson's theme is clear and simple: "In the large, nationalism in Asia and Africa, as in at least its initial phases in Europe and America, is a forward-looking and not a reactionary force, a spur to revolution and not a bulwark of the status quo...
...Thus, as a result of modern education, economic advance and—sometimes— freer institutions, new elites arose in the colonial states...
...Reviewed by Immanuel Wallerstein Assistant Professor of Sociology, Columbia University THE SUBTITLE of this book is "The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples," and it is a pleasure to state that amid the welter of monographs ( many excellent) and surveys (many dubious) there is now a book which attempts, in a scholarly and intelligent way, to view this rise to self-assertion as a whole, and to give the reader some useful guide-lines to analysis and judgment...
...Emerson ends by resuming a familiar argument, but one lent weight by his analysis: "Self-interest demands that the West have the courage to undertake the acts of faith required to link it with the aspirations of the rising nations...
...The assertion of the right to self-determination is an exercise of the right of revolution—a dangerous right—and Emerson observes the double standards of movements before and after independence...
...In short, all you have to do is to get away with it...
...if so, the ultimate beneficiaries will be the Communists, who are single-minded modernizers...
...He quotes Ivor Jennings' bon mot that "the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people," and admits the truth of this, but argues that theory matters little...
...Self-determination is rarely if ever accepted as a continuing right...
...Emerson is most lucid on the unwillingness of people to tolerate colonialism, a "deeprooted perversity of man...
...The administrator, along with the missionary and trader, needed trained people to aid him in his own, to be sure selfish, aims...
...Colonial administrations brought rationalized and efficient administration to Asia and Africa...
...Look at Pakistan...
...Nationalism is one more expression of what Karl Mannheim has termed the "fundamental democratization of the modern world" and participation in political movements provides education in the political process for modern man...
...Emerson is quite clear on the central problems of the new nations —economic development and the achievement of coherent national unity...
...Emerson is also lucid in his brilliant discussion of the difficult subject of self-determination...
...Nonetheless, most of the major themes are covered and covered well...
...Though not sanguine, Emerson is soberly hopeful...
...he is equally concerned with the "psychological debris of imperialism...
...The simplest statement that can be made about a nation is that it is a body of people who feel they are a nation...
...Resurgent traditionalism may lead the new nations to fail...
...What one misses most in this book is a discussion of the role of the mass nationalist movement as an organized political party, a lack both astonishing and unfortunate...
...His basic sympathy for nationalism and the new nations does not prevent him from noting that the very nationalism which condemns Western imperialism is, "perversely, its finest fruit...
...and the USSR naive in assuming such developments will necessarily redound to their benefit...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 33
