NATIONALISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
Knowing that decolonization occurred on a massive scale after 1945, one should not misuse hindsight by assuming that everything the colonized did in phase 4 was deliberately directed toward this end.
There were, to be sure, movements that were clearly nationalist, in the sense that they took a colony as their primary unit of analysis, emphasized shared features entitling its inhabitants to be called a nation, and made the case for the nation’s independence.But many organizations formed in phase 4 did not have all or even any of these characteristics. The primary unit of identity and loyalty often was not the colony but a group within it. This might be an existing religious community (Sarekat Islam in the Netherlands Indies and the Muslim League in India);
a religious community in process of formation (the Kimbanguist movement in the Belgian Congo; Rastafarians in Jamaica);
an ethnic group (Kikuyu Central Association in Kenya; Ibibio State Union in Nigeria); a local community (community improvement associations);
a group defined by gender (participants in the Aba Women’s War) or age (youth leagues, student associations);
a group defined by occupation and economic interest (farmers’ associations, trade unions of teachers or dockworkers).
For many organizations the primary unit was a category far more comprehensive than any one colony. The transcendent tie might be race, as in the “Africa for the Africans” appeal of the Garveyites, the pan-African congresses organized by Du Bois, and the nigritude literary movement of Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, and other francophone intellectuals. The tie might be religion, as in the pan-Islamic movement of the early 1920s that temporarily united Muslims from the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. The tie might be a larger territory, as in the National Congress of British West Africa.
Or it might be class, notably shared working-class interests. In some cases appeals to class loyalty were expressed through the Communist movement, with its strong emphasis on solidarity within an international proletariat. Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and, for a time, Trinidad’s George Padmore were active in the Communist International. In other instances working-class identity was encouraged by noncommunist trade union movements, as in the British Guiana and West Indian Labour Congress.The experience of being a colonial subject was itself the basis for a newly emerging sense of identity. A novel by the Barbadian writer George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, describes a shoemaker who, after being exposed in the 1930s to new ideas and to word of protest activities elsewhere in the Caribbean, “starts to think of Little England [Barbados] as a part of some gigantic thing called colonial.”46
Organizations emphasizing interests and identities of specific groups within a colony or appealing to larger social categories transcending its borders were not inclined to stress characteristics residents of a given territory had—or allegedly had— in common. In this sense they could be termed sub- or supranationalist. As such they existed in a state of tension with nationalist organizations whose imagined community was a colony’s population or at least its non-European majority.47 The most explicit and historically momentous instance of tension was in India. There, by the late 1930s, the Muslim League, led by M. A. Jinnah, was challenging the inc’s claim to speak for India’s Muslims and increasingly threatening to form a separate state for the subcontinent’s Muslims.
But this tension was not irresolvable. Nationalist movements had the potential to absorb or coopt subnational and supranational organizations. Much depended on who the nationalist leaders were, what they said, how they said it, and their ability to form coalitions of diverse communities and interests.
Nationalist movements were most likely to succeed when their leaders were widely regarded as articulating a territory’s general interests rather than the goals of particular groups. It helped, too, when leaders could convincingly argue that independence was the most effective way to achieve goals other groups wished to advance. It certainly helped when leaders could show that independence was more likely if people emphasized what united them and downplayed differences and rivalries.Many colonial organizations phrased their grievances in specific rather than general terms. The goal might be to end official discrimination against indigenous civil servants, to extend the franchise, or to spend more government funds on a local community. It might be to increase representation in a legislature, abolish forced labor, establish a publicly funded university, or guarantee higher prices for a territory’s major exports. If attained, such goals would reform colonialism in a direction more responsive to demands from below. But these changes would not necessarily bring colonial rule to an end. Indeed, a prerequisite for attaining reformist goals was a colonial regime sufficiently effective to carry out the desired improvements. Organizations pressing these kinds of demands could be deemed protonationalist. But they were not nationalist, if one defines “nationalism” as identifying colonial rule itself, not specific metropolitan policies, as the fundamental problem. Over time protonationalist organizations tended to convert to nationalism, above all when their reformist demands were not met. But in many parts of the colonial world as of the late 1930s that time had not yet arrived.
Phase 4 offers several examples of nationalist movements with a broad popular following—but far more examples of organizations that, while not nationalist in composition or goals, were available for mobilization into comprehensive movements for independence. This potential was to be more fully realized in the wake of yet another twentieth-century global crisis, the war that commenced phase 5.