29. Nationalism in Asia, 1914–1939

From Asia’s perspective the First World War was largely a European civil war that shattered Western imperialism’s united front, underscored the West’s moral bankruptcy, and convulsed prewar relationships throughout Asia. Most crucially, the war sped the development of modern Asian nationalism. Before 1914 the nationalist gospel of anti-imperialist political freedom and racial equality had already won converts among Asia’s westernized, educated elites. In the 1920s and 1930s it increasingly won the allegiance of the masses. As in nineteenth-century Europe, nationalism in Asia between 1914 and 1939 became a mass movement with potentially awesome power.

The modern nationalism movement was never monolithic. In Asia especially, where the new and often narrow ideology of nationalism was grafted onto old, rich, and complex civilizations, the shape and eventual outcome of nationalist movements varied enormously. Between the outbreaks of the First and Second World Wars, each Asian country developed a distinctive national movement rooted in its own unique culture and history. Each nation’s people created their own national reawakening, which reinvigorated thought and culture as well as politics and economics. And as in Europe, nationalist movements gave rise in Asia to conflict both within large, multiethnic states and between independent states.

The Asian nationalist movement witnessed the emergence of two of the true giants of the twentieth century. Mohandas Gandhi in India and Mao Zedong in China both drew their support from the peasant masses in the two most populous countries in the world. Gandhi successfully used campaigns of peaceful nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule to gain Indian independence. Mao, on the other hand, used weapons of war and socialist promises of equality to defeat his westernized nationalist opponents and establish a modern Communist state.