IIN THE LATE NINETEENTH and early twentieth centuries the peoples of Asia adapted the European ideology of nationalism to their own situations. The First World War profoundly affected Asian nationalist aspirations by altering relations between Asia and Europe. For four years Asians watched Europeans vilifying and destroying each other. Japan’s defeat of imperial Russia in 1905 (see “The Modernization of Russia” in Chapter 24) had shown that an Asian power could beat a European Great Power; now for the first time Asians saw the entire West as divided and vulnerable.