But if you look more closely, you’ll find clues to the regional rage and global controversies that plague this place. The shrine is dedicated to all those Japanese soldiers who sacrificed their lives on the battlefield since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, most of them during World War II. On the face of it, there is nothing offensive about this: Every nation must mourn its war dead.

But among the pines and the cherry trees lurk messages and monuments that prolong a deep denial about the country’s past sins.

Not far from the shrine stands a monument to the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, long honoured by Japanese nationalists. He was the only one of the 11 global judges in the Tokyo war crimes trials of 1946 to suggest that all of the Japanese defendants should have been found not guilty. And, tucked away behind the shrine, another memorial silently salutes to the Kenpeitai—the military police who terrorized civilians in the countries Japan conquered during the Second World War, and inside Japan itself. There is vast and undisputed documentation of this much-feared organization’s human rights abuses; its closest equivalents in the West would be the Nazi SS or the Soviet NKVD.

To muddy the waters even further, the war museum on the site, with an entrance just 100 feet from the shrine, tells stories that few reputable historians would recognize as true: The displays here blame Chinese provocations for Japan’s invasion of China, and American trade sanctions for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. They even suggest that Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia stemmed from a selfless desire to liberate the Asian people from European rule, rather than an entirely selfish imperial desire.

Perhaps worse than these historical distortions are the museum’s omissions. There is no mention here of the enforced sexual slavery of thousands of Korean “comfort women.” Nor is there any record of the medical experiments on Chinese civilians, the starvation of people in Indonesia, or the massacre of women and children in Manila. These events are well known all over the world and have been repeatedly proven—not only by foreign historians, but by Japanese ones. But they are entirely absent from the museum.

All of these things send the political message that Japan did nothing wrong in World War II and does not need to take responsibility for its actions. This is why a Chinese man tried to set fire to the gates of the shrine in 2011. That is why a South Korean man threw a bottle of paint thinners into the main hall of the shrine in 2013, or why another set off a bomb there in 2015.

There is another reason for attacks and controversy: the very souls housed here. This is not merely because the Yasukuni Shrine honors ordinary Japanese soldiers. Since the late 1950s, it has also openly and explicitly venerated the souls of convicted war criminals.

The problem began in 1959 after the shrine held a mass memorial for Japan’s war dead. In the years since the war, more than 2 million souls had been enshrined here: This ceremony was meant as a final way of marking the past and allowing the nation to move on.

Until that point, Japanese war criminals had always been excluded. The enshrinement process involves inscribing the names and other details of the dead in the symbolic registry of deities, which is housed in a building behind the main shrine, away from the general public; without this information, enshrinement cannot take place. Not wishing to honor those who had brought shame upon Japan, the government had always avoided passing on these details to the Yasukuni priesthood, therefore eliminating any war criminals from veneration.

Even within the government, however, there were those who did not like this policy. The Ministry of Health and Welfare, which was responsible for liaising with the Yasukuni Shrine, consisted largely of ex-military men, many of whom disagreed with the verdicts of the war crimes trials. In the spring of 1959, the ministry secretly started providing the priests at the shrine with the details they needed.

Over the next eight years, some 984 so-called “Class B” and “Class C” criminals were enshrined. These men had been personally involved in the mass killing, exploitation and torture of prisoners and civilians around Asia. The process took place without fanfare, partly in order to avoid any kind of public backlash, but also to avoid any accusations of a merging of religious and governmental affairs—something banned under the post-war Japanese constitution. According to Higurashi Yoshinobu, a political scientist at Teikyo University in Tokyo, the shrine did not even seek permission from the families of those they enshrined, some of whom were deeply ashamed of what their relatives had done.

If the enshrinement of Japan’s Class B and C war criminals was a sensitive matter, then the enshrinement of its Class A criminals was even more controversial. These men had not personally conducted atrocities, but were rather the top brass: those who had been convicted at the Tokyo trials for masterminding and initiating war. For many years their enshrinement was stalled by the head priest, Tsukuba Fujimaro, but after his death in 1978, the new head priest, Matsudaira Nagayoshi, reversed course. In a secret ceremony on October 17 that same year, he enshrined all 14 Class A criminals.

None of these steps were justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, far more Japanese opposed the enshrinements than supported them. Even Emperor Hirohito did not seem to approve of them. Between 1945 and 1975, he visited the Yasukuni Shrine eight times, but once the Class A war criminals were enshrined he never visited again. After he died, his successors followed suit: Neither his son nor his grandson has ever visited the shrine.

Unfortunately, Japan’s prime ministers have not been quite so tactful. Over the past 40 years several have paid their respects here, always claiming they are coming for personal reasons, but also because they know that the more nationalist elements in their electorate will approve. Every time they do so, it causes a storm of outrage among Japan’s neighbors. The most recent visit was by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in December 2013, but it caused such controversy that Abe was not tempted to go again until after his resignation last September.

Other senior members of the Japanese government also visit the shrine regularly. In 2020, despite worsening relations with China and South Korea, four government ministers insisted on paying their respects. The day they chose to do so was probably the most diplomatically sensitive day of recent years—the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945. A spokesman for South Korea’s foreign ministry immediately expressed “deep disappointment and concern” for their insensitivity.

It is difficult to see how the situation might be salvaged now. The shrine authorities could start by removing the memorials to the Kenpeitai and Pal—but they are unlikely to do so of their own accord. And there is no sign of the popular protests against monuments that have happened recently in so many other parts of the world. Likewise, the museum that stands next to the shrine could change its provocative and questionable narrative of the war. But none of this would solve the central problem, which lies with the shrine itself.

Some people have suggested “de-enshrining” the spirits of Japan’s war criminals or moving them to another location. But the priests at the shrine insist that this is impossible for theological reasons: Once the souls of the dead have been “merged” here, they cannot be separated again.

What they neglect to mention is that it would also go against the whole political ethos that has been pursued by the shrine authorities ever since the 1950s. The priests here are not interested in guilt or innocence, which they consider a distraction from what is truly important. This deeply conservative institution, which is steeped in traditions of self-sacrifice and martial glory, is trying to keep alive a vision of Japan as a warrior nation. Nothing else matters—not even reconciliation.

Nowadays, most people in Japan accept the shame of their collective history, but would dearly like to move on. Last summer, at the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Emperor Naruhito openly expressed his “deep remorse” for his nation’s role as aggressor in World War II. Like the vast majority of Japan’s population, Naruhito was born after the war and is more concerned with the problems of the future than with trying to keep alive the poisonous values of the past.

“Looking back on the long period of post-war peace,” he said at a secular memorial service elsewhere in Tokyo, “reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never again be repeated.”

Most of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the shrine would also like to move on. They would like to enjoy the Yasukuni Shrine as a peaceful oasis in an otherwise bustling city, to remember their ancestors without having to think of the actions of war criminals, or to worry about the possibility of an arson attack or a bomb.

But it is unlikely that Japan’s neighbors will ever be able to leave the past behind while the sins of the past remain unacknowledged here. The same is true for the Japanese themselves. While the shrine authorities propagate an atmosphere of misdirection and denial, neither the people who visit nor the spirits of the dead can ever fully be at peace.

The post The Tokyo Shrine That Will Never Find Peace appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But soon Luigi started following the news a little too avidly. Then he started going to meetings on the sly. Suddenly the De Michelis’ good boy was more interested in the man the newspapers called “Comandante” than in the approval of family and teachers. Before his parents realized what was happening, Luigi ran away from home, without finishing high school, to join the movement that had won his heart and mind.

Late in 1920, Luigi sent a letter home to prepare his parents for the imminent reckoning, an armed clash between Italian nationalists (of which Luigi was one) and the Kingdom of Italy’s army, a battle which would come to be called “The Christmas of Blood.” Luigi warned: “Soon there will be battle, maybe soon I shall be no more. Console yourselves in thinking that I died for the purest of Causes …”

How does populist, political charisma change the world and how can we hold it in check? The story of how the De Michelis family lost hold of a child—the history surrounding “the Christmas of Blood”—offers enduring answers to those questions.

Charismatic, populist politicians can have the pull of a cult. The Comandante to whom Luigi was in thrall was not Mussolini, but his precursor, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was the most famous living Italian in 1920. By the end of World War I, D’Annunzio had created a craze around his own personality in ways only a much-loved celebrity can.

Before World War I, D’Annunzio had been Italy’s most revered decadent poet and womanizer. During the war, at 52 years of age, he enlisted as Italy’s oldest officer volunteer. He flew airplanes, manned ships, and screamed from the trenches, everywhere using his prominence to campaign for Italy’s military cause. After the war, he was the most vocal proponent of Italian territorial expansion.

Mussolini would echo D’Annunzio’s calls, though the two did not get along, agreeing about little beside Italy’s greatness and the feebleness of its government. While Mussolini busily recruited thugs to build his fascist party, D’Annunzio used his far greater fame to stage huge rallies and flood the media with his audacious and emotionally manipulative snubbing of traditional state authority.

D’Annunzio created stirs by combining shock and empathy. He could quote Dante and then call Italy’s prime minister a “shithead.” An elegant dandy, he nevertheless presented himself as “one of the guys,” determined to vindicate those who felt cheated by the state and the world at large. Nice middle-class boys like Luigi hadn’t been cheated, of course, but they responded to the daring of saying what one shouldn’t and to a cause that promised to prevent corrupt bureaucracy from keeping Italy from its destined greatness.

How would Italy achieve that greatness? What was the cause that Luigi was prepared to die for? The last line of Luigi’s letter to his parents makes this clear: “Stay safe, your son salutes you, declaring himself above all ashamed of being Italian, that he no longer wants to be Italian, and from now on is Fiumian. Goodbye, Luigi.”

The reference to “Fiumian” is now obscure, but then was a rallying cry for Italian territorial expansion. Fiume, today known by its Croatian name Rijeka, was a multiethnic port town located in the northeastern Adriatic. Before 1918, it was a semi-independent city-state within the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy. Most Fiumians (unlike Luigi) did not identify as mother-tongue Italians and most were multi-lingual. Significant swathes of Fiumians declared their mother-tongue as something other than Italian—26 percent Croatian, 13 percent Hungarian, 5 percent Slovene, 5 percent German.

This diversity did not interest D’Annunzio and his followers. Instead, they saw Fiume as filled with Italians and as a target—a place they could usurp to make Italy great again.

Fiume seemed ripe for usurpation because of the political fallout at the end of World War I. Before the war, almost 300 million Europeans (including Fiumians) lived within a continental empire, whether German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman. When all these empires were dissolved in 1918, new countries were created out of their territories, with others expanding to absorb any lands they could get. Under the leadership of the victorious Entente powers, the 1919 Paris Peace talks became a squabbling ground over which states would get what.

Little Fiume turned into one of the biggest headaches that Paris diplomats tried to solve because the town’s Italian-nationalist leadership declared itself diplomatically and legally independent now that its empire was gone (citing their long-standing city-state semi-independence). This wasn’t the only problem. They also insisted that their new independence gave them the right to annex themselves to Italy.

Paris Peace diplomats, with the American president Woodrow Wilson in the forefront, repeatedly rebuffed attempts to annex Fiume to Italy; they made free-trade arguments against giving Italy a full monopoly over the Adriatic and pointed out that at least half the town didn’t consider itself Italian.

D’Annunzio soon became the most prominent critic of this stance, proclaiming that Wilson was trying to “mutilate” Italy’s WWI victory by denying its rightly earned dominance over the Adriatic. For months, D’Annunzio staged call-and-response rallies filled with lies to push for Italy’s control of the Adriatic and with xenophobic images against “Slavs.” In September 1919, D’Annunzio and his crew stopped just talking and decided to take Fiume.

D’Annunzio and his followers chose Fiume over other Adriatic hotspots because Fiume’s leadership invited them in. So, to the sound of church bells and without a shot fired, they entered Fiume and proclaimed it part of Italy, regardless of what the stuffed shirts in Paris, Rome, Belgrade, or Washington, D.C., said. This unsanctioned seizure of the town was titillating, and newspapers the world over covered it. Luigi was among those desperate to be part of this spectacular Fiume story.

D’Annunzio and his crew expected their de facto annexation of Fiume to Italy to be authorized within a few weeks’ time. They guessed wrong. Month after month, they marched around town proclaiming their endless motto of annexation to “Italy or death!” but no heads of state were willing to recognize their fait accompli.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Fiumians suffered the realities of what it meant to be a state gone rogue from the global order. Counterfeiting went into overdrive, with 60 percent of Fiume’s money supply falsified and no big state infrastructure available to crack down and stabilize. Law codes written in imperial times were patched over to make them look and sound Italian, but everyone was confused about what the real rules were.

Unsure where Fiume would eventually land on the geopolitical map, city policemen refused to follow orders to register their own nationality, even though they all spoke Italian. Croatian- and Hungarian-speaking schoolteachers were ordered to take Italian courses in their free time to make sure the proclamations of Fiume’s Italianness rang truer. Translators were hired to hide the fact that many bureaucrats and businesses still functioned more within a multilingual Central European mindset than a monolingual Italian one. And every day, everyone got poorer and hungrier as D’Annunzio’s Fiume grew more diplomatically isolated.

The Fiume fiasco lasted 15 months before the Kingdom of Italy and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (soon to be known as Yugoslavia) agreed that the only way to end this destabilizing interregnum was to make Fiume an independent city-state. That meant that neither nation-state would get it. D’Annunzio refused to recognize the treaty; he still demanded annexation to “Italy or death!” Italy threatened military action. D’Annunzio’s reply: Bring it.

Eventually, Italy decided to attack, but—to avoid attention—waited until Christmas 1920, when newspaper readership was at its lowest. (Italian politicians had learned the hard way that D’Annunzio was catnip to the media).

Before the first shots were fired, D’Annunzio proved again why the press could never get enough of him. He dubbed Italy’s attack a fratricidal “Christmas of Blood,” a name that has stuck. He might have won the media war, but there was no way the Italian army would lose the real one. The town was bombed; Italian soldiers invaded. D’Annunzio’s followers blew things up and shot at the arriving soldiers. Fortunately, hardly any soldiers died, though D’Annunzio often lied about this, inflating the numbers of casualties on both sides. Even fewer civilians perished, mostly because they hid in their homes waiting for the madness to end.

By New Year’s Eve, Fiumian statesmen had convinced D’Annunzio to surrender and recognize the treaty. Italy had won, but all sides felt they had lost. Italy was regularly demonized for perpetrating a fratricidal attack in a holy season. D’Annunzio was ridiculed for not surrendering in the first place.

Like most of his comrades, Luigi survived and returned home hungover (literally and figuratively) from the entire experience. He spent the next years working to catch up on the middle-class plans his parents had always had for him. With his “Fiumian” identity shed, he finished university, joined the Fascist party (like millions of others), and became a respected pharmacist in a seaside town north of Rome.

The future for real Fiumians was less easy to rehabilitate, however. They were left living in the material and political rubble of a “Christmas of Blood” most had hid from and few had supported.

None of this should have happened. That it did still produces important questions. Why would Italian nationalists go to war against their own Italian nation-state? Why would nice boys like Luigi drop everything to join them? And how and why did a town filled with so many non-Italians put up with all these D’Annunzio converts in their desperate mission to make Fiume part of “Italy or death”?

Historians of charismatic politics have written hundreds of books trying to answer the first two questions; most ignore the last one. Many of their answers are psychological at their core; they investigate how people got brainwashed into thinking that “justice” for Italy would come from taking over a town few Italians had ever heard of. These histories are frightening because they make it seem that the right combination of charisma, anger, and a tendentious media will convince people to do things they would never have thought acceptable before.

It’s easy to see how this lesson relates to Mussolini’s rise, but it’s also frighteningly relevant right now, in the United States and around the world.

For me, the scariest part of the power of charismatic populism is different, though. I’m most afraid of the very last line of Luigi’s letter, where he identifies himself as “Fiumian.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his diary and letters, Luigi admitted often how foreign Fiume was. But he and the rest of D’Annunzio’s entourage successfully convinced themselves, much of the newspaper-reading world, and most historians that they—aggressive outsiders—were everything and everyone, that they were Fiume. As this entire “Christmas of Blood” narrative shows, charismatic populist politics don’t merely convince us to run away from home or leave behind our family and country. They have the power to erase everything outside those politics, including reality itself.

That’s why, in confronting populism and charismatic leaders, we must focus more on the world erased than the world they hoped to impose. We need more study of how wrong the brainwashed thinking was, instead of focusing on its appeal to people. Otherwise, we risk replicating precisely this nefarious vision: that the leader and his followers are all the world worth knowing about.

That’s also why history matters. It’s important to replace prepackaged “extraordinary” stories like the “Christmas of Blood” with the realities that produced a “Christmas of Rubble.” And it’s important to recognize that defeating charisma politics requires taking away its stage or balcony, so that people can see all the drama, troubles, hope, and failures of the big multiethnic world that the D’Annunzios, Mussolinis, and Trumps have worked so hard to overshadow.

The post How a Charismatic Populist Destroyed Christmas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So argued the London-based essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra during a fast-paced and wide-ranging Zócalo/Noēma Magazine online event yesterday, titled “Has Hysteria Conquered America?”

Mishra and The Atlantic senior editor Ronald Brownstein, who served as discussion moderator, spent over an hour discussing how international trends and intellectual history might explain today’s American politics.

Those politics, Mishra and Brownstein agreed, are full of conspiracy theories, xenophobia, over-the-top rhetoric, and questionable thinking. Over the course of the event, the two writers tried to locate the reasons for this crack-up—in economic dislocation, racism, wars, imperialism, and especially in Americans’ misunderstanding of their own place in the world.

Mishra, who is Indian and the author most recently of Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire, suggested that it may have been easier to understand what’s happening in America if you’re not American. “I’ve come to the subject not through the American experience, but through the experience of India, supposedly the world’s largest democracy,” said Mishra. During his life, education, and work as a writer in India, he saw democracy decline. “A whole culture of hatred, of division, was emerging,” he said, “and many people were happily subscribing to it and looking for a demagogue who could at least seem to be protecting their rights.”

“With that kind of training,” Mishra concludes, “what’s happened in America hasn’t come as a huge surprise.”

Pressed by Brownstein, a leading American political journalist, on what explains political hysteria in the U.S. and around the world, Mishra returned to themes from his previous book Age of Anger: A History of the Present. The modern world, he said, is based on “contradictory promises.” The first promise is equality and individual dignity. But the second promise, “is that we will realize individual and national power through capitalism.” That, he said, is “when the contradictions start becoming sharper and sharper, because capitalism tends to generate inequality.”

Inequality creates disaffection with society, and starts to undermine democracy. And democracy’s spread in recent decades, because it coincided with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, produced a backlash because “the promise of equality got entangled with the promise of prosperity,” Mishra said.

Right-wing populism, Mishra said, is part of that backlash, and is driven by a desire for protection not just from capitalism but from the many disasters afflicting the world.

“There’s a sense that the world is falling apart and we have to take drastic measures to protect ourselves,” Mishra said. “The survivalist instinct has kicked in, in many different parts of the world.”

This backlash has surprised many leaders and thinkers in the U.S., the U.K., and the West who Mishra described as “too self-absorbed, far too self-congratulatory, [and] not really perceptive enough to the sufferings or ordeals of ordinary people.” Mishra also cited the widespread hubris that the U.S. had reached “a particular summit of human achievement.”

“One reason we are unable to look at our world clearly is because we are too influenced by a certain ideology of progress and of continuous, irreversible improvement,” said Mishra, adding: “Trump has been welcome in at least one aspect—he’s forced us to confront many of these problems that we understated or ignored or suppressed in the past.”

Very few progressive thinkers in the West have been exposed to a lot of non-Western thought, said Mishra, citing, in particular, the criticisms of Western liberalism by Gandhi. He lamented how Western writers routinely pontificate about Iran or Russia or other societies without speaking the language, or reading the leading thinkers from those parts of the world. Those with broader experience and knowledge, who often are outsiders or minorities in a society, he said, can be more perceptive.

Brownstein, who authored The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America in 2007, agreed. “As a card-carrying member of that mainstream punditocracy, I can say that the person who I encountered in 2016 who was the most convinced throughout that Trump could win was an African American pollster named Cornell Belcher.” Belcher correctly predicted that Trump’s open racism “would not be disqualifying for as many voters as someone like me probably thought in 2016.”

During a question-and-answer period, audience members offered queries about China, the balance of power between the countries, the pandemic, the global power of American culture, and what Mishra thinks of Los Angeles (he said he enjoys going for walks and visiting bookstores on his visits). Some audience questions asked the two writers to predict the future.

“I think the 2020s in America are going to be the 1850s,” said Brownstein, “where you had a rising majority whose agenda is being stalemated by a minority that controls a lot of the key institutions.”

In response to a question about the perceptions of the United States, Mishra said the country’s recent path posed a warning to those who saw it as a global model. “What America offers to the rest of the world is a cautionary tale. You were trying to imitate America, but America can end up in a very unfortunate place.”

For the U.S., humility is now in order, and a willingness to look and think more broadly about everyone’s needs. “Arrogance [and] hubris have, in a way, reached a monstrous culmination with those images of Trump on the White House balcony taking off his mask,” Mishra said. “Humility has an opportunity right now to make itself manifest.”

The post It’s Time for the U.S. to Manifest Humility appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These aggressive cultural-religious nationalisms have asserted themselves not only in the U.S. and Europe, but also from Myanmar to the Middle East. Because this is a global phenomenon, it raises the question of whether these nationalisms are related in some way to globalization.

Answering the question requires unpacking a paradox. Globalization is marked by a rapid mobility of peoples, mass migrations, the proliferation of diaspora cultures, and a transnational sense of community facilitated by internet relationships. But despite all these exchanges, religious nationalism—which appears to take an inflexible stance towards local identities—persists, and in fact flourishes, in this global environment. Are these forces—globalism and nationalism—working against each other, as the common wisdom goes, or are they somehow encouraging each other?

To look at that question, we have to explore why local loyalties and parochial new forms of ethno-religious nationalism have surfaced in today’s sea of post-nationality.

One superficial answer is that this moment we are in is an anomaly, and it will soon pass. After all, history is poised on the brink of an era of globalization, hardly the time for new national aspirations to emerge. In fact, some observers have cited the appearance of ethnic and religious nationalism in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, Algeria and the Middle East, South Asia and Japan, and among right-wing movements in Europe and the United States as evidence that globalization has not, in fact, reached all quarters of the globe.

But is this really the case? Is it possible to see these quests for local identities and new nationalisms not as anomalies in the homogeneity of globalization, but as further examples of its impact? In case studies that I have examined, I have found that the paradox of new nationalisms in a global world can be explained, in part, by seeing them as responses to one or more of several globalizing forces.

In many cases the new ethnic and religious movements are direct reactions to globalization—a fear of the “new world order,” as some patriot movements in the United States have put it. Such movements express angst over the loss of identity and privilege in a world that is rapidly becoming multicultural.

Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist monk in Myanmar who has encouraged violence against the Muslim minority, told me that his stance was simply for the defense of the Buddhist community. “We are a tiny dot of Burmese Buddhist culture at the edge of a sea of Islam,” he said, adding that he did not want his traditions to be forever dashed away. This is a sentiment articulated by Muslims in Iraq and by Christians in the United States as well.

But many of these religious nationalist movements are also responses to a perceived failure in secular nationalism. Though the European Enlightenment touted secular nationalism as the most just and progressive form of political organization for the modern world, this vision is an empty promise in many places. The global political standard—the secular nationalisms of Europe and the United States—look more like vestiges of European colonialism in parts of the developing world.

From Egypt to India, new nationalists have criticized secular leaders for ignoring their cultural heritages and attempting to create imitations of European and American politics for their own gain. The corruption and inefficiency of many of these governments in formerly colonial states does little to assure their citizens that this secular model actually works in their interests. An exasperated follower of the Islamic State in Iraq said to me, “What have we gained from being a secular state?”

This sense of despair over the failures of secular nationalism comes at a time when it as an institution has already been weakened by global forces. Instant, worldwide communication, the erosion of traditional economic boundaries, and the easy mobility of populations across national lines have put secular nation-states under siege.

That vulnerability of the nation-state, in turn, has been the occasion for new ethno-religious politics to step into the breach and shore up national identities and purposes.

These ethno-religious politics come in many forms. Some, like the Islamic State, are transnational and reach across national borders often through the vehicle of cyber networks. Others, like some Christian militants in the U.S., are virulently anti-global, and rail against the “new world order.” In each case, however, while activists may disparage the globalization that has weakened the secular nation-states, it is often that very same globalization that has given the ethno-religious nationalists the opportunity to organize on a transnational scale.

Our current global era is full of ironies and ambiguities, and these movements of new nationalisms and transnationalism are good examples. Though they may appear at first glance to harken to premodern forms of provincial politics, they are in fact postmodern creatures of the global age. Sometime they align with parochial nationalism and sometimes with more transnational ideologies. But in both cases, they stand in a very uneasy relationship with the globalizing economic and cultural forces of the 21st century.

The post How Globalization Engenders Ethno-Religious Nationalism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Although the empire’s successor states, India and Pakistan, had been born amid the confusion and tragedy of Partition, the British relationship with both countries remained good. Most of the British departed, peaceably, marching to their ships in Bombay harbor, but a sizeable minority “stayed on,” as the phrase went, more than 2,000 of them remaining in the armies and administrations of the new states.

When Pakistan’s leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, appointed new governors for his country’s four provinces, three of his choices were Britons. He even lured Sir George Cunningham out of retirement as rector of St. Andrews University to become governor of the North-West Frontier Province; when Cunningham retired, Pakistan appointed another Scot to replace him.

Independence was not, therefore, like the end of empire in other places, with the colonialists expelled and their collaborators rounded up.

While many Britons in the 1950s and 1960s forgot about their empire or were perhaps too embarrassed to remember they had ever had one, others were keen to remind listeners that British rule had benefited Indians in numerous ways, “giving” them certain things and “teaching” them others. These “gifts” usually included cricket, liberalism, the rule of law, incipient democracy, the English language, an incorruptible civil service, and (before Partition) the unity of the subcontinent—the welding together of hundreds of little states that has enabled India to become the vast united country that it is today.

Naturally, there were many people, usually Indian nationalists and British intellectuals of the Left, who contested this view. Britain’s legacy, they claimed, was exploitation, oppression, and division. The British governed India by employing the Roman policy of divide et impera—“divide and rule.” In any case, the British rule was ephemeral and ultimately irrelevant: The future would regard it as an unimportant interlude in India’s millennial history.

No one can dispute the claim that in the 18th century the East India Company made its profits from corruption and exploitation. Nor can one deny that British soldiers were sometimes very violent, especially during the Indian Rebellion of 1857-8. A further charge against the Raj would be the mismanagement of various famines, especially the devastating one in Bengal in 1943.

Yet some of the accusations do not stand up. “Divide and rule” was never British policy; nor was the creation of Pakistan. It was the inability of Hindu and Muslim politicians to agree upon the nature of an independent India that led to Partition. As for the physical legacy, it will surely take a long time to expunge the visible traces of British rule, especially as many of its places are still used and inhabited by Indians today: the high courts, the government buildings, the splendors of New Delhi, and the wonderful examples of Gothic architecture (library, university, law courts among them) that survive in Mumbai. And then there are the railways, the focus of much British investment, which continue to knit together India’s vast economy as well as its territory.

Still, the traditional, self-congratulatory view of Britain’s legacy to India should undoubtedly be modified today. The British did not do much to teach Indians how to practice democracy or even how to play cricket. It would be truer to say that the colonial subjects taught themselves how to imitate their colonialists. As the academic Sunil Khilnani has written, democracy was not “a gift of the departing British”; but “a concept of the state” was such a gift, and so was “the principle of representative politics.”

Indians learned to use British ways and institutions to transform their lives and to create and fashion their new nations. As the Indian sociologist André Béteille has written, the universities established by the Raj “opened new horizons both intellectually and institutionally in a society that had stood still in a conservative and hierarchical mold for centuries.” These “open and secular institutions” allowed Indians at last to question, among other things, “the age-old restrictions of gender and caste.”

As for liberalism, one could not claim that the British “taught” it to the Indians, but in the 19th century the British took certain decisions on matters of law, education and the English language which made it almost inevitable that an Indian version of it would be adopted on the subcontinent. As the historian C. A. Bayly wrote, “Britain helped liberalism take root in India by institutionalizing it through schools and colleges, newspapers and colonial law courts, and thereby converted an entire generation of Indians to a way of thinking about their own future that led to today’s Indian democracy.”

A great early leader of the Indian National Congress, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was a liberal as a result of his education at Elphinstone College in Bombay. The views of Mohandas Gandhi owed much to British institutional influences, his years at the Inner Temple in London, his knowledge of Indian law, as well as his friendship with British liberals. Jawaharlal Nehru, a liberal both in his political sensibility and in his practice of secular democracy, had been a pupil at Harrow School and Cambridge. Nehru and his colleagues guided Indian nationalism toward that rare phenomenon, an essentially liberal revolution: not communist, not fascist, not military, not even British, but liberal in an Indian fashion.

In other fields, the legacy is clearer and also enduring, a reflection of the continuing close ties between Britain and the subcontinent. As the historian Ramachandra Guha has pointed out, “of all relations between the former colony and erstwhile empire, this one is the least acrimonious.” Both India and Pakistan adopted the imperial law codes as well as the civil service with few changes after independence. The government of Pakistan even used to boast that its own civil service was “the successor to the finest civil service in the world.”

Perhaps the wisest assessment of the legacy was made in 2005 by the then Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh:

Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian prime minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, or a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories, have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization of India met the dominant Empire of the day. These are all elements which we still value and cherish. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy, and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration, and they have served our country exceedingly well.

The setting of the speech reinforced the point: Singh was speaking at Oxford University, where he had earned his doctorate in 1962.

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Few people would find the ascendancy of nationalism more surprising, and more depressing, than the man who coined the term. Johann Gottfried Herder is one of the eighteenth century’s most original yet overlooked thinkers: a deeply influential philosopher who left a mark on fields ranging from the study of language and aesthetics to literature and history. He not only invented the term nationalism (Nationalismus), but is also widely seen as its greatest champion.

A student of the irrationalist philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (who advised him to “think less and live more”) and friend of the great Goethe (who credited Herder with having saved him from dry-as-dust classicism), Herder was born in East Prussia in 1744. The son of devout Lutherans, he never lost his faith in God or Germany. Or, at least, the idea of Germany: Rather than a nation, “Germany” in the 18th century was a dizzying hodgepodge of small states and independent cities which shared little more than a common language. 
 
Language, to Herder, is the very essence of a people. “The very first words we stammer,” he declared, “are the foundation stones of our knowing.” For this reason, he called upon his fellow Germans to resist what he called the “cancer” of French. The vehicle of European diplomacy and Enlightenment values, French had quickly become the unofficial language of 18th century Europe. But for Herder, the adoption of French was a reaction caused by shame at speaking one’s language. This, in turn, reflected shame of one’s own country and very own self. Spilling across the continent, bleeding into the work and thought of European elites, the domination of French risked turning Europe into a vast graveyard of other languages and cultures.

Appalled by this state of affairs, Herder hurried to the defense of both the German language and the yet-to-be-born “nation” it defined. “Whoever wants to drive out my language,” Herder declared, “also wants to rob me of my reason and my way of life, the honor and laws of my people.” Yet here’s the rub: Herder wrote these words in an essay lambasting Joseph II’s forcing of the German language on Hungarians and other linguistic minorities living under his rule. While Herder was most definitely a nationalist, he was one who marched to a drum very different from the one now deafening us. This proudly parochial German believed, as Berlin noted, “every activity, situation, historical period and civilization possessed a unique character of its own.” For this reason, to subject a particular Volk, or people, to foreign language and set of ideas—especially those that, like French, pretended to be universally applicable—was, in effect, an act of cultural genocide.

The sweeping line that opens Herder’s great work, Ideas About the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, underscores the inclusive nature of his nationalism: “Our earth is a star among stars.” Just as there is no hierarchy of planets, there is no ranking of peoples. No single measure—even one dictated in French—exists by which cultures and peoples can be judged. More so than any other element of the Enlightenment, Herder rebelled against the belief that a single and universal set of laws applied to the world of men no less than the world of things. Instead, he wrote, a nation’s ways and wisdom, language and lore can be measured only against its own standard. Yet with his elusive notion of Humanität—the conviction that all nations are ultimately drawn to certain universal ideals—Herder also suggested there exists a basis for comparison. Nevertheless, while the German and French people are comparable, they are not and can never be commensurable.

Two or three timeless insights follow from the claim of incommensurability. First, it is worse than pointless to parade the greatness of one’s nation, for this implies that there is a single standard. “To brag of one’s country is the stupidest form of boastfulness,” Herder warned. “What is a nation? A great wild garden full of bad plants and good.” Since each and every nation has what he called “its own center of gravity,” each and every one is utterly unique. As a result, no one nation can serve as a standard for another nation—much less have that same nation dismiss it as, say, “a shithole.” 

Second, there is no single form of nationalism, or for that matter, populism. To the contrary, they come in different flavors. Clearly, Herder’s nationalism was yoked to his deep and abiding concerns over the flourishing of his own language and culture. Though it strikes our ears as paradoxical, Herder was both a nationalist and a pluralist. He saw no contradiction between the claims of one’s own culture and those of other cultures. Just as the “creator of all things knows no classes; each only resembles itself,” so too must we strive to see and value other peoples not as they fail to resemble us, but as they succeed to resemble themselves. In fact, Herder’s cultural nationalism made him even especially alive to his own culture’s faults. “Our part of the earth should be called not the wisest, but the most arrogant, aggressive, and money-minded,” he wrote.
 
To see one people ranged against another in bloody battle, Herder announced, is “the worst barbarism in the human vocabulary.” Here we might ask ourselves whether Herder’s outrage is credible. Would he be justified in expressing outrage over the words and actions of today’s populist demagogues? As some critics have argued, Herder’s kinder and gentler nationalism—one that invoked the thousand points of lights illuminating our world—is different not in kind, but only in degree from political nationalism. Like a grasshopper transmogrified into a locust, cultural nationalism can transform into the twinned plagues of political nationalism and violent populism. Just as a sudden change in the environment of grasshoppers can trigger their terrifying alteration, so too is this the case for peoples. A sudden crisis, whether genuine or manufactured, can unleash the darker nature of nationalism.

This year marks the 275th anniversary of Herder’s birth. By its end, we may be in a better position to decide if Herder’s humane vision of humankind turns out to be as fantastic and fictitious as the German folk tales he loved.

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Before the 19th century, most peoples, in most parts of the world, did not live in nations, but in those larger conglomerations of peoples we call loosely “empires”—or as they were often known, “universal monarchies.” Most of today’s nations are the creatures of imperial collapse: Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Albania, Finland, Ireland, Sweden—not to mention the former settler populations in North and South America and the former colonies in Africa and Asia—all were once part of larger imperial groupings.

Before they became independent, few of the inhabitants of these places had any real sense of themselves as belonging to nations. They took their identity, instead, from what was known in many European languages as “small homelands:” families, tribes, villages, parishes, ethnic and religious communities, etc. Italy, for instance, only came into existence in 1871 after a prolonged series of wars, mostly against its former Austrian rulers and their allies. All that had previously existed had been a collection of duchies, principalities, and city-states sharing a common religion, a more or less common language, and a more or less imaginary common history in imperial Rome.

So when these places became nations, they were compelled to invent for themselves a collective identity, a past, and a role for the future. They also had to lay claim to political legitimacy. This they did through the principle now known as “indivisible sovereignty.” If the nation was, henceforth, to be the only legitimate unit of human association, then the nation’s power to make decisions concerning the fate of its citizens had to be, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “immortal…incommunicable and inseparable.”

A nation might be prepared to open its borders, share its resources with other nations, make and abide by international treaties, etc. But the decision to do these things had to rest with the nation alone. This is essentially what “self-determination” means; and “self-determination,” which Woodrow Wilson in 1918 called “the imperative principle for action” in the modern world order, has become the defining feature of the modern nation-state.

While this definition of nationalism seems inward-facing, in its earliest forms, it was also paradoxically cosmopolitan. These new nations—unlike the old empires—were liberal and democratic and did not look upon their demand for self-determination as a threat to, or threatening for, that of any other peoples. Giuseppe Mazzini—the theoretical architect of Italian nationalism and one of the most influential political writers (and activists) of the 19th century—forecast that the future would be made up of assemblies of nations, each sovereign and independent in its own right, but each living in harmony with all the others. The new “nationality” was, he insisted, no “bitter war on individualism,” nor was it intended “to foster a new sectarianism.” “Ours is not a national project,” he claimed, “but an international one.”

Not all, however, thought like this. In Germany, in particular, and under the influence of some followers of philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, an alternative vision emerged of the nation as the creation of a distinction between “friend and foe.” Nations, the neo-Hegelians insisted, were born out of conflict, and could only survive and prosper through conflict. Every nation, in order to become and to remain a nation, required an “other” against which to struggle.

To put it very crudely: If Mazzini’s nation was built upon some species of love, the neo-Hegelian one was built on hate. If the liberal, Mazzini nation aimed for international peace, the neo-Hegelian one could only flourish in war. And with this came most of the vices we currently associate with nationalism: xenophobia; bigotry; the contempt for other cultures, other religions, even other languages; and the belief that “we” are best and that “we” must always be first.

In Europe, the end of World War I, and the subsequent economic and political disorders, made versions of the neo-Hegelian brand of nationalism seem particularly attractive. As many—most notably Madeleine Albright—have pointed out, the similarities between the situation in the 1930s and the one we face today in many parts of the world can seem uncanny. The fault for every national malaise, from the economy to diminished political status, is laid on the international order—today we call it “globalization”—and on the remote indifferent “elites” who govern what the Italian Fascists sneeringly called “the individualistic liberal state.” The solution for every ill is believed to be to return power to the “people,” and not to the so-called “representatives” of the liberal state.

Inevitably, since the “people” are only ever a figment of the political imagination, restoring their power is believed to require a strongman who would not “represent” but—literally—“embody” them, just as he would also embody the nation: a Mussolini, or a Hitler; an Orbán, an Erdogan, or a Putin or a Trump. But strongmen, like the nation itself, can survive only so long as there exists the threat of an “other” for them to be strong with. And if this “other” does not exist, then, like the Jews in the 1930s or immigrants today, it has to be invented.

But history does not ever really repeat itself. The end of World War II led to the creation of a large number of international institutions ranging from the United Nations to NATO to the International Monetary Fund, from the Arab League to the Organization of American States. The most far-reaching and ambitious of them all began in 1952 as the European Coal and Steel Community, and is now the European Union. Although these institutions are very different from one another, they are all based upon international treaties; and they all attempt to solve the one problem that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 had also attempted, but so spectacularly failed to solve: how to put an end to war.

The international institutions still have not ended that great human scourge. The source of their weakness is that they are constituted of nation-states that are defined by their sovereignty. But international agreements require nations to be bound by international law, which means sharing sovereignty with other nations. This is a difficult juggling act.

Of course, the post-1945 order worked more or less effectively for a while. The long-awaited World War III never materialized. But the order worked only so long as the threat of war these international organizations had been created to avoid remained. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s removed the presence of what had been, even before 1945, the West’s single great “other.”

After 1990, as the threat of war receded, nations began to question the wisdom of having surrendered their sovereignty to bodies over which they have no unilateral control. The new nationalism which has arisen in the past three decades, therefore, found its neo-Hegelian “other” not in other nations, but in the international institutions themselves. People at the local and national levels saw the international order’s devotion to immigration, free trade, and open borders as, above all, a danger to their “indivisible sovereignty.”

This opposition to the concept of an “international community” is what unites all the new nationalist parties of the far right—and the far left—against the European Union. Hence Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s flouting of EU law; Britain’s suicidal attempt to “take back the country;” Turkish leader Recep Tayipp Erdogan’s rejection of any attempt on the part of the “international community” to limit his authority as an affront to his country’s sovereignty; and Donald Trump’s attacks on NATO, on the EU, and on virtually all international trade agreements. All, he argues, challenge the right of what he called recently “this Great Sovereign Nation” to act unilaterally. “Internationalism”—or, as it used to be called, “cosmopolitanism”—is the new enemy at the gates in all its forms, cultural, legal, racial, political, economic.

In a sense, this always has been so. Cosmopolitans have always despised nationalists, and nationalists have always hated cosmopolitans. But whereas liberal nationalism was an attempt by the world’s Mazzinis to replace cosmopolitanism with a new vibrant international order of nation-states, the new-old neo-Hegelian nationalism seeks simply to destroy it altogether. If the cosmopolitan world we unsteadily inhabit is to survive, Hegelian logic would seem to demand that it find itself a new “other”—something which the nations of the world can only face, as they once faced the threat of perpetual conflict, as a cosmopolitan community, in which the self-consuming monster of national sovereignty would, once again, be laid to rest.

Climate change, perhaps?

The post Why the ‘New Nationalism’ Can Only Flourish in Conflict appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So it was in the late 19th century with the rising star of republics—the United States—and with the man who, more than any other, came to epitomize our nation’s drive, character, promotional flair, and obsession with celebrity: William F. Cody.

In the second half of the century, Cody, also known as “Buffalo Bill,” achieved a measure of renown in the United States as a Pony Express rider, plainsman, buffalo hunter, and military scout. Brave, rugged, handsome, and decidedly Western, he was the subject of hundreds of popular dime novels and became a stage actor portraying himself in a series of shoot-’em-up dramas that were wretched productions but nevertheless titillated theater-goers. Starting in 1883, his action-packed outdoor arena show, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” attracted large audiences in places like Lancaster, Woonsocket, and Zanesville.

Still, it wasn’t until Cody took his act to Europe, in 1887, that Americans truly began to revere him as an exemplar of national character. The Wild West was a huge hit in Britain. One million people saw the show, including statesmen (members of Parliament, and once-and-future Prime Minister William Gladstone) and famous actors (the estimable London actor-manager Henry Irving told one newspaper that the Wild West would “take the town by storm”). Queen Victoria emerged from seclusion to visit the show two days after it opened and enjoyed it a second time 40 days later during a command performance at Windsor Castle. The audience that day included many other kings, queens, and members of European royalty who had come to town to celebrate her Golden Jubilee.

W.F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody in 1875. Courtesy of the George Eastman House Collection/Wikimedia Commons.

Their adulation was picked up by the British newspapers, and that press coverage was then amplified by many American periodicals, which eagerly chronicled Cody’s every move through London society. The New York World observed that Cody was already as well-known to the masses in London as the queen. “You could not pick up in the most obscure quarter of London any one so ignorant as not to know who and what he is. His name is on every wall. His picture is in nearly every window.” The magazine Puck joked that Cody was mostly spending his time playing poker with duchesses. Other publications speculated that Cody might be knighted.

None of this happened by chance. Cody’s trip and its newspaper coverage had been engineered in large part by a burly, brilliant, sombrero-wearing press agent named John M. Burke, a man with a genius for promotion and a keen sense of what it meant to be American.

Upon first meeting Cody in 1869, Burke had recognized the scout’s quintessentially rugged Western character and universal appeal. “Physically superb, trained to the limit, in the zenith of manhood, features cast in nature’s most perfect mold…,” Burke wrote later, Cody was “…the finest specimen of God’s handiwork I had ever seen.” Burke himself was somewhat rootless—born to Irish immigrants who died when he was an infant; raised in a succession of towns and homes; trained as an itinerant theater manager, newspaperman, and scout. Perhaps for this reason, he intuited his countrymen’s emerging, visceral desire for belonging, and the prospect that Cody was an identity the American people could latch onto.

This was a remarkable insight from a man who seemingly had a crystal ball (as early as the 1890s, Burke predicted that women would get the vote, world war would break out in Alsace-Lorraine, and a member of a minority group would become president of the United States). For in the years following the Civil War, American identity was still on the blacksmith’s forge. The Republic had been formed during the lifetimes of people still alive to tell the tale, and it had been re-formed by the War Between the States. But there hadn’t been many prominent Americans in world or cultural affairs since the days of Jefferson and Franklin. Perhaps the most clearly identifiable American trait was neither intellectual nor artistic, but simply the enterprising, brash spirit of “Yankee push” best exemplified by P.T. Barnum, who was somehow both laudable and horrifying.

John Burke, the marketing force behind Buffalo Bill. Wikimedia Commons.

And so, unsure of its place, unsteady in its path, America looked across the ocean for validation. Writers, artists, statesmen, and entertainers from the United States sailed to Britain and the Continent to measure their growth and worth. The painter George Catlin, who had earned praise for his portraits of New York Governor DeWitt Clinton and General Sam Houston, and fame for his sketches of 48 tribes of American Indians with whom he had lived, still found it necessary to seek true legitimacy through a tour of London, Paris, and Brussels in the 1830s and ’40s. Even Barnum, famous and successful as he was, felt compelled to take one of his popular acts—his distant cousin Charles Stratton, also known as General Tom Thumb—on a similar sort of corroboration tour of Europe in 1844-45, appearing before audiences that included queens and tsars.

But Burke managed to do something with Cody and the Wild West that the earlier cultural exports never could. He burnished and redefined the American reputation by reflecting it in the shiny crowns of the Old World’s beloved monarchs, juxtaposing ancient and modern and thus validating the appeal of a new kind of American: the Westerner. He accomplished this by applying groundbreaking marketing tactics to promote a sort of on-the-sleeve patriotism throughout the Wild West’s tour of Britain in 1887-88, and during a subsequent tour of the Continent in 1889-92.

For example, he created an illustration of all the “Distinguished Visitors” to the show, with a dour-looking H.R.H. Queen Victoria and other royals surrounding a splendid portrait of Cody in the center. He invited reporters to see how efficiently Cody’s massive show unloaded its train cars, as a way of promoting American ingenuity. He devised a system of horse-drawn mobile billboards that awed one newspaper in Dresden, Germany seemingly as much as the show itself: “Already weeks in advance, the audience is prepared for the show through billboards etc. The American, in this matter as in many others, is very practically minded.” And everywhere the show traveled, Burke’s team plastered towns with iconic images to herald the arrival of the Wild West, employing “immense painted posters all over the city to advertise Buffalo Bill—his portraits pasted all in a row, many times larger than natural; the cowboys on their wild horses; the Indians looking very savage,” as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported. (In France in 1889, this campaign made a deep impression on even the most stuck-up Parisians. “Eh bien!,” wrote Le Temps. “All that ingenious and bold American advertising enterprise has proved to be as honest as our tame [publicity] ever was.” Crowds flocked to the Wild West show in Paris and clamored for cowboy gear in the shops all around town.)

And so Burke transformed the flesh-and-blood Cody into the almost mythic Buffalo Bill, a man whose spur-jingling acts of derring-do embodied America’s heroic past—and whose entrepreneurial wrangling of the world’s most successful entertainment property foretold of America’s promising future. Burke consciously crafted a new Western American self-image, in a rifle-toting, money-making, entrepreneurial husband-father and cultural conqueror who looked dashing in buckskins and dapper in business suits. For millions of Americans, Cody represented a new and uniquely American persona to which they could relate.

An 1898 advertisement for the Wild West show. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It all paid off handsomely. The Wild West returned to American shores triumphant, greeted dockside by thousands of grateful well-wishers. The show thrived, and in 1893 enjoyed its most successful season ever, a six-month stand outside the gates of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that played to full houses twice a day and raked in $1 million in profits. Soon, Burke would even float Cody’s name as a presidential candidate.

In the ensuing years, John M. Burke and William F. Cody continued building the Wild West brand, though mostly on American soil. What had begun with an averted vision across the Atlantic was now an American star of a completely different magnitude. Before it was all done in 1916, they had performed in front of 50 million people, and had carved out a place for Cody in that strange eternal pantheon of larger-than-life legends, where real people and fictional ones (George Washington, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, John Henry, Babe Ruth) dwell side-by-side in a murky world of perpetual stories, myths, and singsong nursery rhymes. When Cody died in 1917, the country mourned in a way it hadn’t since Lincoln’s assassination. Around 25,000 people ascended the tortuous path up Lookout Mountain in Colorado to attend his funeral.

But perhaps the most important legacy of Burke and Cody was the double-barreled contribution they made to the new sense of American identity: a crystallized articulation of the Western ideal that would find expression in everything from the Hollywood Western to the Marlboro Man to Ronald Reagan; and their incredibly shrewd use of promotion to build celebrity and leverage it for commercial success. In that respect, Burke and Cody may be more a part of American life today than they ever were in their own times.

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It wasn’t the Axis’s invasion of their ancestral homeland that concerned these Bedouins, however, but rather their mistreatment by their own government. With the outbreak of the war, they had been thrown into a prison reserved for foreign subjects, and their families were suffering gravely in their absence. Accordingly, they demanded an explanation for why they were being punished as if they were strangers in their own native land.

“We are your subjects,” the Bedouins contended, “and if the government does not want us to be its subjects, we implore you to let us know the name of a state we can join in order to request compensation for our families.” They concluded the petition on a similar note of sarcasm: “We truly believe that we do not belong to the Egyptian government; for, if we did belong to it, adhering to its laws [as we do], it would not subject us to [such] treatment as foreigners.”

Why did the Egyptian government view its own desert-dwelling Bedouin population with such suspicion and contempt? After all, shouldn’t the native inhabitants of Egypt’s desert domains, which comprise roughly 90 percent of the country’s land surface, have counted as being just as Egyptian as inhabitants of Cairo or the Nile Valley?

The answer to these questions lies in the complex history of Egypt’s formation as a modern territorial nation-state.

Nations must never be taken for granted. They do not exist from time immemorial as naturally bounded and cohesive social units, but rather are actively made (and often re-made) to serve particular political projects in particular places at particular times. Even Egypt—ostensibly one of the most ancient political civilizations on the planet—underwent dramatic transformations in the late 19th and 20th centuries before it emerged as a modern nation-state like the one we know today.

One such transformation involved the projection of a unified territorial identity from the center of power (Cairo) into the furthest reaches of the state’s sovereign domains, including the Western Desert. While other nation-states underwent similar transformations, the Egyptian case contained some particular elements that would turn out to be consequential for the country’s region and its history.

My own interest in the territorial dimension of Egyptian nationhood began nearly a decade ago, on a 10-hour bus journey across Egypt’s Western Desert to the remote oasis of Siwa. As I stared out my window at the endless barren expanses, I began to wonder how all of this beautiful wasteland became part of Egypt in the first place. My sense of bewilderment only grew when I arrived in Siwa, which lies only 30 miles from the Libyan border and has an ethnically distinct population that more resembles that of some Libyan regions. (Siwans are of Berber descent and did not speak Arabic for much of their history.) The Egyptian history I had studied as a graduate student, focused as it was on Cairo and the Nile, had little to say about the incorporation or political status of such far-flung places.

So I set out to craft a comprehensive modern history of the vast region I came to call “the Egyptian West.” My foray into the archival sources yielded many surprises. For starters, I learned that Egypt’s western border had gone undefined for most of the country’s history, and that the first modern political map attempting to delineate such a border—an Ottoman map from 1841—went missing for the better part of a century. Although various statesmen periodically noted its absence—Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, surmised that the map was “supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives”—no one seemed especially vexed by this. In fact, Egypt’s marginal borderlands were typically ignored in the cartography of the period. When they were represented at all, they were left intentionally fuzzy.

The powers in the region—Britain and the Ottoman Empire (still technically sovereign over Egypt)—actually conspired not to define the border, lest it provoke unnecessary legal or diplomatic controversy. This stance became particularly thorny during the first decade of the 20th century, when the Italian government—seeking to lay the groundwork for its colonial occupation of Libya, which would begin in 1911—repeatedly pressured the British to draw a western border.

But the Italians’ protests fell on deaf ears. Citing “the peculiar position in which Egypt stands with regards to Turkey [the Ottoman Empire],” the British agreed with the Ottomans that it was better policy to leave the border ambiguous. A bona fide border between Egypt and (Italian-controlled) Libya would not be defined until well after World War I, in 1925, following a diplomatic treaty that was signed shortly after the elusive 1841 map resurfaced at the eleventh hour. (It had been found deep inside the Ottoman archives, in Istanbul.)

Nations are not made merely by drawing borders around sovereign territory, however; they must also to some degree incorporate and assimilate their heterogeneous populations into a unified political community. In Egypt, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century, but it had mixed results.

Law was one institution that the government attempted to use as an instrument of assimilation. Beginning in the 1870s, the government passed a series of reforms that aimed to streamline jurisdiction and legal practice across the country, including the deserts and western oases. But it was not long before the government reneged on this project and ceded judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the country’s vast borderlands.

In the case of the town of Siwa, one official tried to explain the government’s striking about-face by citing the remoteness of the oasis as well as the fundamental distinctiveness of its people. “The town is far from Egypt by a distance of approximately twenty days traveling by camel,” he argued. “It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions, and tastes that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure [Bedouin] Arabs.” Here is one clear case of the modernizing Egyptian state succumbing to the extreme challenges of standardizing its institutions across the full expanse of its sovereign territory; Siwa was simply too far and too different to be folded into the Egyptian national judiciary at this time.

There would be other such cases. In 1905 and again in 1908, the Egyptian government passed legislation that sought to place its administration of the country’s various Bedouin tribes on firmer footing. The new laws—undertaken in large part to counter the trend of many Egyptians falsely claiming Bedouin descent in order to demand the exemption from military service that the tribes had long enjoyed—strove to “organize [the Bedouin tribes] in an administrative fashion approaching the organization of towns and villages.”

When it came to actually enforcing the new laws, however, the government—again hard-pressed to exert its sovereign control in the sparsely inhabited deserts—was forced to cede considerable power to the local tribal leaders themselves. Despite the veneer of formality added by the legislation, Egypt’s Bedouins were still being treated as a people apart.

So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when the Western Desert Bedouins found themselves in jail at the start of World War II, and being treated by their government like a dangerous fifth column. The Egyptian government’s internment of its people is best interpreted as a reflection of its own lack of faith in the mechanisms through which its territorial sovereignty had been asserted in the country’s western borderland. Egypt might have clarified the limits of its territorial statehood with the 1925 border treaty with Libya, but it had by no means woven an enduring social fabric for the collective nation within those boundaries.

The Egyptian state’s antagonistic relationship with its own Bedouin population continues to this day. This is clear in the Western Desert, which has emerged as a haven for militant groups reportedly linked to the Islamic State. The Egyptian government’s heavy-handed response has led to some grave mistakes, none more egregious than the security forces’ aerial assault on what turned out to be a caravan of Mexican tourists on a Bedouin-led desert safari, killing 12 and wounding numerous others. The now years-long Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, nominally waged to root out the Islamic State as well as Al-Qaeda, is another sign of enduring conflict in the borderlands.

In these present-day events are echoes of the particular history of the country’s emergence as a modern territorial nation-state. Moments of significant political upheaval, from World War II to the complicated fallout of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, have always seemed to foster contests over territorial sovereignty in the country’s borderlands. And what we see today is not so different from what the Egyptian government was struggling with over a century ago, when it first sought to consolidate the nation at the margins of its sovereignty. As a result, what it means to be Egyptian in the country’s desert borderlands remains an open question.

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Some of the men (and they were all men) had been active in the Council of Books in Wartime during the World War II. Then, they had helped to produce the Armed Service Editions that took popular books to the fighting troops, and the Overseas Editions that had taken American books in translation into liberated Europe.

At this meeting, with the Cold War setting in, publishers once again decided to support the U.S. government. The new Franklin Publications would “win hearts and minds” across the globe.

As in World War II, publishers initially thought this could help develop truly global markets for American books while also demonstrating the patriotism of the publishing industry. But the Cold War was a very different kind of war, and publishers quickly found themselves involved in a more complicated situation.

Franklin Publications (later Franklin Book Programs) was funded by money from the U.S. government, and for a number of years it worked closely with the United States Information Agency (USIA) to promote American values through print across the world. Its work involved securing translation rights with American publishers (such as Alfred A. Knopf Inc., Macmillan, D. Van Nostrand, and McGraw-Hill) for particular books, and organizing contracts with publishers and printers in countries where its offices operated to produce them.

Franklin’s publications were sold, rather than distributed free of charge, to ensure that they helped to develop a commercial capitalist book infrastructure of bookshops and distributors. Franklin opened offices around the world, including in Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. These offices were run by citizens of the home country, many of whom had studied in the United States or had some other tie there. These offices employed prominent local educators and cultural figures from their countries to help with translation, and in the promotion of Franklin publications. Franklin’s headquarters were in New York, with a small staff who frequently travelled to the field offices to provide advice and monitoring. Back home, they liaised with Washington and the book industry.

Franklin’s effort to promote American books was not purely a Cold War propaganda exercise, although the USIA tended to regard it as such. From the start, Franklin’s dynamic leader, Datus Smith, former director of Princeton University Press, was careful to establish a degree of autonomy for the organization and to ensure that book choices were made by the overseas offices and not dictated by the USIA. But as time went on, Franklin staff (and the publishers and scholars who served as directors on its board) chafed at the control the U.S. government placed on them. Book choice in particular was a source of continuing tension. Franklin sometimes stood up to USIA—and paid the price in reduced funding.

What did Franklin publish? Franklin’s focus reflected both the popular USIA choices of classic American literature, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, as well as practical texts and nonfiction considered useful for developing nations. Many texts weren’t just straight translations, but also included prefaces by notable intellectuals that explained the book’s relevance.

In some cases, whole sections might be replaced by locally written content. When Franklin decided to produce Arabic and Persian editions of Edward R. Murrow’s popular anthology This I Believe (based on his radio show where famous people discussed their beliefs), some chapters were replaced with those that highlighted the views of prominent Islamic and Middle Eastern figures. The text also helped to assist the United States’ broader vision of promoting Islam and religious faith as a counter to Communist irreligiosity.

Those who worked with Franklin believed in the power of books and reading as a means to create a better world. But they also believed that a more subtle approach to the promotion of American culture—that is, to recognize and respect the cultures of the countries they operated in—was more effective than heavy-handed propaganda. Franklin officers in the field were anxious not to be seen as “Ugly Americans.” They increasingly aimed to show that their work was development work, helping to foster a book industry where previously there was none (or very little of one). Once they had succeeded in this, they would depart. When the Franklin office in Cairo eventually was closed in 1978, Datus Smith reflected that he felt “no sadness about our withdrawal from Cairo. Our objective from the beginning has been the establishment of local capability, and this is the crowning proof of our success.”

But as much as Datus Smith declared that he was in no way an American imperialist or an Ugly American, the realities of operating abroad made such assertions questionable. For example, Franklin’s work came under fire in Egypt from nationalists who saw American culture as a fundamental threat to Arabic culture and the sale of imported books crippling to an Egyptian cultural industry. As one Egyptian journalist wrote: “National thought must be allowed to live and flourish.” In Indonesia, initial public support for a program to help the country reach its educational and literacy goals changed as Indonesian nationalism increased: Under the Sukarno regime, educational and cultural development was to be state-directed and not imposed or aided from without. Like the USIA’s libraries, which were sometimes the target of protests, Franklin books, even if in translation, were regarded as potent symbols of American power.

American (and British) dominance in publishing in the developing world, as well as the Soviet attempt to distribute, free of charge, communist texts, circumscribed the choices of readers. Despite Franklin’s efforts, this publishing imperialism tended to stunt the growth of indigenous publishing in many countries. But imported books did, nevertheless, still play an important role in the lives of the common reader in developing nations. What readers made of books such as Little Women remains a mystery, but textbooks and nonfiction were popular reading choices in developing nations throughout this period. Such books matched the needs of students, professionals, and other aspirational readers who used these texts for practical purposes.

As Franklin distanced itself from the USIA through the 1960s, it sought funding from other sources, including the governments in countries where they operated, American foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller, and other agencies, notably the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Franklin’s focus accordingly shifted to building publishing infrastructure, as well as meeting the requests of foreign governments. Notably, Franklin worked closely with the Iranian government and the Tehran office became its most successful operation. Franklin helped Iran establish a printing press with an American loan, secured paper supplies, and helped to produce vast numbers of textbooks for Iranian schools and literacy programs.

The Iran story demonstrates the complications of these kinds of book programs. The close relationship with the Shah’s regime was beneficial insofar as it secured profitable contracts for the books it produced. Franklin had some cooperation with the Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf, in the production of a Persian version of Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care.

But the Iranian regime was not a democracy, and the books it translated ultimately did little to promote democracy, even if they may have helped buttress the uneven modernization efforts of the Shah’s regime (which, arguably, may well have hastened the 1979 revolution). Perhaps even more problematically, working with the Shah’s regime, a violator of political and human rights, undermined the very principles that Franklin purported to stand for—intellectual and political freedom.

Franklin’s real legacy was less with the books it helped to publish and more with its push to develop book infrastructure. The Iranian offset printing plant that Franklin helped to fund appears to still be operating, and Iranian publishers today acknowledge the work the Franklin office did (under the directorship of Homayoun Sanati) in modernizing the Iranian book industry. Franklin had more mixed results elsewhere. In Africa, for example, it was difficult to make any kind of headway as Franklin confronted both British publishers—well entrenched even after independence—and issues such as the multiplicity of African languages that made translation a challenge and the production of sufficient numbers of books unprofitable.

The story of Franklin shows the contradiction that the Cold War posed for the United States: a desire to assert American values abroad, along with the need to compromise those values in a complicated political reality. And although some Americans may have had good intentions in getting involved abroad, those on the receiving end of their philanthropy didn’t always want it (or wanted to fashion such aid in ways that best reflected their own needs and desires).

In the late 1960s, it was revealed that the CIA was covertly funding a range of cultural organizations. The revelation only compounded the increasing skepticism toward cultural efforts abroad. Franklin defended itself by saying it had only received funds from the Asia Foundation (which had indeed been funded by the CIA) and had not knowingly received CIA money.

But the damage was done. Franklin struggled on through the 1970s, but funding dried up. Publishers questioned the business value of Franklin, and lost the patriotic intent that had inspired their support for Franklin early in the Cold War. Contentious leadership at Franklin after Datus Smith’s departure made it even harder for the organization to survive. And, in 1978, Franklin Book Programs (as it was then known) ceased operations.

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