The Past and Present Society

Post-War Nationalisms 1918-1919

Author(s): Arno J. Mayer
Source: Past & Present, No. 34 (Jul., 1966), pp. 114-126
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/650058
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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS 1918-1919

TO THIS DAY THE MENTION OF NATIONALISM AT THE PARIS PEACE

Conference tends to provoke discussions confined to

the successor states of East-Central Europe. Such a narrow
geographic and topical focus conveniently shuns the challenge of
studying contemporary history from a world rather than Europe-
centered perspective, and in terms of analytic rather than narrative
history. Perhaps the time has come to view the particular species of
nationalism which flourished in one remote corner of the universe in
conjunction with other contemporary manifestations of the same
general phenomenon, both in Europe and beyond. Accordingly, this
paper will encompass four varieties of nationalism: (i) super-
nationalism in the victor countries; (ii) revolutionary nationalism in
the defeated countries; (iii) post-independence nationalism in the
successor states of East-Central Europe; and (iv) anti-imperialist
nationalism in Asia, notably in pre-independence India.
Needless to say, each of these nationalisms was shaped by distinct
social, political, economic, and cultural conditions; and nationalisms
of such diverse components and functions are difficult to fit into
a single analytic scheme. On the other hand, all four varieties were
stimulated by one and the same World War and World Revolution.
Moreover, quite apart from their temporal affinities, they were the
product of essentially universal political and social processes and
dynamics.
Historians very wisely avoid giving excessively tight definitions of
those concepts without which they could neither pursue their
inquiries nor communicate their findings. The phenomenon of
nationalism has become so universal in modern times that it has been
transmuted into one of those indispensable concepts "whose elasticity
is essential to its meaning and utility".'
Evidently no exact definition could fit the varieties of nationalism
which dominated the world scene in I918-I9.2 Likewise, even
though the typologies of Carlton J. H. Hayes3 and Hans Kohn4 retain
1 Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation (Oxford, 1952), p. I0.
2See Louis L. Snyder, The Meaning of Nationalism (New Brunswick, I954),
chaps. i-iv; and Boyd C. Shafer, Nationalism: Myth and Reality (Harcourt
Paperback, 1955), pp. 3-II.
3See Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York, 1926); The
Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931); Nationalism:
A Religion (New York, 1960).
4See Hans Kohn, A History of Nationalism in the East (New York, 1929);
Revolutions and Dictatorships (Cambridge, 1939), esp. pp. 68-82; The Idea of
Nationalism (New York, 1956), passim.

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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS I9I8-I9I9 II5

their heuristic value, they cannot accommodate the kaleidoscopic

realities of this epoch. Behavioural scientists like Karl Deutsch
would have us circumvent the shortcomings of conceptual definitions
as well as of historical classifications by focusing on the "processes of
national consciousness and will... in terms of structural patterns of
social communications and of flow patterns of messages in them".5
(sic!) However, as a pre-condition for using this operational
approach, historians would have to accept the questionable behaviourist
premise that nationalism is an essentially subjective and psychological
phenomenon. Furthermore, they would have to assume, even if
only for analytic purposes, that the socio-political context in which
any given nationalism emerges is, and will be kept basically stable and
in equilibrium.6
In the immediate post-war years the dynamics of all four
nationalisms were a function of acute social-economic disturbances
intertwined with pressing political conflicts. In each instance
endogenous conditions determined the intensity of crisis and the
degree of conflict underlying the nationalist upsurge. At the same
time exogenous developments, notably the World War and the World
Revolution, exerted a considerable and often decisive accelerating and
intensifying impact.
It would seem, then, that this interplay of underlying internal
conditions and incidental external developments points towards a
strong continuity between the pre-war and the post-war years. In
the pre-war decade the politics of the Major European Powers were
subjected to a mutually reinforcing polarization between strident
nationalist conservatism and revolutionary activism, at the expense of
moderate and pragmatic liberal reformism. The extent to which
these unsettling domestic tensions predisposed certain governments
and statesmen to risk war in the hope of checking internal
disturbances need not concern us here, although this problem invites
careful exploration. Once at war, and thanks to the political truce,
the parties of order strengthened their position. Starting in 1917,
however, in all the Allied nations except in America, the parties of
change forced a resumption of the pre-war struggle.7 Hereafter it

5 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (New York, I953),

p. I40.
6 The need to abandon the "static-equilibrium-consensus" model in fav
the "change-conflict-constraint" model in social science analysis is explo
Ralf Dahrendorf, "Out of Utopia: Toward A Reorientation of Socio
Analysis", in The American Jl. of Sociology, Ixiv (1958), pp. I 15-27.
7 See my Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, I917-I918 (New H
I959), pp. I4-58.

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II6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 34

was a foregone conclusion that the outcome of war would d

affect this simmering civil war. In October-November I
ushered in a vigorous conservative, reactionary, and pr
offensive throughout the Allied and Associated camp, whil
after having precipitated total revolution in Russia in
generated severe dislocations throughout Central and Easter

In treating the first variety of nationalism, namely super-nationalism

in the victor countries, the British experience serves as a convenient
testing ground.
In England, where the effects of victory were dramatized in the
khaki election, Lloyd George and Bonar Law were not just innocent
victims of a spontaneous popular outburst of ultra-nationalism.8 No
doubt psychologists and social psychologists can demonstrate that
in times of acute stress in rapidly changing societies substantial layers
of frustrated, threatened and alienated citizens eagerly embrace
"nationalism as a form of (security- and comfort-giving) conserva-
tism".9 Though it would be foolish to ignore the role of the
Morning Post and the Daily Mail, the sensational press can no longer
simply be charged with ruthlessly preying on lingering resentments
and frustrations. Analytic historians wish to know about the social
and occupational composition of the post-war deracines. They wish
to know, furthermore, who mobilized not only these crisis strata, but
also millions of steadfast voters, for what ends, and by what methods.
What were the economic, class, sectional, and imperial interests and
motives of those militant Unionists who backed Bonar Law and Sir
George Younger into inflaming rather than dampening the patriotic
fever contracted during the war ? As for the proto-fascist Nationalist
Party, historians of modern Britain tend to overlook it altogether.
Granted this party gathered only Ioo,ooo votes and sent only two
MPs into the khaki Parliament. But as is so often the case with
groups of the Far Right, its influence seems to have been quite out of
proportion to its numerical strength. In addition to swelling the
Tory clamour for a dictated and punitive peace, the ideology and
programme of these new nationalists were distinctly xenophobic

8 There will be a chapter on the khaki election in my forthcoming Politics and

Diplomacy of Peacemaking, I918-I919: First Phase of Containment.
9 Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, Mass., I955),
p. 406. See also Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, Dynamics of Prejudice:
A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (New York, I950), esp.
chaps. i, iv, vi.

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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS I918-I919 II7

populist, anti-Socialist, anti-party, anti-modernist, anti-semitic, and

imperialist.10
The British government became the prisoner of this far from
unorganized and undirected super-nationalist impulse which packed
Parliament with a majority of "hard-faced men". At the Peace
Conference Lloyd George never really dared relent on indemnities,
intervention in Russia, or Syria.
But foreign and domestic policy were cut of one cloth. The same
khaki Commons which required a Carthaginian peace soon proceeded
to raise protective tariffs, lower income tax rates, shelve social
legislation, and oppose the liberalization of the Empire.
It may not be unreasonable to suggest that under the convenient
ideological cover of super-nationalism, the Unionists staged a
pre-emptive assault on the forces of change. Just then the Labour
Party was drawing inspiration from the revolutionary events on the
Continent, was confident of its electoral prospects under universal
suffrage, and counted on the co-operation of the burgeoning trades-
union movement, including the Triple Alliance.
Not that Labour was revolutionary: Arthur Henderson, Ramsay
MacDonald, J. H. Thomas, and R. J. Clynes were reformists par
excellence. However, precisely because prominent Unionists were
determined to arrest creeping reformism rather than sudden revolu-
tion, they resolved to frighten moderates out of supporting reformist
legislation. They did so by deliberately exaggerating the spectre of
revolution and by loudly denouncing Labour leaders for being
Bolshevik fellow-travellers, for having been slackers during the war,
and for advocating a sell-out peace as well as imperial devolution. All
in all, the Tories inclined to take advantage of the national exaltation
of victory to consolidate and enlarge their unexpected wartime gains
over their Liberal, Labour, and Irish opponents. To the extent that
Bonar Law and Younger condoned the proto-fascist excesses of this
pre-emptive operation, they did so confident that with the security of
renewed power Conservative Unionists would renounce and defeat
the metapolitics of their over-excited fellow-travellers.
Similar developments took place in the other victor countries: in
America the triumph of the Republican Party;" in France the

10 Brigadier General The Lord Croft, the moving spirit behind this Nationalist
Party, records its beginnings in his My Life of Strife (London, I948), chaps.
xx, xxi.
11 Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse (Collier Paperback, I96I), chaps.
ii-v; and John D. Hicks, Republican Ascendancy, I92I-I933 (Harper Torch-
books, I963), chaps. i-iii.

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II8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 34

formation of the bloc national and the resulting chambre bleu

in Italy the dominance of the Nationalists;l3 and in Japa
Cabinet's capitulation to conservative and militarist ca
turn, this conservative-cum-reactionary ascendancy both th
and abetted the growth of Radical-Right extra-parliamenta
in America the Red Scare and nativism;'5 in France the fierc
of the Action Franfaise;16 in Italy the rapid growth of the
Combattimento;17 and in Japan the proliferation of super-
organizations.18 Perhaps it is only fitting that the ultra-na
should have made their greatest strides in Italy: there
victory was so close that it did little to shore up the parlia
regime whose fragility had been so glaringly exposed i
Mussolini ingeniously played on the Conservatives' fear of
which in 1919-1920 was not altogether misplaced, and
outrage over what they considered to be the inequitable tre
Italy at the Peace Conference.19

II

In the three defeated European Empires nationalism had altogether

different social and political carriers, functions, and dynamics. In
I9I7 the disintegration of Russia became so pervasive that the small
but organizationally potent Bolshevik Party easily took over the state
and the government. In late I9I8 the unstable Soviet regime began
to consolidate its hold by becoming the champion of Russian
nationalism. Probably the external counter-revolution deserves at
least as much credit for galvanizing this nationalist response as the
12 Jacques Chastenet, Les Annees d'Illusions, 1918-1931 (Paris, 1960), chaps.
i and iii.
13 Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia d'Italia nel Periodo Fascista
(Turin, Einaudi, 1956), chap. i.
14 Robert A. Scalapino, Democracy and the Party Movement in Prewar Japan:
The Failure of the First Attempt (Berkeley, I953), pp. 209-30.
15 Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920,
(Minneapolis, 1955); and John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of
American Nativism, 1860-1925 (Atheneum Paperback, I963), chaps. viii-x.
16 Eugen Weber, Action Fran;aise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-
Century France (Stanford, I962), chaps. v-vi.
17 G. A. Chiurco, Storia della Rivoliozione Fascista, 1919-1922, vol. i
(Firenze, I929), passim.
"8 Richard Storry, The Double Patriots (London, I957), ch. ii; and Masao
Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford, 1963),
pp. 26-8.
19 Federico Chabod, A History of Italian Fascism (London, I963), Pt. I;
Guido Dorso, Mussolini alla Conquista del Potere (Turin, 1949), chaps. viii-ix;
G. Pini and D. Susmel, Mussolini: I'Uomo e l'Opera (Florence, La Fenice,
I957), vol. i, chap. xii; and vol. ii, chaps. i-vi; Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il
rivoluzionario (Turin, I965), chaps. xii-xiii.

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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS I918-I9I9 II9

regime's internal policies and achievements. It would have been

difficult for Lenin and Trotsky to mount a levee en masse in defence of
the Revolution without the patriotic stimulus of Allied intervention in
the Civil War, Polish and Rumanian designs on Russian territories,
and the secession of the Baltic provinces.
The political consequences of Russia's total collapse were a constant
warning to the Big Four. In October-November I918 the Allies
settled for a conditional Armistice, rather than hold out for uncon-
ditional surrender, in considerable measure for fear that total defeat
and disorganization might open the floodgates for Soviet-style
revolutions throughout Central and Eastern Europe. In other words
Allied leaders, in particular Wilson and Lloyd George, wanted to
facilitate the transformation of the crumbling autocracies into stable
and legitimate constitutional-representative regimes. Not unlike the
panic-stricken power elites of the enemy nations, the Allies conceived
of these reformist regimes as much as antidotes to Bolshevism as
bonds for compliant military and diplomatic performance.20 Once
the precarious transitional governments of Ebert-Scheidemann,
Renner-Bauer, and Karolyi-Jaszi had been established with their
help, the Allies resolved to support them - as they now wished they
had supported Lvov and Kerensky in I9I7. From the first day of
the Peace Conference Wilson and Lloyd George - not to speak of
Herbert Hoover - cautioned Allied irreconcilables that in view of
persisting political instability throughout Central and Eastern Europe
any further deterioration of food, price, and employment conditions
could only benefit the radical Left.21
Admittedly, the Bolsheviks were pitifully weak in the three defeated
nations, not least because they lacked leaders of Lenin's stature and
faced opponents at home and abroad who since November I917 had
become wise to their ways. On the other hand, continuing diplomatic
humiliations might conceivably help the Soviets compensate for this
weakness by unintentionally casting them in the role of national
saviours.
Largely because of this fear of revolution, the Allies quarantined
Soviet Russia; sent emergency supplies to Vienna; condoned Noske's
use of the Freikorps to enforce order throughout Germany; and
finally, over French opposition, lifted the blockade of the enemy
countries (though not of Soviet Russia). However, quite as much
on account of the super-nationalist ferment at home as because of

20 See my forthcoming Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, I9I8-I9I9.

21 Ibid.

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I20 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 34

Clemenceau's intransigence, appeasement could not be carried

point of granting the defeated enemies moderate peace terms.
Bela Kun's take-over from Karolyi and his ascendancy ov
incomparably stronger Social Democrats in Budapest vali
Wilson's and - belatedly - Lloyd George's alarm. Whateve
intentions of Colonel Vix's ultimatum demanding further occu
of Hungarian territories may have been, the implied amputati
sizeable purely Magyar territories in favour of Rumania c
nothing less than unleash a storm of nationalist indignation. B
storm could not have developed unless strictly diplomati
territorial issues had become enmeshed with rapidly deter
political, economic, and social conditions inside defeated Hu
Indeed, in the days immediately preceding the Vix ultimat
knowledgeable foreign observers in Budapest warned that an e
situation was being created by sharply rising unemployment
prices in the capital, by mounting peasant impatience wi
reform in the countryside, and by heightened Social Dem
pressures for bolder domestic policies.22 It was this conjun
the internal crisis with diplomatic frustration which made Ka
position untenable.
The point to stress, though, is that because the military def
discredited the old power elites and had undermined ven
institutions, the counter-revolutionary Right was in no condi
rally the nation. As in Russia, the Bolsheviks stepped for
organize a levee en masse, enlisting fiery nationalism not only in
of territorial integrity but also as a prop for their premature revo
George Rude's studies of the crowd in modern European hist
might serve as a model for an analytic investigation of the lev
masse in the Russian and Hungarian Revolutions, with sp
attention to the r61e of nationalist appeals. What was the
nationalist and revolutionary themes in the Bolshevik call to a
Did the nature and blend of these appeals vary depending on w
the intended public was urban or rural, educated or illiterate,
or proletarian, bourgeois or petit-bourgeois? To which sl
symbols, and songs did different social and occupational
including the prejudice-prone crisis strata, respond, and
Perhaps these questions could best be answered by probing int
recruitment methods, enlistment motives and objectives
composition, and collective behaviour of the Red Armies, thou
22 Ibid.
23 G. Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, I959); an
Crowd in History, 1730-1848 (New York, I964).

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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS I918-I9I9 121

responses to the nationalist-cum-revolutionary tocsin on the home

front deserve equal attention.
It would seem, then, that in both the victor and the vanquished
countries, nationalism was caught up in internal social and political
conflicts sharpened by the war as well as by the interplay of revolution
and counter-revolution.

III
These same internal conflicts and external accelerators were at
work in the successor states of East-Central Europe. Especially
starting in 1917 the world crisis not only abruptly inflated and
socially radicalized nationalism but also fatally sapped the authority
of the imperial regimes. Not unlike Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and
Nigeria after World War Two, in I918-I919 the new nation-states of
East-Central Europe secured their independence less because of their
intrinsic virility and cohesion than because of the sudden impotence
of their overlords. Curiously enough, social scientists are better
informed about the composition and strength of the social and
political carriers of nationalism in the embryonic nation-states of the
non-Western world24 than historians are - to this day - about these
carriers in the successor states of East-Central Europe in I918-I919.
In any case, from the very start the governments of Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and Yugoslavia had to contain social-revolutionary demands
while at the same time proceeding with long-range nation-building.
In other words, internal power conflicts were interwoven with
problems and processes peculiar to new nation-states.
The essentially conservative post-independence governments
checked social-revolutionary pressures by agreeing to cautious land,
social, and constitutional reforms. Clearly, the fear of revolution,
the momentarily exaggerated power of Socialist and Peasant leaders
and parties, and the weakness of internal security forces motivated
reforms of an economic and social nature. On the other hand,
Allied influence and power encouraged conservative leaders and
parties to give constitutional reforms priority over economic and
social legislation. The cycle of land reforms in all three nations
reveals the extent to which this legislation was a function of the

2 E.g. Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (London, 1956);

James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley, 1958);
David E. Apter, The Gold Coast in Transition (Princeton, 955); A. P. Desai,
Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 2nd edn. (Bombay, I959); Myron
Weiner, Party Politics in India (Princeton, I957).

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I22 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 34

spectre of revolution, the ephemeral strength of the social-re

parties, and the restraining influence of the Allies.25
All along the leaders, parties, factions, and interests that in
their power and control with the ebbing of the revolution
were committed to putting nation-building ahead of social
They were eager to reshape or create legislative instituti
administrative structures, diplomatic services, military establis
internal supervisory organs, and school systems, not to speak o
arrangements. This nation-building assignment, however
was truly staggering, even though as compared to today
Western nations each of the East-Central European nations, in
Yugoslavia, inherited a relatively developed state apparat
reservoir of skilled manpower.
Characteristically, in new nation-states these institutions hav
grafted on to societies in which the scant integrative energies g
during the struggle for independence are rapidly eroded b
rivalries and particularist obstructions. Under the circum
blatantly chauvinist nationalism becomes an indispensable inst
of national mobilization and control. In I9I8-I9 in East-Central
Europe the rituals, sacraments, and symbols of atavistic self-
glorification and self-flattery served as highly effective antibodies
against divisive strains within the dominant national groups. They
furthermore served to generate feelings of national unity among
centrifugal cultural, linguistic, religious, and regional groups -
among say, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Croats.
Wilson and Lloyd George were indignant about this orgiastic
nationalism which in East-Central Europe went hand in hand with
personalized power, aggressive military policies, grasping diplomacy,
and encroachments on civil and minority rights. With considerably
less justification historians have tended to denounce and regret these
chauvinist, autocratic, and aggressive practices or proclivities as
wanton and perverse departures from the hallowed democratic norm.
Under the influence of recent developments in Asia and Africa,
today's student of the East-Central European successor states is
inclined to identify such practices as an integral aspect of the
behaviour of post-independence regimes of new nation-states whose
societies are caught up in the maelstrom of modernization and of
international tensions. Perhaps before approaching these polities
from this de-provincialized perspective historians should explore such

25 Hugh Seton Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars, 1918-1941

(Cambridge, 1946), chap. iv; and David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasant:
A Study in Social Dogmatism (Collier Paperback, 1961), Pt. III.

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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS 1918-1919 I23

works as Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of

the Developing Areas;26 Seymour Lipset, The First New Nation;27
Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship ;28 S. N. Eisenstadt,
The Political Systems of Empires;29 and Morris Janowitz, The Military
in the Political Development of New Nations.30 These and similar
studies by political sociologists suggest that the framework of the
politics of nation-building might help shed fresh light on the early
history of the successor states of East-Central Europe. Accordingly
the analytic and comparative focus should be on the exploitation of
the rituals and symbols of chauvinist nationalism; the areas of
consensus and conflict between traditionalist and modernizing elites
and classes; the role, style, and sources of power of leaders like
Masaryk, Pilsudski, and Pasic; the quick growth, multiple functions,
and disproportionate influence of the military; the mainsprings and
uses of military and diplomatic belligerency; the exigencies of reliance
on foreign aid; and the structure, leadership, membership, pro-
grammes, and operational codes of parties, interest groups, and
patriotic societies.

IV

This brings me to the impact of the War on anti-imperialist

nationalism in the non-Western world.31 Judging by the nativist
risings in Nyasaland32 and Mozambique33 in 1915 and 1917
respectively, even remote corners of the African continent, let alone
of North Africa,34 were beginning to be caught up in world history.
Since despite her nominal independence China was part of the revolt
of the non-Western world, her nationalist response had more in
common with colonial India's than with victor Japan's.
26 Princeton, 1960.
27 New York, 1963.
28 New York, I964.
29 New York, I963.
30 Chicago, 1964.
1 The only treatments, and all of them summary, are to be found in Jan
Romein, The Asian Century: A History of Modern Nationalism in Asia (Berkeley,
1962), esp. pp. IOI-4o; Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge,
Mass., 1960), chaps. i-ii; Francois Leger, Les Influences occidentales dans la
revolution de l'Orient, 1850-1950 (Paris, 1955), 2 vols., passim.
32 George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent Africa: John Chilembwe
and the Origins, Setting, and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915,
(Edinburgh, 1958).
33 Terence 0. Ranger, "Revolt in Portuguese East Africa: The Makombe
Rising of I9I7", in Kenneth Kirkwood (ed.), St. Anthony's Papers, No. 15,
African Affairs, No. 2 (London, 1963), pp. 54-80.
34 Ch.-Andr6 Julien, L'Afrique du Nord en marche: Nationalismes musulmans
et souverainete franfaise, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1952), esp. pp. 69-70, I08-9.

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124 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 34

After the first battle of the Marne it became evident that the
colonial Powers were over-extended. Germany reluctantly aban-
doned her interests in Africa and China - hoping to recover an
expanded colonial empire through victory - while the Allies, and
eventually even America, made repeated concessions to Japan. In
addition to reducing their garrisons in many overseas territories the
Allies enlisted colonial and semi-colonial manpower for service on the
battle fronts. India alone provided 800,000 soldiers and 414,000
labourers; close to 200,000 Chinese were recruited for non-combatant
service in Europe.
Retrenchment was equally noteworthy in the economic sphere.
Little, if any European capital was available for overseas investment.
India even contributed some oo00 million pounds sterling to the British
war chest. Local manufacturing and mining were stimulated by the
acute shortage of Western imports and by the urgent wartime needs
of the mother countries. In India enterprises employing more than
twenty workers rose from 7,000 in I9II to 1I,000 in I92I; between
I9I0 and I919 coal production jumped from 25 to 500 million tons;
and during that same decade the number of jute workers grew from
I50,000 to 500,000. In China the number of spindles in Chinese-
owned cotton mills increased from 65o,ooo to I-2 million during the
war.

This war-inspired and government-encouraged economic ac

not yet studied in detail, stimulated the growth and prosperi
indigenous strata of entrepreneurs, managers, technici
factory workers. These elements, concentrated in urban
provided an enlarged following as well as financial basi
Congress Party.
Psychologically, nationalists took comfort from the demon
that their white imperial overlords had at last fallen o
themselves. Also, a new sense of pride and self-respect w
from the awareness that in the war Britain needed India's resources
and loyalty.
On the ideological level, of course, the doctrine of self-determination
was of cardinal importance. Especially beginning in I917, once
Wilson and Lenin had expounded it, the ideal of self-determination
fired the imagination of the political classes in the cities.
In India the so-called "extremists" soon got the upper hand in the
Congress Party, and the militants among them wanted to take
advantage of England's misfortunes. By late I916 Hindu and
Moslem nationalists joined hands to press the British Government to
declare its intention to confer "self-government on India at an early

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 POST-WAR NATIONALISMS I918-I919 I25

date". In 1917 the essentially conventional European War was

transformed into a World War of vast ideological and revolutionary
dimensions. This transformation was reflected in the Russian
Revolution; America's plunge into world politics; the regrouping
the European parties of movement; and the articulation of the tene
of the New Diplomacy by both Lenin and Wilson.35 The same
pressures which produced this universalizing and revolutiona
effects compelled the British Government to issue the Monta
Declaration.36
Particularly because victory encouraged the Cabinet not to
implement its promises, the leaders of the Congress Party resolved to
stand their ground. In December I918, on appointing Tilak and
Gandhi to represent India at the Peace Conference, the Congress
passed the following declaration:
In view of the pronouncements of President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, and
other statesmen, that to ensure the future peace of the world the principle of
self-determination should be applied to all progressive nations, this Congress
claims the recognition [of India] by the British Parliament and by the Peace
Conference as one of the progressive nations to which the principle of self-
determination should be applied.37
Whereas in China the non-Wilsonian Shantung settlement helped
precipitate the May Fourth Movement,38 in India the Rowlatt Bills,
the Amritsar Massacre, and the Treaty of Sevres precipitated Gandhi's
first nation-wide and mass-supported satyagraha campaign.39
In I9I8-I920 Indian nationalists, whose ranks had been swollen by
war-accelerated internal changes and whose expectations had been
aroused by crisis-born promises, were less set on extracting additional
gains than on consolidating those which the War had brought within
their reach. At a minimum they wanted London to issue a reasonable
timetable for India's step-by-step accession to Dominion-like status.
On the other hand, the British Cabinet, the India Office, and the
Government of India, reinvigorated by victory, were determined to
keep to a minimum the concessions they had reluctantly adumbrated
in a moment of passing emergency.
This hardening of British policy closes the circle of this paper.
The khaki Commons which, under the cover of super-nationalism,

35 See my Political Origins of the Nezu Diplomacy, esp. p. 368.

36 Edwin S. Montagu, An Indian Diary (London, 1930); and B. Pattabhi
Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, vol. i (Bombay,
I935), Pt. II, chaps. iii-iv.
37 Ibid., pp. I57-8.
38 Tse-tsung Chow, The May Fourth Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1960),
chap. iv.
39 Sitaramayya, op. cit., Pt. III, chaps. i-ii.

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I26 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 34

checked Labour, postponed social legislation, refused Home

Ireland, and forced a hard peace, could hardly be expected to
anti-imperialist nationalism in far-off India. Quite the co
The House of Lords conspicuously commended General Dy
commandant of Amritsar, by awarding him a purse of 2,000 p
and a jewelled sword.40 Such defiant gestures were grist for t
not only of Gandhi but also of Lenin. Through the Baku Cong
he served notice that the Bolshevik Revolution would make common
cause with the anti-imperialist nationalism of the non-Western world.
Princeton University ArnoJ. Mayer

40 Rupert Furneaux, Massacre at Amritsar (London, I963).

41 E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, vol. iii (London, I953),
chap. xxvi.

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