Rethinking the End of the Empire and the Birth of the Nation: An interview with Lynn Tesser
The Modern Period since the French Revolution has seen the progressive emergence and consolidation of an international order of Nation-States, first in Europe and then in the globe. As self-evident as it seems now to the contemporary observer, the nation’s dominance and nationalism as an all-embracing ideology were not the obvious course of action for most historical actors in that period. The majority of ordinary residents and even many indigenous leaders typically identified more with religious, ethnic, or social status groups rather than with a national identity. Why did the aspirations of a small group of nationalist activists and ideologues lead to the establishment of numerous new states grounded in the nationalist principle? This is the main question of Rethinking the End of Empire. Nationalism, State Formation, and Great Power Politics (Stanford University Press: 2014), the new book by Lynn Tesser (Marine Corps University in the United States). Tesser reframes the transition from the empire-based international order to the nation-state system of the twentieth century as a recent and contingent process rather than a long-term, self-propelled one. In her views, empires were not doomed by the immanent forces of history but remained viable and dynamic political forms until World War II. Not only imperial administrators, but also non-European intellectuals and politicians in the colonial territories proposed various federal and autonomic alternatives before going for full independence. According to Tesser, nationalism became a potent force, but not the sole driving factor, and was always intertwined with other aspirations.
Salvador Lima, (European University Institute)
Salvador Lima (SL): Your book addresses many cases of “national revolutions”, from the Americas to the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, Eastern Asia and Africa. What common threads could you find in the processes of nation-making of such different regions?
Lynn Tesser (LT): Thanks for the question. Scholars face at least two major tasks in analyzing the phenomenon of nation-making: understanding what occurred, including consideration of discourse and how actors thought about what they were doing, and to develop a narrative on why such endeavors took place at particular times and locations. Yet, there is the risk that scholars’ framing or mental models assisting in the development of a narrative (or selection of variables–for some social scientists) will inject preconceived ideas, such as hindsight or confirmation bias or the availability bias, into the analysis.
In older historiography and in even recent multi-case social science analysis, I often come across the term “national revolution” to reference events prior to state birth. The ongoing use of this label has led analysts, particularly in my own field of political science, to understand nation formation in empires’ peripheral regions (for the land empires) or colonies (mainly for the sea powers) as occurring earlier than most recent historiography indicates. In scholarship authored before the rise of constructivism, one may find references to the “nation” or “nationalism” that bundle together activities and events that more nuanced research later reveals as incongruous, or to simply emphasize the causal power of ethno-religious or national identity when engaged activists or rebels shared an identity (or were assumed to share one). Subsequent research may similarly raise questions over identity’s actual influence on discourse and action.
With this in mind, one common thread on nation-making is that the development and proliferation of national identity to broader segments of society in newly recognized states, if it occurred, tended to happen after recognition of official statehood. But since my book focuses primarily on the decades leading up to independence in multiple regions and time periods, post-independence nation-making receives less attention. For the pre-independence periods, there are two other threads of potential relevance for questions of nation-building. First, metastasizing activism and/or rebellion was often a response to increased exertion of host state power and potentially in conditions of economic decline (though activists and rebels did not necessarily employ nationalist discourse in response). Second, the imperial metropole and third-party states tended to stress either liberal revolution (for larger revolts and uprisings from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas) or nationalism in understanding the key motivators of proliferating unrest in either the peripheral lands or the colonies when, in fact, nuanced historiography raises questions over such categorizations.
SL: Why do you suggest that pre-independence unrest moments should not be regarded as predominantly nationalist or separatist movements?
LT: Such labels focus only on particular aspects of complex events, and overemphasize the agency of nationalists and/or separatists for state birth. Key details in recent historiography challenge assumptions that activism and rebellion prior to state emergence from 1770-1970 was overwhelmingly nationalist and state-seeking. With this in mind, my book instead emphasizes the unintended consequences of the politics of empire, with particular attention to the nexus of great power politics and prominent non-state actors (i.e. activists, rebels and insurgents).
Let me provide a brief overview of the context for the emergence of pre-independence activism and rebellion in WWI Austria-Hungary, unrest often characterized as nationalist and separatist, as an example. The Habsburg empire’s inhabitants tended to be diverse and intermingled–with many ordinary people resisting consistent self-identification with a particular nationality. Once WWI began, prospects for empires’ opportunistic use of the notion of national self-determination increased. Some empires encouraged activists in competing powers to foment unrest to weaken their respective host state, often with preferences for its framing as ‘nationalist’ (or ideally “secessionist”).
These efforts intersected with repressive Austro-Hungarian domestic policies. During the war’s initial years, the population faced a punitive military dictatorship that eroded confidence in the ruling authorities. Widespread and severe food shortages also held the power to enhance prospects for domestic discontent. With the wartime British/Entente blockade of goods to the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary resorted to armed force to extract food supplies from their respective rural populations in late 1917 and early 1918. Habsburg merchants’ handsome wartime profits added to popular grievances. Austro-Hungarian authorities were particularly distrusting of the empire’s Slavic nationalities, a population that experienced a higher degree of curtailment of civil rights than Magyars or Germans. Authorities increasingly discriminated against non-German settlements lying near or within war zones as well as in Bohemia. Hundreds of community leaders from Dalmatia and the Slovene lands were arrested and nearly a thousand Czechs held for political offenses by late 1914. The empire’s eventual submission to Germany could then further diminish the regime’s legitimacy among the Polish and Bohemian nobilities.
While it is difficult to know the precise effect of these policies, this brief overview, and the more detailed treatment of the pre-independence period in my book demonstrate that the categorization of activism and/or rebellion as “national revolution” or even as a “national movement” obscure more than it reveals, and also overemphasizes the independent, self-generated agency of nationalist activists in nation-making and state birth.
SL: One finds in your book that, in each allegedly nationalist movement, activism was usually more determined by social class or local community allegiances than by grand nationalist narratives. How did this divergence of interests work in multi-confessional land-empires like the Habsburg and the Ottoman?
LT: I don’t think there is a straightforward answer to this question. Variation in class- and locality-based activism and unrest existed in the late Ottoman and Habsburg empires as well as differences towards the treatment of (ethno-)religious and national diversity, policies with the potential to influence identity. The European powers also pressured the Porte for reforms towards non-Muslim populations, particularly Christians, (and occasionally intervened) that lacked broad support in Ottoman lands and to an extent without parallel in Austria-Hungary. My book draws also attention to the unintended consequences, with implications for identity-shaping, of the European powers’ interference and intervention with a focus on the western Ottoman lands.
For the rural Ottoman Balkans, it is difficult to separate socioeconomic and religious differences given predominance of Muslim landlords and Christian sharecroppers. At the same time, local notables–Muslim or Christian–could make attempts at local territorial autonomy, and occasionally independence, with the potential assistance of the great powers in light of the Mediterranean region’s geopolitical significance. Some analysts may also reference the millet system as the basis for the emergence of national movements, though recent historical research shows that a significant nationalist uprising never appeared in the Ottoman Empire before WWI, with much of the population resisting nationalist appeals even into the 20th century.
For the Habsburg empire, the focus was on language use and nationality rather than confession, though there were differences between Austria and Hungary. While Vienna managed Austria’s linguistic and ethnic diversity through negotiation, expanding representation, and largely avoiding adoption of the nation-state concept, Budapest increasingly aimed to assimilate non-Magyars. Following the 1866 Prussian defeat that weakened Austria’s position, the 1867 Ausgleich/Kiegyezés brought back an escalated Magyarization, previously interrupted by Franz Joseph’s post-1848 re-imposition of centralized rule, through provisions for Hungary’s constitutional autonomy. Such circumstances led, in part, to the development of counternationalisms in Hungary, a response that did not appear in the Ottoman lands (given that the Porte did not adopt a dualist structure with at least one segment pursuing imperial nationalism).
SL: In other regions, you explain how old traditions were reinvented or reappropriated or even linked to new ideas and discourses. In the Thirteen British Colonies, we see how revolutionaries claimed many of the Whig tenets and accused the Crown of having broken the “constitutional agreement”, whilst in Spanish America, the Creole Elite (or Criollos–the Spanish term for “native born”) also appealed to the pact between the King and the people represented by their local bodies. How did these old customary laws relate to the new Enlightenment’s ideas and the nationalist principle?
LT: Earlier scholarship links the activism and mobilization associated with Latin American independence with a desire among the Americans in Spanish territories for self-rule, with their distinct identities as ‘peoples’ resulting from Europeans’ lesser treatment and identification with incipient states that happened to be first-order administrative units of the Spanish Empire. Such work suggests the pre-existence of stateless nations or other identities as proto-nations that aligns with the idea of national revolutions preceding state birth. Yet, nuanced historiography shows that the emerging “states” did not overlap with the presence of distinct identities–or advocates of autonomy understand Spanish and American identities as mutually exclusive, potentially owing to their fluidity as well as Spanish nationality’s grounding in religion rather than ethnicity. National consciousness was largely absent before the initial wave of state birth. Only educated people in Spanish America identified strongly with their respective region by the early nineteenth century, with elites differing significantly from the majority and comprising a very small part of the populations of the incipient states. More evident was the weakening of the Spanish metropole by the 1790s and emergence of a vague sense of ‘American-ness’ among American-born elites of European ancestry.
In hindsight, republican ideas circulating in Latin America during the pre-independence era appear to mimic French and US republicanisms. Yet, several prominent historians highlight the more likely influence of an indigenous (albeit provincial elite-centric) republicanism. I am particularly indebted to Jaime Rodríguez O.’s The Independence of Spanish America–and to Brian Hamnett for drawing my attention to this book. Though Rodríguez O. emphasizes the variety of unrest in Spanish America, he observes that, in practice, the ‘people’ generally referred to the provincial elites within Spain and the kingdoms of the American territories–at least until the return of Ferdinand VII to Spain in 1813. Representatives of the people within Spanish legal tradition included the cities, tribunals as well as other major corporations. Legitimacy in this context owed to the Hispanic legal principle that sovereignty returned to the people in the absence of a legitimate monarch.
With these details in mind, my account of pre-independence unrest in Spanish America does not stress the power of Enlightenment thought and derivative nationalist principles. Regarding the period after Ferdinand returned to Spain in 1813, my analysis aligns with broader trends in recent historiography emphasizing the restoration of absolutism and the brutal counterinsurgency for transforming demands for home rule in the American territories into claims for territorial separation. Spain then lost control of most of its American holdings. Rebellion, civil war, localized conflicts, and a wave of new state recognition in the Americas ensued.
For the Thirteen British Colonies, I agree with Gordon Wood’s observation that “[t]he revolutionary leaders never intended to make a national revolution in any modern sense. They were patriots, to be sure, but they were not obsessed, as were later generations, with the unique character of America or with separating America from the course of Western civilization.” At the same time, Wood claims the presence of “nationalistic sentiments in 1776” and “perhaps more a feeling of oneness among thirteen disparate states than at any time in history.” As in the case of Spanish America as well as other regions and pre-independence periods, my analysis of the emerging United States centers on the host empire, non-state actors, and foreign powers, and how their interaction contributed to an eventual turn towards separatism or its absence when conditions appeared opportune.
SL: What role did empires and their elites play in the nation-building process in the breaking of the European land-empires? Did the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union have similar consequences for colonies of the overseas empire?
LT: The European land empires–the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman and German empires–broke up during or after WWI. With the exception of Russia, all were on the losing side of the war. Yet, a victory for the Central Powers would have allowed most, if not all, of these empires to survive. For this reason, I do not assume the central role of minority elites’ nation-building or nationalist mobilization for the dissolution of these empires. Defeat in multi-year international war was more consequential not merely for imperial authorities’ wartime policies and the conflict’s effects, but because the victorious powers preferred to break up the losing empires into smaller states (potentially buffer states–except Germany that retained its major regions while losing territory) that major powers could more easily influence than larger states.
But I do think minority elites in the host empires played a role in the nation-building process, particularly in the Habsburg Empire, western borderlands of the Russian Empire, and in parts of the German and Ottoman Empires. Yet, this nation-building could simply be a response to imperial nationalism–empires’ self-fortification to appear more like homogeneous nation-states–or to the stresses of major war and the repressive internal policies of some engaged empires. Elites’ role in the imperial breakups owed to the possibility–but not inevitability–of working with enemy empires to undercut the respective host empire(s).
For the colonies of the sea powers (Britain, France and the Netherlands in particular), I stress the British-led reconquest of parts of Asia as a key catalyst of the turn towards separation in the affected areas. I also discuss developments during WWII that made the return to the prewar order difficult for the reconquering European powers. Africa’s location outside the WWII theatre delivered a different (and, with few exceptions, much less militarized and separatist) experience than what people lived through in Asia. In some cases, the US-USSR competition did matter for nationalism and/or separatism in the colonies–but usually not to the same extent as great power competition and international war experienced by the Ottoman, Habsburg, and western borderlands of the Russian Empire in WWI and then the above-noted reconquest in Asia. The superpowers also did not fight a hot war that would have raised the stakes of competition and likely increased opportunistic policies towards diverse populations in geopolitically important areas.
SL: In your book, nationalist claims seem to be the last stepping-stone of a succession of political struggles and social demands related to autonomy, taxation, land reform, religious liberties. Why do you think nationalism eventually succeed in creating a convincing narrative to most mobilizing actors?
LT: You make an important point, though nuanced historiography challenges assumptions that most mobilizing actors, even in the immediate pre-independence periods, found nationalist narratives convincing. A variety of motivations and ideas could often be found during times of metastasizing unrest.
But among the high-level activists and rebels after the initial wave of state birth in the Americas, key non-state actors often employed nationalist arguments in pre-independence periods–particularly in the year prior to state birth. Most of the new Christian states in the nineteenth century Balkans had followed a similar pattern, though the European powers recognizing the new entities were often more concerned about protecting Christians than supporting nationalists. Why then did nationalism appear a more powerful idea than other ideologies prior to state birth? I can think of three reasons: its ideational flexibility (e.g. potential linkage with a range of ideologies and spiritual traditions), compatibility with ideas of sovereignty and statehood (at least in theory), and most importantly, because a majority of the great powers gravitated towards imperial nationalism. Since these powers decided which states to recognize, activists and rebels faced incentives to make their claims for statehood based on assertions that they formed part of a people or nation in need of a state–mirroring, in a way, the nationalizing empires. Other context-specific reasons for the turn to nationalism also often existed, including the potential for imperial nationalism to catalyze resistance that, sooner or later, coalesced as counternationalism.
At the same time, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. In other words, the presence of nationalist discourse in most immediate pre-independence periods does not mean that nationalism caused state birth. As previously noted,metastasizing activism and/or rebellion, part of which eventually turned nationalist in many cases, was often a response to increased exertion of host state power and potentially in conditions of economic decline. Looking back even further into the past usually reveals differences in institutionally based and/or locality-based treatment of particular social segments, classes or groupings, some of which would then be predisposed to engage in such activism and rebellion. In some cases, foreign powers supported nation-making, separatism, and/or other activities among particular social segments in other empires, categories of people potentially of focus for nation-building and/or secessionism by enemy powers during wartime–particularly in geopolitically important locations.
SL: Why do you think that mapmaking and demography were relevant tools to imperial and national statecraft?
LT: These technologies could assist ruling authorities in an age of imperial nationalism and modern territoriality. Western and Central Europe served as the initial epicenter of imperial nationalism owing to Napoléon’s fusion of imperialism and nationalism in expansionist campaigns. France and Germany were particularly keen to weaken regional attachments at home through imperial pursuits to build more genuine nation-states. Though Habsburg Austria did not implement Germanization policies, Hungary pursued Magyarization even before gaining autonomy in 1867. Imperial nationalism was also a potent source of counternationalisms from activists associated with subject populations with the potential to employ these technologies, eventually in the pursuit of their own statehood.
Map-making served as an important part of imperial statecraft, particularly efforts to naturalize territorial acquisitions, with modern centralized states as the primary locations of cartographic production. Governments’ position as the predominant client for mapping meant that maps of territories often reflected the perspectives of ruling powers. By the late 18th-early 19th century, cartography accordingly facilitated the proliferation of Eurocentric notions of progress, expansion, and the distinctiveness of common domains (whether imagined as national and/or imperial), conveying jurisdiction over colonial subjects or areas labelled “uncilivized,” though these assumptions did not necessarily penetrate deeply among local elites and society.
Map-making would be complemented by the meteoric mid-nineteenth century rise of statistical demography, a practice allowing for the politicization and even falsification of categories such as confession, language, and ‘historical’ region, among others, in efforts towards standardization or asserting claims of representing objective conditions. Cartographic and demographic expertise gave rulers, and the specialists they employed, the means for amplifying or extending control over territory and associated populations. With the rising focus on ethnicity and nationality, state- and nation-building projects could also oversimplify a varied demos through use of terms like Volk, narod or people. Yet, obfuscation was not necessarily intentional. Since statistics would not capture inhabitants’ bi- or multi-lingual abilities, “[f]ractioned identities and shifting ethnic allegiances fell away;” “national indifference–likely the most widespread position–was colored over”–as Helmut Walser Smith claims. Once new states emerged that were typically fragments of empire, the state elites could then employ map-making and demography in the management of diverse populations in the new nation-states that were usually more aspirational than actual nation-states.
SL: When we see the trajectory of the new postcolonial states, it is interesting to find that some of them, such as India, Indonesia, Morocco or Turkey, tended to annex neighbouring territories, exchange populations or repress minorities. They employed the colonial apparatus and sought to legitimize the inherited borders of the colonial state. Would you say they behaved like “empires” within their own territory? How did they manage nationalist narratives and alternative identities?
LT: Given that my book focuses mostly on pre-independence periods, it does not go into great depth on the post-colonial period(s). But I do note that life in the new states was not necessarily very different from colonial times–as Partha Chatterjee observes in India. Since the elites of newly recognized states had spent much of their lives in an empire–potentially a nationalizing one, it is not surprising that the new states would behave like the empire(s) from which they were carved. The same could be said for the Americas over a century earlier. In The Ideology of Creole Revolution, political theorist Joshua Simon observes a trend towards what he labels “anti-imperial imperialism” featuring Creoles across the Americas tending to think like their former imperial masters owing to the varied status experienced within colonial era institutions. The Creoles also demonstrated that an identity-based hierarchy could be preserved in the post-colonial period.
For non-Western elites critical of empire, the remarkable political and military successes of Mustafa Kemal (more commonly known as Atatürk–a response to the Allies’ plans to carve up the remaining Ottoman lands and the ensuing Greek invasion of Anatolia–inspired many activists and state-builders long after the recognition of Turkey in 1923. Like Atatürk, Turkey’s extensive efforts to forge a nation-state also served as a model to emulate, one situated in what I label elsewhere as the “regime of ethnic separation:” the internationally sanctioned population exchanges and transfers concentrated in the first half of the twentieth century. From 1913-59, Turkey developed and implemented population policies to turn eastern Anatolia into a much more ethnically homogeneous area under the banner of Turkish identity, with the borderland areas experiencing comparably greater violence and thoroughness in the creation of such homogeneity. Despite criticism of these practices, by then the homogeneous nation-state was the ideal for international peace and stability. The lesson was not lost on other potential state-builders. For some of the newly recognized states after WWII, Brad Simpson points out that “[m]any of the countries that deployed self-determination claims with the greatest fervor after 1945, such as India, Indonesia, and Algeria, denied them even more fiercely when made by restive ethnic and regional minorities within their borders.” Even rival state governments could see eye to eye on the need to avoid recognizing nationalist movements within their respective territories.
With this in mind, scholars might explore multiple forms of imperial nationalism as well as nationalist imperialism, including informal variants, beyond the European empires. A multi-country book length project on the questions that you raise would be an excellent way to explore these issues further.
SL: To conclude, your book offers a set of interesting reflections about the principle of self-determination. The United Nations and the Third World project have emphasized a nation-state internationalism that put self-determination on a pedestal. What problems or limitations has it had as the definitive principal of legitimacy for the recognition of states?
LT: The limitations center on the fact that the principle of national self-determination was often more of a frame or mental model than a reality for inhabitants of empires’ last decades and even many engaged non-state actors. Empires’ populations tended to be diverse, intermingled, and often resistant to consistently identifying with a singular nationality. My book, the conclusion in particular, draws attention to the unintended consequences of opportunism among non-state actors and major powers towards the principle of national self-determination. When coupled with the turn of nationalism away from its integrative, tolerant forms to (ethno-)national separatist variants, these practices contributed much to the use of coercive measures such as ethnic cleansing, genocide, population transfers, and other brutalizing state policies to forge more genuine nation-states. For analysts as well as political actors, the entrenchment of the global nation-state international order after 1960 also makes it possible to see nationalism where it is weak, situational, or even non-existent, with potentially tragic consequences.
Lynn M. Tesser is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Marine Corps University. She is the author of Ethnic Cleansing and the European Union (Palgrave 2013) and Rethinking the End of Empire (Stanford 2024).