The development of the Palestinian national movement can be traced at least to the end of the First World War, when the crumbling Ottoman Empire gave way to the territorial expansion of the Western imperialist powers—including France, Britain, and later the United States-into the Middle East. Palestine, the provincial territory controlled by the Ottoman state, had for centuries been home for the Palestinian people. But while successful national uprisings in the Balkans and elsewhere in the empire led to the establishment of independent nation-states, the area inhabited by the Palestinians and the surrounding regions extending to the Persian Gulf...

Kurdistan is located in an area covering northwestern Iran, northeastern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, and northeastern Syria.¹ Although a precise geographical description of the region cannot be made under present political conditions, estimates do exist. According to Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, for example, the region of Kurdish settlement covers 409,650 square kilometers, of which 194,400 are in Turkey, 124,950 in Iran, 72,000 in Iraq, and 18,300 in Syria.² Similarly, since official data is either unavailable or distorted, we must rely on estimates regarding the number of Kurds. Ferdinand Hennebichler, for example, places their number in Kurdistan at approximately twenty-two million, with about...

In both theory and practice, the national question has long been a source of controversy and disagreement within the liberation movement in South Africa. Despite widespread agreement that South Africa’s ruling class has cynically promoted tribalism and racialism, as well as fraudulent types of nationalism, in order to divide the oppressed and exploited majority, there is no consensus over how to define the nation., national identity, and nationalism. These disputes over the national question cannot be seen as merely academic hairsplitting. With the collapse of white minority rule and installation of a democratically elected government under the leadership of the...

Even though four decades have passed since India became independent, doubts remain in the minds of many regarding its future as a viable nation-state. Every now and again commentaries on the Indian political situation fill with speculation about how long Indian unity will hold.¹ These speculations are inspired by Western notions of the nation-state where ideally language, religion, and political sovereignty have coterminous boundaries. Notwithstanding the fact that such notions disregard the historical processes by which some nationalities were subsumed by more powerful nationalities in the making of modern Western nation-states, the belief that language and religion, in their pristine...

No society has accomplished the full liberation of its women. However, it can safely be argued that the status, opportunities, and general welfare of women in many Third World societies are dralnatically improved following national liberation. Post-World War II anticolonial struggles have been fought in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.¹ Typically, their immediate goal is to wrest political control from the colonizer, a stage referred to as the national democratic revolution. It is sometimes followed by a process in which the working class and the peasants seize political power from the capitalists and landlords in a socialist...

This chapter analyzes the origins and development of the Puerto Rican struggle for national self-determination. After a detailed historical account of the independence movement in Puerto Rico from the early nineteenth century through its various stages in the twentieth century, the chapter focuses on recent nationalist movements and struggles against U.S. imperialism in the post-World War II period and examines the successes and shortcomings of these struggles during the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of Puerto Rican nationalism in the 1980s and early 1990s and provides projections on the future of the Puerto Rican national...

Northern Ireland is a product of the opposing forces of imperialism and nationalism. Ireland was England’s first colony, and it has been said that the conquest of Ireland was the model for British imperialism. As a consequence of England’s attempt at domination, Ireland has been home to a variety of nationalist movements. The two nations’ mutual history offers many insights into the relationship between imperialism and nationalism, and the impact of class, ethnicity, social consciousness, and national movements on this relationship. This chapter examines the origins and development of the conflict between British imperialism and Irish nationalism and analyzes the...

After its defeat in the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain experienced a decline in its national image and subsequently a call for regeneration. This new situation gave rise to the idea of a “center” around which different regions were to be organized, an idea that theoretically allowed for a kind of regionalism that would preserve the symbolic basis of traditional society—for example, in the Basque Country, thefuerosor traditional Basque laws.¹ This regionalism could then be transformed into nationalism if a given region considered itself no longer part of a national whole but rather a whole in itself....

As it has everywhere else, at least in Western history, the national question has evolved in Quebec in the context of the formation and transformation of the capitalist economy and the liberal democratic state.¹ The internal market and wage relations that tend to homogenize economic practices within a social formation (money, weights and measures, salaries, free circulation of individuals and goods) were becoming institutionalized at the same time as the modem state was becoming the center of regulation of social relations and relations of power that are now administered in the name of the nation within the framework of popular...

The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 at the high point of a revolutionary drama full of ambiguity. Three aggregate forces soon contested Bolshevik power, whose future was far from secure. First, the Bolsheviks were faced with indigenous counterrevolutionary forces whose armies sought to overturn the revolution. Second, the armies of various Western capitalist states, including the United States and Japan, invaded the fledgling Bolshevik state. Finally, the Bolsheviks found themselves face to face, as the czars had been, with the problem of the non-Russian nationalities. By the mid-1920s, Soviet leaders had overcome the first two obstacles and firmly established state...

At the center of China’s modernization drive as it concerns national minorities are four core issues: social equality, economic development, cultural autonomy, and national integration. My aim in this chapter is to discuss some of the main implications of modernization for China’s national minorities. The chapter begins by outlining the background to China's national minority situation, including a description of its minority groups, its historical experience with minority policies, and government provisions for varying degrees of autonomy in minority regions. Because of the great diversity that characterizes China’s national minorities, I will emphasize China’s western provinces, particularly Xinjiang and Tibet,...

The national question lies at the heart of the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 and of its destruction in 1991–92. A vision of national liberation and modernization brought the various South Slav nationalities together after World War I; seventy years later, a retrospective, mythical, antimodernist vision tore them apart. The appeal to the concept of self-determination was used to justify both.

The South Slav lands, a geographic and cultural gateway separating Eastern and Western Europe, were dominated for centuries by Hungarians, Ottomans, Venetians, and Hapsburgs.¹ Clashes between the great powers shaped the region into a large Balkan military frontier,...