The world market system is a geographically inegalitarian system. It organises the world in centers and peripheries, where the center has the initiative and the peripheries are supposed to attend the center.

Globally, the pattern is organised through commodity chains where the center links monopolize important knowledge, resources or faculties. The system was established successively through colonial conquests, and is maintained today by ownership rights, guaranteed by a global power system where the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Security Council and NATO are important weapons. The functioning of the world is described in chapter 2.

Stein Rokkan has pointed at the three dimensions of center-periphery patterns that are of importance for the emergence of periphery defence, or national movements. There are according to him three kinds of transactions in society where the center controls the periphery to its own benefit and to the marginalization of the periphery:

These dimensions are valid globally and regionally as well as locally. Globally and regionally as well as locally, geographically sited power blocks aim at dominating over peripheries.

Globally, the center consists of the finance/violence alliance that has been described in chapter 2, its challengers and closest entourage. But the whole system is also a hierarchy where less powerful finance/violence alliances dominate smaller peripheries - or provinces as it is usually called at that level, while the centers are usually called capital regions (in some countries the capital functions are shared between several cities but this isn't important in this context) [2].

Provinces may according to Rokkan be of three kinds - underdeveloped peripheries like for example South Italia or Bretagne (you may probably assign the global peripheries to here, but Rokkan doesn't expressively mention them), i.e. zones whose role is to provide the center with cheap labour and raw materials; overdeveloped peripheries which have happened to develop a strong economy but is deficient of institutional political power to defend it with like for example Catalonia before 1975 and Slovenia before 1990; and interface peripheries, zones at the border between two strong centers like for example Alsace or South Tyrol, which the center distrusts, starves and discriminates against.

National movements have during earlier historical systems defended local community alliances against outsider empires. Such national movements have been treated earlier in this book - in the chapter about Christianity, which had the Jewish defence against Assyrian and Roman empires among its roots, in the chapter about the Ming revolution against the Mongol empire, and the whole chapter 4 about local communities' defence against the world market system and its central states. Such national movements for defence of the local community continue to grow during the age of the world market system, but they are then forced to strengthen regional ties and solidarities to get the power they need to manage.

The national movements of the world market system are produced by the system itself, as defence of territories threatened by subordination in a center-periphery relation within the framework of the system. The history of the world market system is for that reason teeming with national movements, and they are increasingly common as the time goes on. For the system is continuously creating centers and peripheries.

National movements consist of people in peripheries who aim at defending the peripheral territories against the marginalization and the blocking of a reasonable development that are caused by the transgressing and power wielding of centers. The aim of a national movement may be more or less far-reaching - do away with the cultural stigmatization caused by the centers' control of norms, demand resources from the center as a compensation for its taxes and pillaging, and demand more or less local and regional autonomy from the control of the center. Since the states are only actor in the world market world that are permitted to defend a regional interest, a "sovereign state" of their own is a reasonable demand for any national movement that judges itself as having the power to reach it.

As we will se however, a state of their own has not always been the natural aim, and perhaps this tradition is drying up now in the early twenty-first century, in the light of the increasing paralysis of states.

The unit for a national movement is the peripheral territory. But to mobilize all its inhabitants it is necessary to organize them as a collective. It is necessary to create an identity, common for all inhabitants that can outvote other identities like class identities or local affiliations.

In the global peripheries, this was easy. There, the colonial powers maintained a caste-like division between themselves and the colonized, which made the other identity differences trivial. The third world nationalists of today can easily continue to build on this division.

In the regional peripheries, the identities are more ambiguous, and a strategy is often needed to establish the identity cutting the most effective way. In many peripheral territories the language may be identity-shaping; for different reasons this was the typical case for the East European national movements during the nineteenth century, and the tradition from that is still strong. In other cases, this doesn't work - for example Scottish nationalists are highlighting the common exploitation from London and the common historical institutions since there are two languages in Scotland. Other national movements may highlight popular traditions or legal customs for the same reason. For others, religion is the most effective cement - Catholicism in Ireland, Shi'a in Iran, Hinduism in north Sri Lanka. Often, it is hard to find such identity-shaping characteristics with any emotional appeal, and the history of national movements is full of examples of casually effective compromises, put together during the struggle, but afterwards turning into matters of bitter conflict within the territory when the movement had won. The peripherialized social categories create a language, a national ideology, which afterwards gets its own life to the detriment of the identities of the social categories themselves.

Territorial self-assertion and territorial autonomy may be more or less important for different actors, different classes or different groups within the territory. It may also be more or less easy for different classes or groups to act. In the following exposition I will show the way aims, instruments and results have varied according to which actor has dominated the movement.

Systematic descriptions of national movements as a phenomenon are extremely few, and in my opinion mistakenly focused. Most of the literature edited during the last fifteen years of flaring interest put the nationalist ideologies in the focus, showing very scant interest for the movement who have formed them and for their reasons, aims and action forms. They are also mingling national movements and states, which also use national strategies to promote their interests as states [3]. This chapter builds for this reason on literature about each nationalist movement separately, which is fortunately plentiful. The disadvantage of this is that the narrative may appear incoherent. But I can't do much about this, it's the research that is incoherent, and I can only mirror it.

The Creole revolutions

The national theme was invented by the so called Creole revolutions - movements among European settlers in America to assert their interests against the colonial powers, resulting in the independence of the American states between 1776 and 1826. They may be seen as examples of the difference in results depending of the carrier of the movement. In North America, it was carried by farmers, artisans, urban middle classes and capitalists in common and resulted during a few generations in the arguably most egalitarian society that have existed within the world market system, at least in the north and north-west. In Latin America it was carried, with few exceptions, by local export capitalists, resulting in that the repression of the direct producers turned worse than ever.

In neither case, the actors were interested in independence as such from the beginning. They defended their local interests for different reasons, and only successively, independence was seen as a reasonable aim.

The legal role of the North American settlers was to provide the center with raw materials like timber, fish and tobacco. Most of the settlers were subsistence peasants though, who had emigrated from the land-scarce Europe. Most had their origin in puritan congregations with strong community solidarity, and both peasants and townsmen had considerable experience in defencing their communities. The representatives of the state were few and weak and could never discourage the Americans to hunt away taxmen or customs officers [4].

Although the English policy towards the colonies had as its foundation that the colonies were there to make England richer, the settlers were not too exploited. They also, or at least the leading of them, had some advantages of England as a protected market and of cheap English goods, and they knew how to protect themselves against the claims of the state. It was only in the 1760s, when the British state out of rationalist zeal tried to stop up the loopholes in the taxing system, that the conflict flared up.

The budding nationalist movement organised as a coordination of local resistances against a new stamp duty on legal documents. The fee, and the compulsive registration, were seen as attacks on the local autonomy, and became a focus for resistance to the British state and authorities in general. The wealthy burghers, who not only feared remote control from London but also the autonomous activities of peasants and artisans, hurried to lead the movement, called Sons of Liberty and organised as local corresponding associations. "Liberty" in their parlance meant liberty from interference in the local community; it had nothing to do with independence from England.

While the peasants chased away the government's representatives from their villages, the Sons of Liberty supported peaceful means like petitions, reinforced by boycotts against British commodities, and intervened forcefully against all violence against authorities. The boycotts did very soon induce the British merchants to demand a repeal of the stamp fees, promptly executed by the British parliament. Instead, it increased the customs.

The Sons of Liberty, that had been dissolved, praising the British government, was thus reorganised to pursue new boycotts. Boycott committees were organised in the towns with participation of as many organisations as possible, and in towns like New York and Boston they began to resemble parallel governments. As the movement grew, the lower middle class got prominence in it.

When most of the customs were abolished, the merchants thought that the costly boycotts should be so too, but peasants and artisans continued to run the movement, strengthened by a feeling that they defended themselves against a tyrannical upper-class.

Two factors contributed to change the struggle about a factual matter to a calling in question the whole British regime: the ravages of the regime towards the democratic opposition in England, and its arrogant and prestigious attempts to teach the Americans lessons it hadn't the power to carry through.

Particularly there were two local actions, and the excessive British reactions to them, the provoked the Americans to set independence as an aim.

The first was when the inhabitants in Providence captured a customs ship and the authorities tried to hang them for treason without finding anybody to hang.

The second was when a group of young Bostoners captured a ship and threw the cargo overboard, and the authorities closed the assembly of Massachusetts without being able to prevent it from meeting.

As late as 1775, the aim for most politically active Americans was a common popular movement in England and America against the authoritarian regime. But in England, the democratic movement was weak, and it was soon clear to the Americans that they had to struggle alone. In 1776, independence was seen as the reasonable aim.

The following war began as a war against the soldiers accompanying the taxmen. The greatest burdens were taken by the peasants, taking part in the voluntary army of the united American colonial assemblies. For that reason, it seemed reasonable that the independent North America satisfied the most important of the peasant's desires, breaking up of the landed estates - of course with exception of those owned by independists - local autonomy and cheap credits. The North American state was made weak; the peasants were not more eager to relinquish autonomy to an American government than to a British one.

But after just some ten years, planters and merchants were able to take back the initiative. The backdrop was a struggle about the cheap credits.

After the war there was a recession and many peasants got into debts to merchants; market relations are not easy to see through for subsistence peasants. But the peasants had not made war to let merchants take over their land; they occupied courthouses and burnt the debt notes; they liberated violently peasants from debtors' prisons and refused to pay [5].

Faced with this threat to ownership, merchants and planters were able to mobilize the marketized artisans of the towns on their side to wreck local autonomy, and push power upwards, to a union with a strong government, army, and right to taxation. With the help of this union, the peasants were repressed and the rights of the merchants was maintained [6].

Despite these concessions made to the trade interests, the peasants succeeded rather well in maintaining some of the popular democracy in the USA, and be a source of inspiration for popular initiatives in the rest of the world for a hundred years - although most of the popular democracy perished in the civil war in the 1860s. In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville used the USA as a model for democratic society, and related among other things the way duties that in other countries were carried out by the state or by notables, in the USA was carried out by a democratic civil society [7]. Particularly in the west, at a distance from the Atlantic merchant aristocracy and the southern slave plantations, peasants had some reasonable freedom to develop their autonomy and for that reason also guarantee some popular hegemony in the American culture.

The American national movement began as a democracy movement. The next national movement, the Haitian one, began as a slave rebellion, see chapter 4 [8].

The rebellion had no intention to claim independence from France. On the contrary. For a long time, the rebellious slaves saw the French revolutionary government as an ally against the planters. But successively, they got less and less support from there, and after Bonaparte's coup d'état, the rumour spread that slavery was about to be re-established. Nevertheless, independence became a necessity only when a French army was sent out to repress the rebellion.

In the Spanish Latin America, with few exceptions, no popular movements were involved in the struggles for independence. These were instead a social counter-revolution, engineered by the local upper class to assert its power over the Indian peasants when the French armies invaded Spain in 1809 and the Spanish power system collapsed [9].

This was most obvious in the Andean, where the Indian peasants are plentiful and potentially dangerous. The domestic Creole, i.e. Spanish descendant, upper class traditionally acted with the utmost moderation in their conflicts with the colonial authorities, and backed always out when they were emulated by Mestiz artisans and small tradesmen. The independence movement in most of the Spanish America mirrors faithfully this pattern: the initiative was taken by planters, scary that the Haitian example would be contagious when the Spanish state fell, while the Spanish colonial army got support from the lower classes which were afraid of the power of the planters.

There were fewer Indians in the La Plata countries, so the European settlers were more courageous there. In Buenos Aires, artisans and clerks took the initiative to the independence movement on the South American continent after having defeated an English occupation army. In May 22, 1810, their citizen militia occupied the city hall and proclaimed the independence of La Plata.

The merchants of Buenos Aires, who dominated the city, were however more interested in free trade with the world and in controlling the trade of the surrounding provinces. These provinces hurried to proclaim their independence of Buenos Aires; in Uruguay and Paraguay they succeeded because the notables made concessions to the people in the form of land reforms, while other provinces had to give in after some compromises. Attempts to conquer Bolivia, Chile and Peru failed however.

There is only one region where the pattern of social counter-revolution doesn't apply - Mexico, the richest and most densely populated country in America. Here, the Indian peasants and workers were able to capture a share in the independence and the citizenship through a rebellion which began in 1810 and never was fully repressed.

The Creoles in Mexico had more reasons to hate the Spanish regime; the Spanish state had confiscated all money in 1804 and used it for armaments; the indignation even spread over the race divides. In the Guanajuato mining district the middle class turned to the Indian miners for support; they responded willingly but didn't differ between Creoles and Spaniards, for them all lords were the same. Their rebellion developed into a popular liberation movement with demands for a land reform, equal share in the wealth of the cities, and an end to the world market system.

The Creoles hurried to ask the Spanish army for help, but the war turned out to be expensive. In 1814 the Spanish state resurrected, demanded dictatorial power and raised the taxes. A Creole general mutinied, compromised with the Indian-Mestiz peoples' movement and was supported by the Creoles. All would have a part: ownership was kept as it was, Spaniards were allowed to stay but not to govern, and Indians got citizenship in the new Mexican state and got their rebellion acknowledged as the mother of the nation. It would take a long time until the Indian peasants were able to assert their social interests, but in contrast to for example Peru they were not subjects to a racist contempt. It was even possible for Indians to be presidents in Mexico [10].

Economically and politically, a local export bourgeoisie - land owners, merchants and mine owners - controlled the independence movement in Latin America. It was also they who got their aims satisfied. Their main aim was free trade, and independence thus led to the annihilation of what existed of local production for local consumption, to the benefit of English import. Latin America's position as a periphery was affirmed.

In North America, peasants and artisans had been the most important proponents of the independence and democracy movement. They were for that reason able to form a political block with local capitalists to defend the interests of local production, with the help of a program for national development. Successively they were also able, in struggle with planters and raw materials exporters, to lift North America from the periphery role to be the absolute center of the world market system. Their model - national ventures for infrastructure and favouring of domestic production as a replacement for import, socalled import substitution (see chapter 5) - would be emulated by all other national movements when in government position [11].

National movements in the European semi-periphery

 

The Creole revolutions didn't in a direct way inspire the national movements that followed immediately after. The French revolution was much more forceful as a model. Its concept of a nation of citizens would appear as the reasonable answer to the centralizing, increasingly penetrating power over people that the European states, and not least Napoleon's French state, pursued. It was the reasonable answer because it created a solidarity that could be set up against the arbitrary encroachments of the state. It was the centralization of the French empire that provoked the first national movements in the European countries that were demoted to the role as periphery and province.

The Spanish popular resurrection against the occupation 1809-1814 was perhaps the most successful one in an immediate way, and the most popular one. It was this movement that launched the concept Liberal, as a designation for those who wanted to base power with the people instead of in the royal bureaucracy. And it was this movement that coined the concept guerrilla to characterize their own method of struggle against the Bonapartist armies.

But the German and Italian national movement were those who began to thematize national liberation to the European public.

The German case was very special. Since the French occupants had been chased away, the question was about the need of the bourgeoisie for a strong state to assert German interests internationally in a way all the small German principalities couldn't do. In the Italian case this was important, but even more important was that the Italian territories, like the territory of Bohemia, Poland, Croatia and Finland, were peripherialized by a bureaucratic empire.

The nineteenth century was an era of increasing government encroachment on the life of people and communities. Conscription and compulsory school attendance were introduced, which demanded standardization of language. A national police began to superintend the behaviour of people. Food was commercialized also in Eastern Europe, and everyday life got increasingly dependent of international food prices as well as national economic policy. And not to risk popular bread seizures, the states began to institute a food distribution policy. As a reflection of this, the bureaucracies grew. The national markets grew also, and so did the centralization of finance [12].

Eastern Europe and Italy were dominated by three great trans-national empires, the Austrian, the Russian, and the Ottoman. The first categories who raised the national cause in these regions were the educated urban middle class - lawyers, teachers, journalists - who had suddenly discovered that their opportunities to assert themselves in the era of centralization was limited by their speaking the wrong language. Particularly, the growing surplus of university graduates began to agitate for the value of the peripheral languages and peripheral cultures, and after a time for autonomy or an independent state [13].

The educated middle class used the methods they were used to. In Italy, art, literature and music became important instruments for asserting the national values, and Italian operas became a symbol for liberty in the whole Europe. In Bohemia and in the Baltic provinces, it was a national duty to catalogue the dances and dialects of the peasants and edit heavy books about it. There was no question about mass politics before 1900. In Italy some of the younger and more radical nationalists tried to mobilize the artisans for a program of social justice - but the majority within the movement thought this was too adventurous and preferred trusting the pope or the king of Sardinia [14].

Yet, this pro-artisan policy, pursued by organisations like Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Germany and Young Ireland, was not completely without a trace. It was they who succeeded in launching the concept of national social reform or republicanism among the urban lower classes. Popular demands were, much because of their activities, successively conceived as national, despite the principally cosmopolitan attitudes of the early labour movement.

The majority, the peasants, remained sceptical to the enticements of the nationalist middle class. In Poland the peasants supported the empires during the national risings in 1830, 1846, 1848 and 1863 - the empires had abolished the serfdom while most of the Polish nationalists were landlords who were suspected of wanting to reintroduce it. According to Norman Davies, it wasn't until the German terror of the second world war that the Poles in general became nationalists. Not even earlier German forced purchases of land, indeed opposed by the Polis peasants, or forced German or Russian schooling helped to produce a nationalist mass movement, and during the interwar Polish independence there was almost a state of war between the peasants and the nationalist Polish government [15].

And to wind up, the Hungarian nationalism was a business of Hungary's numerous petty landlords, the Croatian by Zagreb's bourgeoisie attempting to guard its interests against first Hungarian political centralization and then against German industrial competition, and the Catalan by Barcelona's bourgeoisie. The latter had some success in allying with the farmers in their opposition to the Spanish government's national centralization. On the other hand they provoked, with their authoritarian patriarchalism, the strong labour movement of Barcelona to programmatically use Castilian in their publications; the first Catalanist political manifestation by the way was a protest against Madrid's attempt to abolish child labour [16].

It is perhaps not surprising that these rather authoritarian traditions so easily capitulate to the contemporary empire building of the European bourgeoisie.

Wasn't there any popular nationalism during the nineteenth century? Oh yes. Take the Estonian one. The Estonian national movement wasn't so much directed against the Russian state as against the German landlords who owned the Baltic provinces until the mid nineteenth century, and justified their rule with an alleged cultural superiority.

During the first half of the century the old forced labour was gradually replaced with a more manageable tenancy system, which gave more liberty of action to the peasants, yet without giving them so much economic benefit. Meanwhile, inequality increased because the more substantial peasants could afford buying their land [17].

Since the German landowners legitimated their power in culture, the peasants made their first thrust there. In the 1870s and 1880s musical association were established in almost every parish. To be sure, the organisers were the educated people in the villages, teachers and priests, but the peasants were soon very active. They sang, arranged dancing for the youth, founded libraries and staged theatre. In the 1890s when the landlords were getting suspicious against the cultural associations, a temperance movement followed, with a strong cultural streak. The political demands of the Estonians were directed against the landowners, they hoped that the Russian state would help them, and no thoughts of separation were aired before the Russian empire broke down in the first world war. Typically enough, the first move of the Estonian state was to seize and share the estates among the peasants; when this was done the energy split in dozens of political parties.

Perhaps the most successful example of a national movement during the nineteenth century was the Norwegian one, which was the most popular of them all. It began as a democratic peasant movement against the Norwegian government and its maintaining of Norwegian interests in the world market, and was converted to nationalism only through the logics of the struggle [18].

The backbone of the movement was two categories.

The first was the peasants in the mountain valleys and fjords. They lived in egalitarian subsistence villages which had to some measure begun to open up to the market. They had no interest in paying taxes to state officials whose most important duty was to assert export interests. They struggled for local autonomy to break the power of the state. They had some success with that, in electing a majority of peasants to the parliament to legislate on local autonomy and a democratic jury system in the courts.

The other category was the fundamentalist Christian fishing communities in the south coast. They had since the eighteenth century tried to break the trading monopoly of the merchants and protected their interests through a cooperative alternative society of such strength that it still partly exists.

The adversary of the peasants and fishermen, the Norwegian state bureaucracy, tried to protect itself through appeals to the king, who was primarily the king of Sweden, to block the decisions of the peasant majority in the Parliament. For these, it was an irresistible point that the government had to support itself on foreign interests. Peasants, fishermen, and later also workers, got an opportunity to pose themselves as the nation, in contrast to the government, and use the national day May 17 to demonstrate their demands.

The democratic alliance was organised through farmers' associations and peoples' high schools, an invention by the Danish farmers' movement that emphasized the link between the farmers and the nation, or simply stated that the nation was the farmers (Grundtvigianism, after the leading ideologist of the Danish farmers' movement, see chapter 7). The movement launched the peasant dialects as a national language through an organised language movement - unlike the middle class movements on the European continent which launched a standardized city language. It succeeded in deposing the bureaucratic government and in 1905 it had mobilized the whole people to proclaim the independence of Norway.

The national alliance in Norway remained, unlike all other countries, popular, democratic and anti-bureaucratic, based in the autonomy of the local communities and not in the career interests of the urban middle class. The mountain and fjord farmers, and their ambivalent posture to the world market society is still to a high degree setting the tone in Norwegian culture, making it able to organise the most powerful opposition to the imperial project of the European elites. "Norway, the different country", a slogan of the EU resisters, has still some truth in it, to the annoyance of the sophisticated urban middle class.

The importance of these national movements in the European semi-periphery is perhaps primarily local. But particularly the East European movement succeeded, primarily through tactic skill, to establish the principle of local political autonomy as self-evident; in 1917 it was acknowledged by the representatives of the state system at the conference at Versailles.

The European national movements that influenced the global spread of national movements and the practice of these movements were however the Irish and the Russian ones.

Ireland was England's first and nearest colony, established through military conquest in the seventeenth century. Its role was to provide the English industrial towns with cheap food to allow the wages to be low. The way the system worked was that Irish tenants raised cereals and cattle for English landlords, for with they got the right to cultivate potatoes for subsistence. The efficiency of the system is best demonstrated by the famine in 1845-48 when about 800.000 Irish peasants starved to death without affecting the food export the least [19].

At least from 1760, when the commercialization of agriculture began, a great peasant rebellion is registered about every decade, all the small risings uncounted. Some of the rebellions would last for years. With the time, they established an organisatorical tradition, with uniforms, secret passwords, fancy names like "Oakboys" and "Ribbonmen". Typical actions were occupation of pastures to plant potatoes, refusals to do forced labour, attacks on peasant-evicting landlords, and refusal to pay tithes - a popular way of uniting Catholics and Presbyterians against the English Church.

Over time, a middle layer of wealthy tenants arose, who pursued commercial agricultural methods. By then, particular movements for land workers and cottagers developed which turned against these commercial tenants with bread seizures and occupations; the tenants answered violently and real wars were waged in the early 1810s.

The towns were also hit as the English produce was able to outcompete Irish burghers. It was they, and the commercial tenants, who established the first Irish national movements. To them belonged the United Irishmen which tried to use the discontent with high war taxes to raise an Irish rebellion in cooperation with the French army. It had difficulty in communicating with the peasant movements, partly because so many Irish nationalists were themselves peasant-evicting landlords and subject to peasant disgust. For example, members of the United Irishmen took part in the pursuit of land worker organisations, and a generation later the Young Ireland called off its resistance to the starvation disaster, according to the labour leader James Connolly because they were afraid to provoke a peasant rebellion against the landlords.

But sometimes, they were successful. The movement that invented the modern peoples' movement organisation with mass membership and employed functionaries, the Catholic Association, was a mobilization to end the discrimination of Catholics, i.e. the majority of Irishmen. It was preceded by a Christian awakening among the peasants in Munster and it collected a million members, arranged mass meetings and demonstrations over all Ireland. It succeeded in a few years, 1823-1829, to get the British parliament to revoke the laws prohibiting Catholics to own land and be civil servants. The Irish middle class was the main beneficiary, but the campaign was all-Irish and strengthened the common resistance to the colonial power. But the Presbyterian smallholders in Ulster, hitherto a driving force in the national movement, dropped off and supported increasingly the British rule. Resistance was increasingly a Catholic concern - one example of the difficulty to form exact and effective identities serving the whole peripheral territory.

The starvation disaster and the mass emigration to America that followed raised the price for labour and strengthened the bargaining power of the tenants towards the landlords. Meanwhile, the land workers were enfeebled politically since they almost disappeared. For that reason, the nationalists began to approach the peasants more wholeheartedly, and in the nationalist peasant organisation Irish Land League they took up a common struggle for ownership of the land. After a few years Land League dominated the local politics and unofficial justice particularly in west Ireland. It was now the concept boycott was coined, when the Land League boycotted the manor steward John Boycott from September 23, 1880. The boycotts against recalcitrant representatives of the landlord class was combined with refusals and going slow in paying the rent, and parliamentarian horse-trading, see chapter 7, and the aim was reached: the British state began to buy the rapidly value-losing land of the estates, and sell it off cheap to the tenants. This also led to a growing respect for the Irish national movement in England.

But primarily, the result was that the majority of peasants began to perceive themselves as nationalists and act increasingly self-confident in the local politics, where the English rule was perceived as increasingly irrelevant.

The parliamentary horse-trading dominated the Irish political life in the late nineteenth century. The aim was Home Rule, and the strategy was to support the British political party that promised most.

Farmers and urban traders grew more prosperous from 1890, and tended to link their prosperity to the nationalist cause. They began to develop a culture inspired of Irish myths, the socalled Celtic renaissance, which also appealed to some degree to anti-imperialist Englishmen [20]. They began to cultivate ideas of Irish economic development built on cooperative self-reliance, protectionism and Irish autonomy in partly voluntary forms - Sinn Féin, as this tendency was called. They began to do well about 1905 when it was evident that the English parties would rather do business among themselves than with the Irish, and that parliamentary horse-dealing led to nothing without popular activities.

The prosperity didn't reach the propertyless workers, who were forced to either emigrate or gather in the militant labour movement of Dublin and Belfast. It had more immediate needs than Irish autonomy - Dublin had at this time a higher mortality than Calcutta - and 1907-1914 it pursued an almost continuous strike movement for decent working conditions. The national movement didn't care or was vaguely hostile because the workers "spoiled Irish industry".

The increasingly tough attitude shown by the capitalist towards the strikes caused the labour movement to build up a citizen's guard. It also led to an increasing nationalist attitude among the workers - the biggest capitalists were English, and labour leaders like James Connolly thought that the workers would get nowhere if the Irish economy wasn't directed from Ireland. The participants in the notorious Easter Rising in 1916 belonged to a large number to the workers' Citizens' Army.

There was another category that was, to say the least, sceptic to Irish home rule - the industrial class in Ulster that lived from selling products to the British market. They saw themselves threatened by ruin by Sinn Féin's self-reliance policy, and threatened with rebellion in 1914. Their agitation instrument towards Ulster lower classes was Anti-Catholicism.

These socalled Unionists and the inclination of the British government to submit to them played over the initiative to the most radical faction of the Irish independence movement, Irish Republican Brotherhood, IRB. They, a rather small group from the lower urban middle class, had all the time argued for an armed rebellion, and the arming of the Unionist made this strategy stick. During the last prewar summer, some 150.000 Irishmen gathered in the Irish Volunteers to protect Home rule with armed violence. The movement now spread quickly and broadly in the countryside. Primarily, it appealed to the young men who had had the duty since the days of the Ribbonmen to guard their villages against bailiffs and policemen.

In these quarters, IRB got a great appeal.

IRB's and Citizens' Army's failed rising in 1916 left the Irish rather cold. The indiscriminate British revenge turned the opinion however. But the issue that united all (Catholic) Irishmen behind the national movement was the war resistance. From 1915, a spontaneous resistance against conscription began to spread, and it was skilfully organised by IRB. The British government was forced to give up its plans to send Irishmen to the trenches of Flanders.

In the elections in 1918 the Irish thankfully elected a great majority of IRB-Sinn Féin candidates. Also conducive was, according to George Boyce, the ability of the radical nationalists to engage the priests for their cause - a consequence of the anti-catholicism of the Unionists [21]. To the optimism for the nationalist cause contributed also the support for national autonomy expressed by the peace conference at Versailles. The newly elected parliamentarians declared themselves swiftly as the parliament of the independent Ireland, and began to attack English police pickets, relying on the English indiscriminate reprisals to radicalise the opinion. They counted right.

The war-weary Englishmen had no energy to repress the rebellion. Moreover, they were forced to consider their American ally and the many Irish immigrants in the USA. The Irish nationalist were able, exclusively through perfect planning and hitting only at the weakest points of the British, to force the British to acknowledge Irish independence in 1921, however with conditions [22].

The weakness of the movement was immediately apparent. For two years a civil war raged among the nationalists about which conditions they would accept. Did the opportunistically shaped identity exclude the Presbyterians of Ulster or didn't it? The militarized atmosphere created during the insurrection contributed to the heating of the conflict; during the insurrection political considerations had little influence on the proceedings which were run almost exclusively by the village youth in a decentralized way.

As government, the nationalists pursued for a generation a politics founded in Sinn Féin's ideas about industrial development through self-reliance. Their success in breaking away from British economic dependence was modest, and in the seventies they opened the doors for the transnationals, which were enticed with tax exemptions. In 1973 Ireland joined the EEC and accepted the same free trade dictatorship that had lead to the starvation in the 1840s, confidently assured that Ireland now was a part of the system center and didn't have to risk things like that.

The national movement in Russia is buried under a morass of myths. But despite their pretensions of representing repressed classes it should be clear that the different middle class movements that shaped the Russian revolution ideologically, and finally also took government power there, were primarily national and aimed at asserting Russia's independence towards the system center. Their aim was to advance. The support to peasant movements (in the case of the Narodniks) and to the labour movements (in the case of the Bolsheviks) were alliance politics and were never allowed to infringe upon the main course [23].

The mainstay of these movements was the intellectuals. In Russia, where ordinary politics was forbidden, the only public life was the literary one, and its representatives got for that reason a key role in representing the needs of different groups and the needs of the generalized Russian society.

Unlike the East European nationalists, the Russians could not blame a centralist state to repress a regional periphery. And unlike the Irish nationalists they could not blame a foreign occupant. They had an eminently independent state; they had to attack the world market system as such. It was this that made the Russian revolution such an effective example for other national movements. And they had to attack their own upper class for neglecting national development needs in their own corrupt interest. For that reason they had to ask which interests within the country they needed to cooperate with if they wanted to replace the present rulers, and they also had to appeal to them in some way.

There were two alternative partners, apart from the middle class the intellectuals were closest to, the peasants and the workers.

When the Russian peasants were liberated from serfdom in 1861, the landlords kept about a sixth of the land, including a requirement to get paid for the rest. The peasants had no means to pay. But the power of the village communities was now in the hands of the peasants, and they were determined to take it all. The landlords, on their part, began to run their estates more businesslike, evicted tenants and were increasingly strict in recover debts [24].

When the Russian state lost the war against Japan in 1905 the peasants saw an opportunity. While the workers in the towns went into a general strike, the peasants attacked the manors and burnt buildings and papers. They also attacked the representatives of the government, refused to pay taxes and liberated conscript soldiers. According to official sources, 3000 manors were attacked. The owners were usually spared, though.

The counterstrike of the government was to dissolve the collectivist village communities and favour those peasants who were able to establish themselves as commercial farmers. This policy had scant success. Locally, the collective pressure of the peasants towards rich members big enough to ensure that only 14% had been detached by the outbreak of the war. And wealthy peasants were also dependent at times of communal support against the state bureaucracy, according to Magagna. So probably only the very rich, or the very ruthless, had resources to break away; those were the socalled kulaks, the bad reputation of which was later to be so important.

The movement of the peasants was thus rather successful. But the parts of the intellectual middle class that tried to appeal to them for support for their modernization program, the Narodniks, had very little success. The rebelliousness of the peasants didn't imply that they had any national development aims. Their greatest desire was that the state and the urban middle class would let them alone. Their understanding of "modernisation" according to world market system terms was perspicacious. They were against it.

The Russian labour movement is described in chapter 5. It was to this labour movement the Bolsheviks appealed. The Bolsheviks was a faction within the Russian social democrat party, a party dominated by intellectuals - workers kept aloof from party politics except in 1905 and 1917, since they couldn't control it. The Bolshevik method was to contribute to unionization and defend workers hit by repression. The idea behind the choice of the Bolsheviks was that workers was the only category in society except the educated middle class itself that would possibly have anything to gain from modernization.

To keep the control of the movement firmly in the hands of the intellectual middle class, the Bolsheviks consciously broke away from the democratic peoples' movement tradition developed during the nineteenth century, and built up a secluded organisation of functionaries, appointed from above. The pattern was developed in radical middle class movements like the early nineteenth century revolutionary small groups, the Freemasonry, or the Catholic church which was organised in this way in the eighth century for roughly the same reasons, see chapter 3. The organisation was financed with business, crime, and gifts from developmentalist capitalists. An organisation like this had, as Lenin confessed in 1905, scant capacity to contribute to the rise of a popular mass movement. But it turned out to be exceptionally competent in getting hold of an existing movement and give it a certain direction.

The Russian government broke down in 1917 because its incompetence and jealousy had turned out to be a disaster in the war and alienated all classes. While the front and the economy went to pieces, politically inept burghers, officers and bureaucrats tried to organise a coup d'état to save the country when they were anticipated by workers and conscripts in Petrograd, whose respect for the government had dwindled even faster than the respect of the middle class. When February turned into March, when the factories were closed for lack of coal, the female workers organised demonstrations against the shortage of food. And the first of March the soldiers mutinied rather than shooting at the workers. The regime fell, and the hitherto powerless parliament, the Duma, reluctantly took responsibility [25].

In the economic and political confusion, it was necessary for the workers to take control over the supplies to the factories. Such a control was not completely unprepared; as soon as 1915, unionists and capitalists had begun to cooperate for this aim, even if the unionists had been thrown into jail because of their insolent meddling into government business. Liberated by the revolution they took initiative to the Petrograd Soviet to coordinate the supplies. In the Soviet, the educated middle class people from the socialist parties got an advantage because of their superior organisation.

When the market and the communications stopped working and starvation was near in Petrograd and Moscow, only the Bolsheviks took a responsibility for the supplies. The provisional government of the Duma was very unwilling to "exceed their responsibilities" which they interpreted narrowly, and moreover it seemed incapable of giving up old expansionist war aims that everybody else had lost interest in. For that reason, the support for the Bolsheviks grew during the summer of 1917 to a mass movement where the educated middle class could only lead through standing by the demands of the majority.

In October the majority of Petrograd and other industrial towns supported the Bolsheviks and their demands for bread, peace and government responsibility for the food supplies. The rising that carried the Bolsheviks to power was organised by the red guards. Almost nobody supported the Duma government.

Meanwhile, the peasants took initiative in the countryside again. They got help from returning peasant-soldiers. Now, they took over the estates for good. The government administration was shattered and the land of the kulaks was forced back into the village communities. Contrary to later assertions, the kulaks were liquidated as a class in 1917. Of all competing political groups only the Bolsheviks accepted the actions of the peasants, and for this reason they got support, or at least benevolent neutrality from the peasants too.

But as related in the chapter about the Russian labour movement, it didn't help with a Bolshevik government to reorganise the national supply. It was caused by the war, and the peace only aggravated it in the short run, because the industry was geared towards war production. The German occupation of Ukraine also stopped food deliveries to the cities. The workers' support for the Bolsheviks ended quickly and the party dwindled again to a party of functionaries. And the forced requisitions of food to the cities turned the peasants into enemies.

Paradoxically, the civil war saved the Bolshevik government. The revolt by a collection of discredited politicians and generals with foreign support, and the disintegration of the country, placed the radical nationalists in a role they were better suited to than the role as labour leaders - as the saviours of the fatherland. Now, the support began to flow in from all national groups like for example the military.

The war liberated the Bolsheviks from the need to court the favour of the workers. It almost finished the industry, and the workers left towns for the countryside, they became peasants again, or soldiers, or - if they were safe politically - lower government bureaucrats.

On the other hand, the power of the peasants grew. They controlled the food production. In the absence of regular state administration, they had the local power. They weren't interested in what happened at the national scene. To village organised peasants state and bureaucracy are always incarnations of repression that should be kept at a distance. For that aim, they tried as well as they could to play off different power pretenders against eachother and supported sometimes Bolsheviks, sometimes other parties, according to local criterions.

With the workers out of the picture, the ruling nationalist middle class party had to look for support, or at least neutrality, from the peasants. During the twenties they accepted the local autonomy of the peasants, politically and economically. They were forced to that by a series of rebellions, the most serious by the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in 1921. But they could not achieve their great project, advancement in the world market system, through concessions to the peasants. For this project they needed investments in industry, and the only ones who had resources to invest were the peasants. Accordingly, the peasants had to be broken and plundered. This was carried through in 1929-1932 with military means, under the pretext of liquidating the kulaks that not longer existed. In 1933 serfdom was reintroduced. As a precaution it was also introduced for the working class in the new industry [26]. The reply from workers and peasants was a continuous go-slow that grew increasingly effective with time. The peasants also resorted to sabotage, social banditism and murders of government employees; to get a reasonable peace with them, the regime had to give back some of what it had stolen and get rid of some of their most brutal tools, which it did during the purges of 1937-39 [27].

Henceforth the modernist Russian bourgeoisie ruled in the interest of the nation's world market system career, and of course in their own interest. Those who still advocated some class alliance were killed, as were those who expressed some popular demands contrary to the national interest. This affected not least the old Bolsheviks who had believed in such alliances. But concessions to the direct producers at the expense of the market career were seen as treachery by a middle class that thought Russia's backwardness as a greater evil than the powerlessness of Russian workers and peasants.

The Russian industrialisation strategy thus didn't build on the needs of the majority but like most national development programs on capital accumulation. The resources were scarce. The social basis of the world market career was narrow; primarily consisting of the technical cadres, the engineers, which were favoured by the industrialisation and who carried the nationalist regime. The political integration for the rest built primarily on paternalist networks. In due time this weak base would lead to the fall of the nationalist regime in 1989-92, and to the end of Russian self-assertion [28].

But there was one alliance, one solidarity that the Russian nationalists didn't desert: the solidarity as a peripheral nation. The revolution in 1917 proclaimed all peoples' right to self-determination, and four years later the Russians united with all anti-colonialist movements in the whole world at a congress in Baku. Henceforth they gave, wholeheartedly in the beginning but later with some glancing at their self-interest, political, economic and sometimes even military support to movements who aimed at liberating their territories from colonial repression, in China, in Vietnam, in India, in South Africa, in West Asia, in Cuba.

However, they didn't take seriously their posing as labour movement, and never supported a labour movement against capitalists anywhere. This falsehood would cause much damage by creating false identities in the labour movement, a tradition that is not fully overcome yet within the peoples' movement system. Like four hundred years earlier, careerist semi-peripheral states' theft and corruption of a underclass language has left the underclass silent, without tools for interpreting its own conditions.

If the Creole revolutions successfully introduced the regional self-determination as a principle, and if the east and south European movements got a global support for their ambiguous principle of nations as a reasonable organisational method for the state system, the Irish and the Russian national movements created an effective model of movement practice to be copied by other national movements. The Irish with their mass organisations, their boycotts, their favouring of local production, and their combining of peasant and national movements, and the Russians with their disciplined party, their party-directed armed rebellions, and their rigidly ruled national development policy, became the two poles of identification in the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century. In the Russian case, the connection was fully conscious and publicly acknowledged by the linking up to a communist identity.

Anti-colonial movements

 

The polarization in center and periphery may have caused conflicts at the regional level. But as indicated in chapter 4, the conflicts were much deeper in the global peripheries. The very reason why the centers conquered colonies was that the direct producers of the center with increasing success were able to pose conditions for their participation, which was affecting capital accumulation negatively. For that reason new, unorganised direct producers were needed who would be pushed to work at less favourable conditions, and they were to be found in countries that could be organised as peripheries.

 

Latin American populism

The failures of independence were first acknowledged in Latin America. The independence movements were led by local export capitalists, and the independent states were accordingly dominated by their export interests. Production for local needs was considered dangerous and anti-developmentalist, and thwarted. Instead, labour was directed to mines and plantations by means of indebtedness and expropriation. The upper class used the export profits to buy European and North American consumer goods, a pattern that would be followed by the urban middle class as soon as it got an opportunity.

Nowhere, this policy was followed more dogmatically than in Mexico, under the socalled liberal era 1854-1911, culminating in Diaz' development despotism [58].

Labour and land were commercialized through the land law of 1861 which cancelled collective and customary ownership. The commercial holdings were thus able to subdue the peasant villages and use them for export. The resistance of the peasants had up to the mid nineteenth century been directed against forced labour and taxes. Now land theft grew more important and would be the most important of the movers of the revolution of 1910 [59].

Rebellions against land thefts and metropolitan power were endemic in Mexico. For the fertile parts of the land were densely populated and couldn't accommodate both peasant villages and commercial estates, and the development-despotic Diaz regime was very eager to discipline local elites. Yet, peasants and provincials were no serious threat as long as each rebelled separately. Each movement was, as peasants movements used to be, local and easily repressed.

The revolution was triggered by a democratic movement among the urban middle class. This middle class had been favoured, or even created, by the economic policy of the dictatorship, which had concentrated wealth to the towns to the expense of the countryside. But its position was precarious. The political power lay with a tiny coterie of friends of the dictator, who saw the country as a kind of personal belonging to plunder at pleasure. Faced with the customary re-election of Díaz in 1910 the politically aware middle class organised an election campaign based on a program of opposing corruption and nepotism. Of course the votes for the opposition candidate, the businessman Francisco Madero, was cancelled and himself thrown into prison, but as soon as he had escaped he called an insurrection.

Therewith, he coordinated and legitimated the divided popular movements which were now effective. For while the urban middle class preferred to wait and see, two groups responded.

Firstly, the mountain peasants of the north, serranos. They were less troubled with commercial estates than with government bailiffs. Many of them were commercial estate owners themselves. Others were peasants, donkey-drivers, miners, cattle-raisers or bandits, or all of these like the most famous of them, Pancho Villa.

The serranos responded first to the call for rebellion. They had resources - arms and horses, and they were used to a mobile life. Many of them had money too, to invest in the rebellion. They were very effective soldiers.

Secondly, village peasants in central Mexico, who for more than a generation had defended themselves against the encroachment of the commercial estates. The most militant of them were those who had current struggles going on, like the villages in Morelos against the sugar plantations or the Yaqui Indians against North American mines. They defended themselves as organised municipalities - their most legendary captain, Emliano Zapata, was for example mayor of Anenecuilco.

While serranos' mixed society was unable to agree on anything more advanced than local autonomy, its activists displaying the most amazing careerism when they had an opportunity, the village peasants represented a social program, expressed in the Ayala plan of 1911: an egalitarian peasant society at the expense of the commercial estates. This was a goal they never budged from, neither collectively nor individually.

Their role in the rebellion was to tear down the strength of the dictatorship at the home front.

It is striking that the workers didn't contribute much to the rebellion. Of course they sympathized with the opposition like most urban middle class people; politically they were a part of this middle class. The Díaz regime regarded them as such, permitting them to establish trade unions and legislating against child labour. And they also regarded themselves as such, in their contempt for the backward peasants and their identification with an Europeanized city culture.

The ruling class hurried to dispose of the dictatorship in an early phase of the rebellion, scared that it would grow to a peasant revolution, and let the dissatisfied middle class in. But the plan miscarried; the middle class was content to let the countryside down, but serranos and village peasants went on with their revolution and strengthened their positions. After a couple of years the military mutinied and reintroduced the dictatorship at an even narrower basis than before to get free hands to repress them.

This time, the middle class politicians had to make a serious alliance with the peasants. Madero's compromising with the Díaz high society had turned out to be suicidical. Of course the middle class politicians wouldn't think of abandoning their dominance, and were fully prepared to secure it violently if needed. But it was forced to bargain, accepting the peasants as a partner. The Ayala plan was a part of the new constitution, jointly adopted by both as a basis for the post-revolutionary Mexico, and the peasants got the titles of the land they had taken during the revolution. And serranos got their local autonomy. It is no coincidence that Mexican governments have to bargain with the Chiapas rebellion while their Guatemalan neighbours would have airbombed it; they are forced to, because of the relative strengths established by the revolution, primarily by the peasants of Morelos, see chapter 7.

The Mexican revolution was democratic, not particularly nationalist. Knight insists that the popular revolutionaries exclusively expropriated the Mexican upper classes and left foreign investments alone. But in the geographically layered world of the world market system, a regional movement has no choice. The new government had to organise nationalistically to realize any program. In the thirties it found itself following the Russian example, nationalizing oil and build up a national industry based in national planning and import substitution.

This model was also popular in other Latin American countries, particularly when the export markets in Europe and the USA collapsed in 1929. The urban middle class took the opportunity to challenge the export bourgeoisie with a policy that has been called Latin American populism: appeals to the urban workers and paternalist support to their weak unions, nationally controlled industrialization based in import substitution, and intense nationalism. This was a policy introduced in Mexico, but which in other countries lacked the ingredient that made it viable: a strong, independent peasant movement.

For that reason, the middle class finally had to compromise with the export bourgeoisie and give up their populism, after decades of sometimes heroic attempts. The compromise looked a little differently in different countries. In Argentina the labour movement took the initiative and frightened the middle class back into the arms of the meat exporters, who after a protracted and extremely destructive struggle with the workers were able to dismantle the industry where the workers were based. In Chile and Peru the populist forces were even brittler and their promises to everybody destroyed the economy when they were about to be met, after which the middle class gave up. In Venezuela, the populist middle class was converted into an export bourgeoisie itself, with oil as a speciality. Only in Brazil, the middle class was big enough to keep its self-confidence through all regime shifts and keep its aim, national self-assertion. Perhaps because they had never promised any integration of the direct producers and didn't have to rely on them.

The populists used the traditional ways of controlling the state - military coups, intrigues and elections. They shunned popular initiatives like the plague. In some cases, except Argentina, they were nevertheless dependent of such.

One was Bolivia. Activists from La Paz' little middle class had succeeded in using the defeat of the traditional rulers in the Chaco war in the thirties to gain access to power. When the traditional elite tried to revenge themselves, the miners saved the middle-class based government by three days of street fighting in 1953 [60].

The government tried to create a counterpoise to the miners, whom they feared a lot, by founding peasant organisations with themselves as leaders. But when the world market price of tin dropped, the towns couldn't afford to buy the peasants' crops so they consumed it themselves. At that point the urban middle class deserted populism and supported world market terror regimes instead.

The other case was Cuba [61].

Cuba is an untypical country in Latin America. The colonial rule continued to 1898 when a protracted liberation war resulted in North American occupation. US owned business took over the earlier Spanish estates, so the domestic export bourgeoisie remained weak. Middle class activists were glad to play middleman between the occupiers and the people in good times when there was plenty of money paid for sugar. In slump times they rather played the part as defenders of the fatherland and founded populist reform movements. Such a movement, dominated by students, overthrew a dictator in the thirties and launched an era of reforms that lasted until next boom. It never challenged the US supremacy however.

When the sugar prices began to decline in 1956, students took initiative again. They were hit by unemployment and were outsiders in the corruption system developed by the old populist leaders since the thirties, which tied key people from every sector to the regime. Outsiders were also the land workers and smallholders, and for the first time an alliance was developed between them and the populist middle class. For the first time, the populists were forced to take serious the land workers demand for land - the first to join Castro's guerrilla movements were the semi-illegal squatter society in the mountains. For the first time, the direct producers had a direct influence on the Cuban politics.

What gave the countryside movement hegemony within the opposition was paradoxically the traditional neglect of the government. The government didn't care about what happened there. But it thoroughly terrorized all urban opposition and forced oppositional people to escape to the countryside guerrilla. When the regime finally had to send an army against it in the summer 1958, the urban-bred soldiers didn't want to fight in the unfamiliar terrain and the government collapsed.

The new government was at first dominated by populist middle class politicians. But the participation of land workers and smallholders made a land reform necessary, and the US interests must necessarily pay for it. And the countryside people's control over the sugar plantations gave them control over Cuba. But control over Cuba was not enough to get out of the periphery role.

During the sixties the Cuban revolution was a source of inspiration for populist middle class youth over all Latin America. But the inspiration was not that a change of society is possible only through a majority alliance on the majority's condition; what was copied was the armed insurrection which the middle class youth hoped to carry through on behalf of the majority. This paternalist condescension continued to characterize the Latin American populism and made the activist easy victims when the populist middle class was called back to order [62]. Only in Central America, where the export bourgeoisie kept the middle class out of influence very long, the Cuban armed strategy had some temporary success.

 

Chinese communism

The most successful national movement according to populist principles during the twentieth century took place in China [63]. The Chinese central power had lost control over the country in connection with the late nineteenth century peasant rebellions, and local strongmen had established small statelets for themselves, see chapter 4. For that reason it was easy for the colonial powers to establish their own bases with extra-legal administrations and take control over raw materials and labour. In early twentieth century, American, European and Japanese businesses ruled over Chinese taxation, customs, telegraph, railways and the Great Canal.

In China, people from two circles reacted. Reformers within the Chinese administration concluded that China needed reform after European models; their attempts failed because of deficient resources and suspicions from the regime against everything new. And peasants rebelled against taxmen and European railway builders, merchants and religious colporteurs, but their rebellions were uncoordinated.

But there were nevertheless some attempts at coordination. A secret society [64], Justice and Harmony, got government approval for a rebellion in Shantung in 1899, but European armies put them down and took the opportunity to sack the Chinese state and claim reparations.

This broke the government completely. The peasant rebellions grew and became more frequent. In the power vacuum a small group of intellectuals with European education and support from the Shanghai merchants saw an opportunity; they took contacts with rebellious peasants and secret societies and with this alliance they proclaimed the republic in 1911. The imperial court gave up without resistance, but it was more difficult than that for the republicans to establish new order.

For the alliance with the peasants proved to be only formal. It was impossible to agree on any program - the urban middle class intellectuals who led the republic had a rather confused idea of peasant needs and were primarily interested in their own modernization project, among other things based in commercialization of food. The peasants, who weren't interested in this supported their own secret societies instead, and in this conflict, the local strongmen, the socalled warlords, got the best of it. The republicans capitulated and left over power to the strongest of these, Yuan Shikai.

Meanwhile, the colonial powers strengthened their hold, and lawlessness grew and made peasant landless and exploiters rich.

What created an opportunity for political action was the peace congress in Paris in 1919. While it recognized the right to independence for all nations, it also recognized the right for Japan to colonize China. The students of Beijing University reacted against this hypocrisy. They organised a demonstration in May 4, 1919, against the most pro-Japanese ministers, burnt the home of one and gave the other a beating. Out of it a movement grew. Merchants organised boycotts against Japanese commodities and subscriptions for Chinese production, workers in Japanese industries went out to strike, and the demonstrations spread to all China. After some failed attempts to repress the movement, the government gave in, refused to sign the Versailles agreement, but settled with the Japanese in secret.

The May 4 movement didn't reach its aims, but it changed the political climate. Youth and women had been the leaders, which shattered the Confucian order built on the authority of old men. A new spirit took hold among the students, built on independence, enterprise, practicism and science, and a host of groups were founded to live the new ideals. And despite the catchword of the movement - save the country - a cosmopolitan curiosity for new ideas also flourished [65].

From this movement, three parties originated, which would have a great influence on the continued development of the Chinese revolution.

The first was the labour movement, primarily in Shanghai. It had begun as a support movement for the boycotts of the merchants, but after a few years it didn't mind making claims on Chinese capitalists. But its most important target was still the foreign businesses. This is treated more fully in chapter 5.

The second was the students who established the Chinese communist party. They tried, in accordance with communist tradition, cooperation with the labour movement and contributed to organising trade unions. It was a tiny group, but the only one interested in contacts outside the traditional Chinese elite. It had also a valuable ally in the Russian government which had made itself popular by relinquishing old claims of concessions.

The third was the merchant society of Shanghai. They had profited from the war and developed an export of Chinese textiles and even mining and steel . They also profited on the impoverishment of Chinese peasants by exporting food. But the favours given to Japanese and European business damaged them severely. They grew increasingly impatient with the unserious regime of the warlords. Their participation in the May 4 movement had been a first step, it was followed up by a republican project to which they invited the other participants.

This project was set up in Guangzhou, far from Beijing and impossible to harass from there. After having cleaned the region from local warlords a counterregime was set up, supported by three assets: money from the Shanghai merchants, the popular appeal of the communists, and Russian organisational principles.

Primarily, it was the educated middle class that took part in organisational work. A certain antagonism could early be seen in the movement. The majority had a background in the coast cities, they gathered in the nationalist party. A minority came from the countryside; they made up the communist party. Bud during a few years they were able to cooperate smoothly; the communists organised trade unions and pesant associations and saw to it htat they turned against foreigners, while the nationalists organised cooperation with the financial world. Together they organised the army they would use against the warlords.

The trade unions stroke in 1925, against Hongkong and British interests. It went on for a year; unfortunately it also hit against Chinese merchants and the alliance was close to a break. To prevent a total conflict, both parties backed military conquest instead. In 1926 they sent the northern Expedition towards the Yangtse valley, an army of 100.000 dedicated anti-imperialists. The expedition had been prepared locally by communists organising peasant associations. When the army appeared, the associations spread with lightning speed; the peasant rebelled, chased away local oppressors and took over the local power.

In the peasant associations, all were members, not only a minority as in the secret societies. They had an army of their own. They abolished inegalitarian relations like clans and oppression of women, they introduced puritan laws to defend their small resources, they started schools with peasant oriented courses. They did not expropriate land because they didn't want to offend the conservative nationalists, but they reduced leases and interests. When they had gained impetus, they didn't need professional activists.

The labour movement had also prepared for the liberation. In Shanghai, where it was strongest, the labour movement rose and conquered the town several days before the army arrived.

The strength of the peasant and labour movements frightened the bourgeoisie that carried the nationalist party. When the army controlled the Yangtse valley there was no need to maintain the alliance. The achievement of the Shanghai trade unions convinced them to take action. Supported by captives from the warlord armies and mobsters from the Shanghai underworld they broke first the labour movement, then the peasants' associations.

But in the inaccessible fringes of the provinces, the peasant movement was not so easy to break. Peasant activists and communist trade union organisers together with deserters from the abused Northern Expedition survived there and succeeded to keep away the nationalist party for seven years. In eleven enclaves with in all ten million people, peasant movement and communists organised the administration while the army deserters, bandits and communists looked after the defence. And this double role gave hegemony to the communists.

This practical organising was a completely new thing, compared to the traditional secret societies.

Politics in the liberated districts built on the peasant associations, but was more radical. The peasants didn't need to appease nationalists, so they didn't mind expropriating the landlords and share the land between them. The communists tried to counter the radicalism of the peasants not to make more enemies than necessary; perhaps their being sons of wealthy peasants also contributed to this. Since they had to do without much contact with the surrounding world they founded industries, which except providing the peasants with industrial products were used for building such contacts, on the terms of the liberated districts.

The success of the communists was based in the fact that they could provide a service that wasn't provided by anyone else. They provided a market and industrial goods, they provided health care, roads, defence against warlords, and not least career paths for ambitious peasant youths. They were able to provide real benefits for each peasant that took part in the movement.

However, the nationalist army succeeded after six failures to repress all these enclaves save one in 1934, and forced the participants to flee. This escape has become legendary; under the name The Long March a 4.500 km retreat was carried through, with constant fighting, and constant opportunities of propaganda and recruitment, until it reached the last enclave far away in the northwest.

One cause of the failure, according to Chesneaux, was that the communist party never used its whole strength on these enclaves, but used the enclaves as resources for risings in the cities that failed one after another. Behind the choice lay a developmentalist belief that the cities belonged to the future; it was also nurtured by the trade union successes of the twenties. Only during the retreat, Mao Zedong and his more practical peasant organisers succeeded in wringing the party from the hands of trade union functionaries and intellectuals, and commit it entirely to the countryside.

When the Japanese attacked China in 1937 and occupied the coastal area, the nationalists chose to lie low - probably because merchants don't like to risk their property. But doing so, they threw away their capital of confidence as nationalists; the least you can expect from such people is that they should defend their country against foreign occupation. The communists didn't do that mistake. They declared war on the Japanese and won the allegiance of many conservative nationalists. From the perspective of the peasants, resistance to the Japanese was rational also; the tactics of destruction practiced by the Japanese hurt the peasants more than any.

In 1947, the communists were politically the strongest. They had been the only organising power in the regions occupied by the Japanese. Their well-managed realms contrasted starkly with the corruption of the nationalists. The nationalists didn't see this but declared war to the communists and lost. In 1947-1949 the communist armies swept over all China.

The swift victory changed the relation of strength between peasants and party functionaries. Between the Long March and the victory they had together built up a society in the northwest. But the rest of the country was conquered with military means. While the communists in the northwest had been forced to share power with the peasants, they were now able to establish themselves as a bureaucratic hierarchy to be obeyed. This aim was achieved by establishing client networks of privilege, like the political bosses of the American cities in the late nineteenth century; some were allowed to participate in the gains while others were not; the latter had, in consequence with the formal democratic constitution, to be disgraced and blackened to provide a motivation for the exclusion.

This contrast between the democratic northwest and the autocratic center was early acknowledged as a problem; it was this contrast the many Maoist campaigns were supposed to mediate in. The Great Leap as well as the campaign of The Hundred Flowers were supposed to assert the position of the peasants against the functionaries - but the weakness of Maoism, never to allow the peasants or anybody else to organise autonomously, made failures of all these campaigns.

The Culture Revolution was released by Mao's attempt to stop police violence against critics and raise the status of the majority against the bureaucrats. Encouraged by this support, all out-groups in the Chinese society tried to assert themselves against past injustices. Poor peasants tried to assert the collective integrity of the villages against state functionaries and more prosperous peasants who had begun to use the market to part from the village solidarity, while the peasant collective as a whole tried to get control over the cooperatives and municipalities to run them after their own interest instead of the interest of the state. Contract workers without social rights tried to assert themselves against life employed workers in the national industry. And, particularly, those who had been persecuted and disgraced by the local party bosses tried to break these paternalistic networks. They contributed with most of the violence in the Culture Revolution. The contemporaneous revolt of all these categories shattered all China. But without all organisatorical traditions they soon losed out to the functionaries [66].

The peasant revolution in China is seemingly of limited value for the peasants. Fifty years after the party functionaries as a ruling class with scant interest for the conditions of the direct producers. But it was an unqualified success from a national viewpoint. Of all peripheral countries, China has shown least sensitivity to the demands of the world market system, while it has had the greatest economic growth, i.e. the fastest advance towards the center. From 1950, China has advanced from a position near the bottom-line to the global average, and this development has also favoured the peasants [67]. This may partly be a consequence of the fact that China never was a colony and for that reason never had its economy so thoroughly subordinated to the needs of the system center. But it is also possible that it is a consequence of the huge mobilisation of majorities.

The peasant revolution in China also informed the conditions of strengths in the neighbouring countries. In Japan, the fresh labour movement was able, with not much effort, to raise its salaries to the highest levels in the world. In South Korea and Taiwan the rulers were scared into a land reform that was the most radical in the world, next to Chinas's, while they without tangible threats begun a national industrial development based in import substitution, protection against businesses of the system center, and even aggressive marketing of industrial products in the system center. A serious populism, if you like, that went further than in Latin America because the threat of popular mobilization was greater [68].

 

Islamist populism

Populist mobilizations are also a characteristic of the third great peripheral region that was not colonised in the early twentieth century, West Asia. There, the Ottoman empire tried to strengthen its control by building a centralised state from 1820 on, to assert itself against European assaults. This implied emergence of center-periphery relations, against which two categories in particular tried to protect themselves from [69].

One was the numerous religious minorities in the area - Armenians, Maronites, Greek Christians etc - which wouldn't have great opportunities in a Turkish Sunnite power milieu. They tried to protect themselves in two ways. The first was to appeal to the system center states, England and France, to support their local autonomy. This was the method of the Maronites in Lebanon; they tried with some success get a French support for an independent Lebanon they could control. The other was to invent an Arab identity that could be set off the Turkish state. Copts in Egypt and Christians in Syria were the inventors of Arab nationalism.

The other was the tribal societies in the peripheries of the empire, primarily the present Saudi Arabia. Their society differed too much from the urbanised Turkish bureaucracy to be assimilated.

These two groups were helpful tools when the system center powers divided the Ottoman empire after the first world war.

But it was in Egypt and Iran popular national movements first were founded. This was because the system center powers first tried to encroach upon the region in these countries.

In Egypt a local regime in the early nineteenth century had tried to create a competing center within the Ottoman empire, built on commercial cotton production. This attempt stumbled economically in the 1870s and the European creditors took control. It was the resistance to that control, or more particularly, resistance to a cut in the state budget, that provoked the first popular national movement in 1881.

It began as a military revolt against reduced salaries, but it soon spread to the peasants, attacking the taxmen and other state officials. In the towns, the educated middle class began to express their views in newspapers and lecturers' desks, Some of the were influenced by European models and demanded parliamentary reforms. Others rather expressed themselves in therms of justice and would with time develop the Islamist tradition. Together, they had no difficulty in mobilize the street and carry through the wanted parliamentary reforms.

In spite of an ever-tightening European grip over ownership and economy, the political public developed by this movement survived. In it, there were alternating appeals to the Arab or Egyptian nation or the Islamic solidarity, and a popular rising succeeded in throwing out the British occupation troops in 1919.

The tradition that would finally be called Islamism was born among people, primarily intellectuals, who had taken part in these movements and the contemporaneous ones in Iran, see below. They gave themselves the task to answer the European challenge in a way emanating from the local cultural tradition, by using an Islamic language and by link up with Islam as a utopia [70].

This discussion, called salafiya, was developed to a political practice during the continued struggles against the British rule in Egypt during the twenties and thirties.

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB), where this development took place, was according to themselves "a political, cultural and economic organisation with a social idea". It organised for example scouting, healthcare stations and schools where Islam education was mixed with science. The most grandiose attempt was one to rise an Egyptian economy based in self-reliance, in opposition to foreign businesses, and linked to trade unions and strikes [71].

A secret mujahedin movement was also organised for armed struggle against the British rule. Their conspiratorial methods soon became problematic for the Brotherhood.

MB organised townsmen, who had been involved in the commercialized life without having any of its benefits. Typically enough, MB was formed in the Canal Zone, the most modernized part of Egypt, while the contemporaneous Qassamite movement in Palestine was organised in the harbour of Jaffa. It resembles the Swedish non-conformist churches in the nineteenth century, which caught on in the most modernist environments at that time, the new industrial boroughs growing up at the railway junctions. Ideologically they were also similar; popular mobilizations against a hierarchical society, against growing class differentiation, against a traditional clergy that didn't answer to people's needs, and using a traditional language because it was popular and had a broad appeal. The focus was justice. Meanwhile, they used European mobilization methods like the government power strategy and the political party [72].

The first conflicts concerned resistance to European mission. But MB was soon involved in the national movement against British influence, through economic and personal support for the Palestinian revolt 1936-39.

The conflict was carried to its extremes during the second world war, with its inflation and scarcity. MB soon provided a leadership, in competition with the communist-dominated trade unions.

The peace exacerbated the economic plight because the war industry lay off hundreds of thousands. Communists and Islamists competed about organising strikes and demonstrations against economic mismanagement and against the British alliance, and it was the boycott organised by the Brotherhood that made the government break it.

When the Palestine war broke out in 1947, the MB canalised the economic and personal support for the Palestinians. But the militarisation of the conflict was disastrous. The conspirative mujahedin began a war of their own against Egypt politicians they considered untrustworthy, which was a reason for the government to put down the movement. Its inspirator Hasan al-Banna was murdered, and its moral backbone was broken. When the movement was built up anew, its activists sought respectability to any price and shunned all that could be seen as socially hot. The political initiative slipped over to the Arab nationalists in the army.

The military Arab nationalism would dominate West Asian politics during the fifties and sixties, with its paternalist land reforms and its profiting support to the Palestinian cause. What would bring forth Islamism again and lift it to a global level was the IMF revolts and the Iranian revolution [73].

IMF riots are modern "bread seizures", poor people rebellions when the Inernational Monetary Fund has ordered states to cut their social expenditure, see chapter 9. Such rebellions have been numerous since the mid-seventies, particularly in Latin America, Africa and West Asia, those regions which have suffered most from the post 1973 slump. IMF riots are usually unorganised, but in West Asia and North Africa, an organising according to Islamist models has occurred afterwards, trying to bring some order into the civil society which the heavy-handed IMF economists have worked havoc in. And in a few instances - Algeria, Palestine - such organising has got political consequences.

The Iranian regime, which was traditionally more of a loose federation of clans, was a rather easy prey of British and Russian interests in the nineteenth century. The Russians were primarily interested of territorial expansion, while the British preferred economic and bartered money for privileges - sole rights of railways, mines, telegraph and the national bank, except exemption of duty, aimed at opening Iran for British goods.

Iranian popular movements were more successful than the Chinese to defend themselves. The urban middle class was particularly active in the resistance. Within it, there were two categories. One European-educated, which aimed at modernizing and saw national independence as a precondition. And one traditional, consisting of the crafts and the bazaar, which saw itself threatened by European goods, and their traditional ally, the 'ulamate, which was more well-organized in Iran than elsewhere [74].

During the campaigns against British concessions, these two groups found eachother in a lasting regligious-radical-nationalist alliance in 1891. They initiated together a very successful boycott against an intended British tobacco monopoly, and organised demonstrations that only grew when they were fired at by the army. The province towns, peasant movements and clans joined the movement in 1905 and the government fell; a constitutional republic was proclaimed and the 'ulamate filled the constituion with Islamist content as a first attempt at practic salafiya. But before the republic had time to undertake economic legislation, the first world war broke out and the British occupied the country; they had discovered oil. With the proceeds from the oil they financed a military government to make a very profitable agreement with; to revoke this agreement was to be the focus for all subsequent national movements.

The first opportunity was the aftermath of the second world war, when anti-colonial movements flourished all over the world. But this opportunity was thwarted by the USA and the military government in agreement; instead the government begun a huge modernization program to buy off the modernist middle class and annihilate the traditional one. However, a result of this was that all industry was appropriated by the ruling family and that great parts of the peasantry were cleared off into the slum of the cities.

What brought the religious-radical-national alliance into action again was however the increasingly extremist policy of the government. As long as only active opposition is persecuted, people can live in peace if they lie low. But in 1975 the regime introduced an official state ideology with the dictator as "spiritual leader" and began to assault all who didn't hail the government servile enough. The opportunity came when in 1978 the USA introduced its campaign for human rights and would presumably not support too drastic repression in Iran, while at the same time the government had to cut the welfare budget because of the slump (without orders from the IMF in this case).

There were two phases of the Iranian revolution. In the spring 1978, the traditional alliance of modernist middle class and bazar shook the government with its mass demonstrations and attacks on government buildings, banks, luxury hotels and other symbols of privilege and Americanized culture. They succeeded in using a language understandable by all, the Shi'ite tradition, as a sharp contrast to the regime. The government succeeded in appeasing the middle class by reforms, but these reforms entailed cuts for the poor, and in the autumn workers and slum dwellers toppled the government. The final straw was the oil worker strike and the slum-dwellers' attack at the army.

The amplifying of the alliance beyond the traditional base was made possible by a common program, which could be supported by the shantytowns as well as the middle class. The program millions of people marched and stroke for was a social-radical one - popular spokesmen like Khomeini, Taleqani, Shari'ati and the mullahs of the shantytowns scorched the waste of the court and the army, the eviction of peasants, the corruption, the high rents and the absence of social integration. They emphasized justice and the needs of the unpropertied masses. This was not a program that the middle class movement was happy with, but on the other side they had to get support from the majority to achieve its own ends, a better distribution of the wealth and some national control of the economy.

They turned out to calculate right. Twentyfive years after the revolution it isn't Khomeini's politics of compromise between middle class and the poor that dominates the Islamic republic. The incomes are somewhat more evenly distributed but are still more uneven than in other West Asian countries. The hegemony of the middle class was guaranteed by the monopoly of organisation by their political branch, the 'ulamate.

Islamist movements of different description have made some successes in several other countries, without having the Iranian advantages of a well-organised 'ulamate.

In Lebanon, a Shi'ite movement with a base among the poorest Beiruters, Amal, succeeded in ending the civil war in the eighties. Amal was theoretically a non-factional movement aiming at organising the civil society among the poor, for example savings-banks, vocational schools and healthcare clinics, but its attempts to amplify its base into Sunnite and Christian factions met with scant success. However, it was an Amal-led mutiny in the Christian-dominated army that initiated a de-escalating process in the war-torn country and established some other elements than factional struggles into the polity [75].

In Algeria it was also Islamist organising of the civil society that gave them influence. The Algerian upper class has never cared about things like that; for them, oil export to the EU is the primary concern. But in Algeria the cultural resistance is an integral part; the Algerian upper class is francophone despite the fact that the liberation struggle in the fifties was fought under Muslim banners. For that reason, asserting Muslim values has become a matter of national and lower class solidarity, which would have given FIS government power if a military coup had not prevented it [76].

The same factors lie behind Islamist successes in Egypt and Turkey, where IMF riots initiated the movements in the 70s, and in Palestine.

Since the eighties, however, the Islamist appeal to justice has faded somewhat. Conservative governments have done their best to coopt the movements, frightened by the Iranian revolution; oil money from Saudi and the Gulf States have flooded once-Islamist movements and redirected their focus to old-fashioned, often patriarchal morals. Roy has named the result "neo-fundamentalism" instead of Islamism [77]. But the inclination towards false solidarities is always present in over-ideologized movements; when the core is "truth" the pragmatic action for real interests slip away from focus and is replaced by a discourse about moral, virtue and perfect people. So has Palestinian Hamas leaders for example refused to discuss suicide bombings in terms of practical utility for the development of a successful strategy for Palestinian liberation; for them it's enough that if the Israelis kill children, they have right to do it too.

 

Peoples' movements in the peripheries of the peripheries

Another type of second generation national movement in the global periphery is the one turning against the regional center, the capital, to assert the interests in the marginalized regional periphery.

The new states, which the national movements had to take responsibility for, were faced with the demand for adopting to the interstate system. They had, in a short time, to build a strong and homogeneous state apparatus, and also to implement what they had argued for during their phase of mobilization, "development" or advancement in the world market hierarchy.

This called for resources. And since the anti-colonial movements had mobilized people from the core regions, and were even more dominated by people from the core regions, they tended to discriminate against the peripheries. Economically, in terms of payment for the new state and for the development policy; politically, in terms of the recruitments to the state posts; and culturally, in terms of the norms and codes that were valid in the new states [78].

The peripheries of the system periphery states were for that reason posed in a situation very similar to the one of the European provinces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and reacted in a similar way, see chapter 4. Peasants and traditional elites joined in tax rebellions against the new independent states. In Ghana, the clans organised such rebellions in the fifties [79]. In Kurdistan they were organised, according to old patterns, by sufi orders; the legendary Kurd leader Mustafa Barzani was a sufi sheik until he organised modern parties to appeal to the educated urban middle class [80]. Moros in Mindanao were organised by the traditional aristocracy before the urban youth took over in the seventies [81]. The ability of traditional elites to lead their societies was conditioned by the fact that such peripheries were not even peripheries for the colonial empires but were rather left alone - and if the empires had intervened it was to the benefit of the traditional elites, to have peace in their rear. They were not peripheries until the post-colonial states brought them into the world market system.

Burma, for example, had been divided by the British into a centrally administered, densely populated, rice exporting plain, and an inaccessable mountain fringe left to rule itself after old fashions. The independence movement that appeared during the twenties and thirties was recruited, quite naturally, from the plain, while the British recruited the policemen for repressing them from the mountains. Thus a reciprocal distrust was built up, which was triggered when the British left in 1948. Apart from the fact that the mountain regions were not more pleased by being ruled from Rangoon than from London, the new nationalist government lived up to the suspicions of the mountain people and refused to acknowledge any representatives for them than the ones they coopted from the center [82].

Accordingly, armed resistance broke out in the peripheries, beginning in 1948 with the Karen and the Mon in the southeast and the Kachin in the north. Some of the movements subscribed to a communist identity, but most were content with keeping the bailiffs at a distance. Some were nationalist and aimed at creating a state of their own, like the Karen; other just comprised some villages in a valley like the innumerable rebellions among the Shan in the east. They were all able to achieve a real independence, if not a formal one, and together they blocked the construction of a Burmese state. In the eighties, 40 percent of the national income went to fighting the rebellions while 40 percent of the trade was controlled by mountain people controlled smuggling, while the rest was controlled by an increasingly corrupt military caste.

Another variety is the Tamil movement in Sri Lanka. The Tamils were relatively favoured by the British because they were a minority to set off against the Singhalese majority. For that reason they were more numerous in the civil service than reasonable, thought the Singhalese which began to discriminate against them in the seventies [83]. This created an anti-singhalese mobilization among the Tamil youth who were locked out from education, and the mobilization got a mass base when Singhalese peasants migrated into traditionally Tamil lands in connection with various "green revolution" agricultural projects.

Sometimes, regions may use political and cultural power to offset economic dominance, like when the populous states of the Ganges plain want to promote their Hindi language, to counter the economic dominance of Mahrati-speaking Bombay. Which creates a violent protest wave among the educated middle class in Tamil Nadu in the south [84].

National movements in the peripheries' peripheries succeed very rarely. The interstate system simply can't afford them to succeed. The only successful separatist movement in the South until now was the Bengal movement in the seventies.

At the Indian independence, the Muslim peasants in East Bengal supported the Muslim Leage to get rid of the Hindu landowners. But Muslim League consisted of upper class politicians from Punjab, and the Bengal peasants had no leverage on it. So the Pakistan state was organised by and for Punjabians, a state of things that got even more marked with time [85].

A result of this was that Bengal export incomes were spent in the Punjab, another that the Pakistan state declared that Urdu, a language nobody in Bengal understood, should be the only official language.

When the local upper class disappeared, a rather numerous layer of wealthy peasants had risen to prominence in the Bengal. They, and their educated children, created the Awami League which successively began to demand independence from the West. The triggering event was the military coup in 1969, which centralised the power still more. But despite the very wide support, it would according to most students have been impossible for Bengal to secede hadn't India supported it with military means.

 

"Grundtvigian" national movements in the system peripheries

So far, it appears that national movements are nothing but a playground for the urban middle class, particularly the educated urban middle class. But after the failure of the populist movements in Latin America, it seems that a re-definition is under way. The Indian movements are beginning, like the Norwegian peasants in the nineteenth century, to define "the nation" as "the peasants", and demand equality with the Creole middle class of the cities [86].

The Indian movements were born from the peasant movements that tried to manage the land reforms of the populist governments. Such reforms were acted out in almost all the Andean as an answer to the peasant mobilizations, see chapter 7 and 8. The motivation was everywhere to canalize the energy of the peasants as support for the government, as a payment for legal rights to the land, in the form of paternalist organisations.

After a shorter or longer period of euphoria, the peasant terms-of-trade devalued. The urban middle class realized soon that there were more political gains to get from adaptation to the world market system, and the governments began to favour commercial agriculture at the expense of the Indian peasants. The latter then saw the need to define themselves independently from the paternalist organisations, and chose the Indian identity.

Peasants/family farmers have lead this change in three countries.

In Mexico, it took time for the state to shift from paternalist support to world market adaptation. It was a process begun during the second world war and was finished only with the NAFTA agreement with USA and Canada in 1993. Conflicts have for that reason arisen locally in many places during this time, and there was a rich world of organising for the new Indian movements of the eighties and nineties to relate to. The Indian movement in Chiapas, a state where paternalism never took root, has had much support to build on when developing the world's perhaps most eloquent critique of the development despotism of the nineties.

The Bolivian break with paternalism was swifter: in 1974, a peasant based IMF rebellion was put down by the army. The peasants and their relatives in the giant shantytown El Alto near La Paz then oriented towards a cultural movement gazing back to the peasant rebellion of the eighteenth century, see chapter 4. The government regarded this as safer than organising for material interests, but as soon as 1976 the Indianist movement was strong enough to take initiative to a resistance alliance against the government and its IMF partners. Earlier, such alliances had always originated by the miners or the La Paz middle class, but now the Katarist peasant movement both organised strike support for the miners and blockades of La Paz after eighteenth century fashion.

During the eighties culture has been emphasized more and peasant movement less. In 1993 the Katarist movement horse-traded with the government, and accepted IMF-imposed cuts for greater local autonomy and language rights. On the other hand, miners-turned-coca growers have risen as a new resistance core with an Indian identity, violently opposing the neo-liberal agenda together with the urban poor, with a lot of success.

In Ecuador, the Indian and peasant identities have fused - you are Indian if you are a peasant, even if you are black. The movement was born around the struggles for land reform in 1964, and since this struggle has never been brought to a solution, the Indian identity implies that you struggle against Creole landowners and oil companies for land, and land rights and cultural autonomy are two sides of the same coin.

But the strongest component of the Indian federation CONAIE is however the near-autonomous Shuars in the Amazonian forests. The Shuars and the peasant movement have in some way managed to solve the problems of complex identities - all Indian identities are equally valid and equally contributing to the movement. And this has given CONAIE the strength to engineer several risings against the Creole upper class, that have controlled the country temporarily. The visible results of these movements have been to depose presidents, but the aims have been to bargain about land rights with land-owners and oil companies, and to assert national rights against IMF and WTO demands.

So far, these "the lower-class-is-the-nation" movements seems to be a Latin American phenomenon. But given the fusing of national upper-middle classes into a cosmopolitan jet set, they seem to have a future before them [87].

I will come back to the Indian movements in chapter 8, and to the peasant/small farmer movements in chapter 7.

The national movements have been alliances between different classes with very different interests. They have cooperated since they all had been able to see a foreign rule or occupier as the first and most important obstacle for attaining their interest.

The peasants have struggled against a world market system coming from without, shattering the village solidarity, creating uncertainty and dependence of money, and they have struggled against bailiffs who have been more effective than the traditional ones and who have never considered the peasants' ability to pay.

The workers, who have usually been part-time peasants trying to get some cash to eke out their subsistence, have struggled against a usually racist labour discipline.

The local capitalists have struggled against foreign or domestic monopolies preventing a more versatile economy.

And the educated middle class has struggled against a racist colonial administration that haven't permitted it to make careers, and struggled for a national development policy with the aim to advance in the world market system.

How well have they satisfied their interests through the national movements? Nobody seems to have made this question, and still less tried to answer it. Those who have written about national movements have usually treated the "nation" in a lump and tried to assess the outcome in a lump. But I'll make an attempt; the history is well known.

The educated middle class is of course the big gainer. It led the national movements, and it stepped into the power positions when the national movements won. In some instances, when the movement won without much efforts and it didn't need the help of its countrymen, it have easily been able to plunder the latter and establish itself as a corrupt bourgeoisie. But the educated middle class has been the big gainer even in countries where it really needed to mobilize majorities in protracted struggles like in for example Vietnam [88].

For the local capitalists, the results have been mixed. They have lost from long protracted struggles that have demanded concessions to the peasants as in China and Vietnam. For that reason they have opposed such developments within the national movements and preferred to make peace with the colonialists if there has been any risk.

The workers have as a rule benefited from the national movements. They have been a strategically important part if them, being able to strike against center-owned enterprises, and for that reason been able to bargain with the leaders of the national movements. They have also benefited from the development strategy chosen by most new states, the import substitution strategy which has called for increased domestic demand and increased salaries. During the fifties and sixties the workers in the periphery could consider themselves as a part of the middle class, if they had fixed employments. This applied to the semi-periphery in Russia and Latin America as well as Africa and India. On the other hand, this didn't apply to all workers. Peasants cut out by the commercialization of agriculture to become a part of the semi-proletarian layers in the cities have been the real losers of the movement. And when the states began to adopt the export oriented strategy, calling for low wages, or dropped the advancement policy altogether in the seventies or eighties, the workers lost the benefit they had had.

For the peasants, the majority of the "nation", the result has been very mixed. They have liberated themselves from distant bailiffs without interest for the well-being of the peasants. But the new states built up by the national movements have as a rule been as pitiless enforcerers of high taxes as the colonialists were. They have aimed at development, advancement in the world market system. And this is expensive. Somebody have to pay. And the peasants are near at hand. The nationalist states have used different forms of transmission mechanisms which have benefited industry and towns to the expense of agriculture and countryside. Few have used as ruthless methods as the communists of Russia; most were content to go on with the commercialization of the economy the colonialists had begun with, linked to new government purchase and sales monopolies and taxes, which in the long run was more lucrative than the ungainly methods of the Russians [89].

When the national development strategies were deserted, this didn't imply any relief for the peasants. Then, the surplus has simply gone to direct consumption of the new elites.

The peasants have not been able to counter the commercialization of land and food and the dissolution of the villages, and few have been able to benefit from it. Many have been cut out and been forced to join the sub-proletarians in the shantytowns of the cities. From the thirties, the peasants were able to use the power of the national movements to push their own movements for land reform, with some success in many sites. When they gained it was because of their own efforts; they didn't get anything for free from the national movements. But the contemporaneousness, the fact that the rulers of the world were busy dealing with the national movements, helped them. This will be considered in chapter 7.

At last, the national movements have been movements for a collective aim. They can't be reduced completely to the participants' particular aims. We have to ask ourselves if the global peripheries have been helped by the national movements to escape from their peripheral situation. And this is very dubious.

The aim for the educated urban middle class people who organised the national movements was development, advancement in the world market system. All, or almost all, from the North American independence movement on, entered a national development policy as soon as they had got their independence. The drift behind the policy, formulated by people like Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Josef Stalin, Raúl Prebisch and Mao Zedong - and by Colbert and Oxenstierna in their age - was to protect the productive forces of the country and fortify it with the help of government planning, to make it as forceful as the productive forces in the system center. To "catch up and pass" as Chrushchev expressed it. Of course this implied that they betrayed the human needs of the civil society, and the reciprocity and spontaneous expressions of life of the people there. For the urban middle class, this was not a great sacrifice. The difference between the radical, "communist" variety and the more moderate, "nationalist" one, was mostly a matter of degree. The alternative, free trade, has only been practiced by regimes that were content with the role as periphery and the opportunity this gives for the upper classes to profit from the minimum wages of the direct producers, for example the East European regimes in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, and the Latin American ones in the nineteenth. But the criterions of the world market system have never been called in question, except perhaps by the Maoists during a short period in the sixties.

This "developmentalism" was also something of a global dogma during the era incited by the Indian independence and the Chinese revolution. The integration mechanisms seemed to work again. As the labour movements had been able to carry through universal suffrage, higher wages and social policy within the system center countries, the national movements seemed to be able to carry through a kind of global suffrage within the UN system and an international development aid. And the national development policies based in import substitution seemed to be tolerated by the system, at least sometimes. The USA was a brilliant success in the nineteenth century, Russia seemed to be a moderate one, and for example China, Argentina and Mexico also.

But latest about 1980 it was clear that there was some serious wrong somewhere. Firstly, it was apparent that the gap between rich and poor countries weren't affected at all, see figure. Secondly, the national development projects wrecked. Most dramatically in the Soviet Union, the pioneer and prime example of the twentieth century.

There were several causes for this.

Firstly, while the system center couldn't oppose the aspirations of the periphery openly, because of the strength of the national movements, it could do so furtively. The development plans of the peripheral nations were as far as possible conformed to the relocations of unprofitable industry from the center and the need for cheap import. The center could use the support of supranational organisations like the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, which were able to bypass the national strategies of the new states by cooperating with their west-educated functionaries about integrating them into the global financial networks. It wasn't always the governments of Southern countries which were eager to take the loans they later would be so strangled by, it was often lower level technocracies.

During the seventies and eighties, the Kondratiev B made it more necessary for the enterprises of the center to hit back the independence thrust from the peripheries. They were helped by the supranational institutions also this time. They were even more helped by an increasingly presumptuous global upper middle class and their ideological guise, market liberalism. This global upper middle class had been consolidated by its control over the growing complexity of the economy and the growing centralisation of state power. Now, it provided capital with something of a mass base for an attack at both national and labour movements in North and South [90].

Secondly, to play a system center role demanded increasingly more capital. It was easier for the USA to "catch up" with Great Britain in the nineteenth century than for India to "catch up" with the USA in the twentieth, because the gap was smaller then in absolute terms. The technological equipment of the nineteenth century was easier to get than the technological equipment of the twentieth for a territory of subsistence peasants. A very large territory like China may succeed, but for a small one like Nicaragua it is a utopia. Some theorists have suggested that a very extensive regional cooperation in the South is necessary to get out of subordination [91].

Thirdly, "development" in the world market system is climbing up a hierarchy. This implies among other things that it at least in the short run may pay of for one to muck it up for the other. The national projects of the national movements have for that reason, in spite of their Non-Aligned Movement, been divided and not able to appear in common even when it has been easy. For example, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina had probably been able to dismiss the so called debt crisis if they had shown a common front to the claims of First National City Bank in 1978; yet they chose to deal separately [92]. This is partly due to the form of the national movements: forming of nations and governments.

Fourthly, the bases of the national movements were undermined from the instigation, since it gave the urban middle class such a prominent function. The urban middle class had been built up by the colonial power to its own copy, and it was always easier for it to communicate with its own counterparts in the system center than to communicate with its own rural countrymen. When the advancement in the world market hierarchy turned out to be difficult it was always handy for it to compromise with the system center, keep its own position as the representative of the system center, and sacrifice the peasants. It was strangely easy and fast to give up national development during the weventies and eighties, also if the price was starvation.

One point with the Islamist movement and its culturally motivated abhorrence of the system center may be that capitulations like that are made somewhat more difficult.

But there are also more profound troubles about the whole development project.

Fifthly, one may call in question whether it is possible for all peripheral countries to advance together within the framework of the system. For the system is a hierarchy where superior and inferior positions are dependent of, or reflexions of eachother. The role as center is allotted to the one that has got a monopoly of the most strategic links in the global production system, while the role as periphery is allotted to the one that has got least of such strategic monopolies. Neither the import substitution model nor the export oriented model aimed at destroying or conquering monopolies. At most, as in Russia or China, it implied to delink from the world market system and build "independent" alternative societies at a small scale or, as in South Korea and other "tiger economies", to specialize in accidental niches with the consent of the monopolies. Also in this way the disunity of the national projects of the peripheries appeared; they never made any concerted and serious attempt at challenging the possibility to monopolize resources, contacts and faculties [93].

Sixthly, finally, perhaps the development model they chose was impossible. For the model was the one practiced by the system center - capital and energy intensive investments adapted to a global techno-structure rather than effectivation of the popular economy of the country. Some people have argued that this technostructure is impossible without cheap raw materials from the periphery, guraranteed by cheap labour. The model would, if that is correct, be impossible to copy because the peripheries don't have any periphery, except their own peasants. Perhaps development is so extremely expensive if you don't have any peripheries that the sacrificing of several generations is necessary to make it - the Soviet example, and the miserable European seventeenth century are cases in point. So the failure of the Soviet example wasn't only due to its narrow social base; it was also due to its narrow geographical base - without peripheries it had to plunder its own people to the skin to get resources to advance towards the center [94].

To invalidate the center-periphery dicotomy would thus call for destroying of the overcapitalized technostructure of the center.

But perhaps the whole section above conveys a too negative picture of what happened. The center-periphery dichotomy of the world market system is five hundred years, and it may be unfair to demand from the national movements that they should be able to annul them in just a generation. What they really did achieve was to hold up the increase of the gap between North and South that had been going on from 1500 up to about 1900. During the last decades of middle class desertion from the movement, the gap has increased again, see figure. But in a long term movement perhaps momentary backlashes are inevitable.

Many debaters have pointed at the fact that the razor-sharp differences between North and South are blurred; distances grow increasingly unimportant and it isn't more difficult today for a North-based enterprise to exploit workers in the South than in the North. While a wealthy middle class and an industrial working class grow in the South, an unintegrated subproletariat arises in the North. If this is lasting, perhaps it is a sign that the national movements in the south have been successful after all: they have broken the twentieth century protectionist blocks of the center and to some extent homogenized the world. Even if the polarity between center and periphery doesn't disappear - the system presumes that the center exploits the periphery - perhaps the division between one center and one periphery is being substituted by many centers and many peripheries. Whatever this implies, it implies that the traditional anti-colonial alliance is history. The national movements of the future will have a different composition.

The twentieth century national movements in the system center

 

In the center, national movements have primarily been active during the Kondratiev B phases 1914-39 and after 1973. When the economic problems have begun to spread, the system have primarily tried to foist them on the poorly organised, peripheral provinces. For that reason, attempts grew in the provinces to assert their increasingly pressed economic, political and cultural interests during such periods.
The movements have developed rather differently depending on if the peripheries have been "under-developed" or "over-developed" according to Rokkan's terminology [95].

Movements in "under-developed" peripheries have seldom aimed at organising a state of their own. This calls for too much resources. Their aims have been to keep the central power at a distance and assert their own culture. They have also tried to get control over economic investments to attain the same service level as the center - or demand the same level of integration as people in the center. This has been the aim in Sápmi, in Occitania, in Corsica and in Wales.

Up to the second world war these culture asserting movements were usually led by traditional local strongmen, for example landlords or the church, and the bite was against "the city". The first organisation to defend the interests of Bretagne was founded by landlords who were as much interested in propping under their own faltering power as asserting the interest of their province. During the interwar years, the national movement in Bretagne was, as the movement in the Flanders, hostile to the labour movement because it was seen as "modernist" and threatened traditional local culture. This, a result of the political blocks formed in the French revolution, induced them to support the most ruthless anti-labour policies from the state [96].

During the post-war Kondratiev A, this local, traditional upper class disappeared or was coopted into the center, and the peripheral movements had to rely on its popular base. For that reason, they often developed radical democratic features. For example, Alain Touraine has noted how the Occitan movement, despite its notorious inability to unite in any organisation or on any strategy, yet is united around one thing: its aversion against all hierarchies and all authoritarian rules. Such things are identified as "Parisian methods" and won't be accepted [97].

Who takes part in such movements? Rokkan points at local culture workers like teachers as important organisers. But Touraine points at trade unions for workers and peasants, whose economy is threatened by peripherialization, as at least as important. Wine growers in Occitania, miners in Norrbotten and fishermen along the Norwegian coast are typical examples of core groups in regional peripheral movements.

It is very difficult to organise a movement in an under-developed periphery. Despite the great needs, the divisions are even greater. The identity as peripheral is so disgraced that most people see assimilation, or submission, as a less painful way out than self-assertion. The resources are small and the hope is scant. The Breton movement may be an example of the failures a national movement in an under-developed periphery is likely to get into [98].

The interwar movement consisted of youth, awakened to the Breton cause by the repression of their language at school. For that reason they emphasized, after Irish pattern, the Celt culture and demanded independence from France. Action consisted much of blasting French monuments. But the interest from Bretons was poor; a majority spoke French and didn't want to hear about any cultural oppression.

Desperately, the movement began cultivating racist mythologies and turned to like-minded people in Germany for help. Hoping that the Germans would give them independence they turned tools for the German occupation according to the principle of my enemy's enemy. I suppose it's obvious that they were disappointed.

The interwar movement had ignored the economic misery of Bretagne. This was the theme of a new organising after the war, consisting of different interests in the province - trade unions, municipal politicians, farmers' organisation and trade associations. They used primarily parliamentarian alliance; like the Irish seventy years earlier Breton politicians formed a block in Paris and succeeded in canalizing money for integration in Bretagne. This organising was however disrupted in 1957 on the issue of supporting de Gaulle or not, and it definitely lost its drive in the centralist bureaucracy of the fifth republic.

But then the force had appeared that finally would create a popular national movement in Bretagne. In 1955, the Breton farmers had invented a new struggle method - dumping of underpaid agricultural commodities in the city streets. In the early sixties, they begun to interpret their distress in terms of geographic discrimination and internal colonisation, and they were soon followed by the trade unions. But it was the contemporaneous rebellion of youths and workers in 1968 that opened for the Breton movement; it was only then that it was possible to see that the Breton problems were the same that hit the South, as a matter of center-periphery relations that was possible to tackle economically, politically and culturally.

Thus, workers stroke against Parisian-owned businesses and demanded Parisian wages and got support from municipalities, youth organisations and musicians. Bombing of French projects of exploitation were met by sympathy if not by support by municipal politicians. And the Breton language the interwar activists had in vain tried to promote was casually converted to a symbol of resistance to be sung and learnt in study circles.

The Breton movement seems to have stagnated in the eighties, perhaps because it was coopted into Mitterrand's government, or because of the pressed situation for peoples' movements in the North after 1975. The result is poor so far - some mitigated centralism in the administration, Breton acknowledged as a school language, and a stop for the unpopular nuclear project in Plogoff. But Bretagne is still the second poorest region of France.

One of the most effective short-run peripheral movements was the Norwegian anti-EU movement, emerging from the same milieu that carried the national movement of the nineteenth century - farmers and fishermen in the valleys and fiords of western Norway [99].

The initiative to the resistance was taken by the family farmer organisations in the early sixties. About the same time, marginalized milieus within the Labour Party, which earlier organised the resistance against NATO, took initiative to a party-internal resistance. The anti-EU movement in the sixties was geared towards debate; since the membership was closed in 1963 it was never tested. But it created the personal contact that would be used later.

In the early seventies the membership was considered anew. At that time another participant had appeared, the youth movement which was formed about 1970 for defence of the environment, resistance to nuclear weapons, defence of the interests of women, and for reconciliation with the South. This diversified movement, which was facilitated by the difficulties of the world market system to deal with national movements in the periphery and a militant labour movement in Europe, was strong enough to swing all political youth organisations except one to the anti-EU line.

During the campaign in 1972, the family farmers were the organisatory back-bone - for example they laid a struggle tax on milk. In the valleys and fiords the whole civil society worked as an incredibly strong campaign organisation which knocked out the united pressure from media and authorities. In the cities, the youth movement fought under a disadvantage against the upper middle class, the state and business establishment. In addition a few of Oslo's strongest trade unions lined up with the resistance, as a result of resistance to NATO in the forties and fifties.

The victory in the referendum in 1972 was a short-run victory for the aim of the family farmers, status quo. But the alliance between them and the other resisters was broken as soon as the short-term aim was won, so the upper middle class politicians were able to work for their aim: increased class differences and undermining of the peripheral Norway's grip on investments, political cooption and cultural codes. In 1994 the same anti-EU coalition had to take the struggle once more, and won with equal result. This time they posed Scandinavian the welfare state against the market fundamentalism of the Maastricht Agreement.

Only the "over-developed", that is, the industrially strong, peripheries that have been able to develop separatist movements and sometimes wring some autonomy or even independence for protection of their economy. To these belong Scotland, Flanders, the Basque country, Catalonia and Croatia.

The Basque national movement began as a rebellion of the lower middle class in Bilbao against the five families who owned the prosperous Basque steel industry. The core of their critique, apart from power concentration, was the way the city had been destroyed by industrial slum inhabited by immigrants without feeling for the local culture [100].

The movement had for a long time some difficulty to formulate a uniting identity. Since the eighteenth century, the Basque country had tried to retain some autonomy against a centralizing state, and this tradition was important to the Basque movement. But the autonomy had been defined locally, as local so called fueros or agreements with the central power about local autonomy. During the eighteenth century, the church played an ideologically leading part in this struggle, and the Christian identity was for that reason natural to assert against both capitalist and socialist non-Basques. The language was no leading factor though, because half of the native Basques spoke Spanish. The uniting identity was "we natives". To have a Basque name proving the identity turned out to be crucial test.

It was not easy for the Bilbao middle class movement to spread over the Basque country on this meagre program. But the activists took on to develop it, they investigated the needs of the Basque peasants, they combined an enthusiasm for Basque popular culture with organising of saving banks and friendly societies, and got a base this way. During the Republic, some third of the inhabitants sympathised with Basque nationalism.

According to the Basque nationalists, the Spanish civil war was a foreign affair that didn't concern the Basque country. This didn't help them; Franco considered Basque separatism as treason and established the most centralising regime ever in Spain. To say "hello" in Basque was a crime, as was using Basque traditional costumes.
This petty repression made Basque nationalism a mass movement. Basque nationalism was the most natural way of opposing the dictatorship.

The first resistance was raised within the church, where younger priests held service in Basque, organised Basque schools and protested in public against the repression. When they were thrown out of the church they continued as laymen. ETA begun as a movement in seminaries.

For laymen, sending children to Basque schools and collect money to these was a natural way of resisting the dictatorship. The political resistance which appeared during the sixties was associated to this base activity.

Another way was to organise producers' cooperatives. Cooperatives were seen as a democratic alternative to the hierarchic Franquism, and also a way of breaking out of the control of the dominating big business. Cooperatives were thus associated to Basque nationalism, and a valuable economic base for the movement.

In the late Franco era, Basque cultural festivals were also a way of demonstrating the strength of Basque culture. It was at that time that young people began to attack police, banks and other symbols for the central power, while the revenge of the state gave opportunities to mass demonstrations and strikes.

Since Basque nationalism had spearheaded the democratic struggle it had hegemony in the Basque country when Franco died. All political parties were Basque nationalists. The most nationalist were the immigrants, who saw nationalism as a way of being accepted. According to Heiberg, ETA of today is dominated by immigrants.

Basque nationalism is unique so far that it is was antagonistic to the locally dominating upper class. Usually, this has a strong position in national movements of over-developed peripheries. Its endeavour may be said to achieve equality with other center bourgeoisies, preferably with peripheries to exploit in their turn.

One example may be the national movement in Croatia, which appeared in the nineteenth century within the Zagreb middle class, as an effort to keep the Hungarian state at a distance, and developed in the twentieth with the same aim with regard to the Yugoslavian state. When the Yugoslavian developmentalist policy went bankrupt in the eighties, leading circles in Zagreb simply seized on the opportunity to grasp as much of Yugoslavian territory as they could, to create their own center [101].

An almost over-explicit instance of over-developed nationalism is found in Germany in the inter-war years. An attempt to hegemony had collapsed in the first world war and the ruling class had got limitations to its power imposed on it by the victorious coalition. The German ruling class' endeavour to regain its liberty, linked to middle class attempts of revenging itself on a successful labour movement, caused a process that is rather badly investigated, as if research were prevented by the bad conscience of the middle class [102].

Despite a lack of reasonable accounts I will try to sum up as follows.

According to Peter Fritzshe, a key factor was that the labour movement had a formal strength that was not matched by a moral one. On the one hand, the German labour movement leadership had repressed its own members in blood, helped by rightist para-militaries, see chapter 5. On the other, the labour movement was culturally a sect - it didn't consider outsiders as important enough even to have diplomatic relations to. The labour movement thus confined itself to unionist struggles, protected by its dense subculture, and was rather successful.

The middle class people, who had greeted the labour movement as an ally in 1919 were however disappointed when the state and business interests decided to inflate away all their debts, at the expense of the middle class, since the labour movement was able to at least partially compensate with higher wages. Exasperatedly, middle class people, divided by trade, terms of employment and historical affiliations tried to emancipate themselves from earlier guardianships, in sharp rivalry with the labour movement. The only unifying factor they found to counter their divisions was the nation, so from the twenties all middle class movements appeared as romantically nationalist. This, however, didn't make them any more effective.

What finally made the need for effectivity acute was the slump of 1929. While unemployment and misery increased, the politicians of all shades had no remedy other than cuts and wait-and-see. The middle class mobilizations, which were as frustrated by their own incapacity as the one of the politicians, gave their confidence to an organisation that had three clear advantages: a stand for Keynesian politics, independently of the vagaries of the world market, a lower middle-class origin of the leaders which appealed to the self-esteem of other lower middle-class people, and ample funding.

We all know the insistence of the Nazi leadership that professional people must rule; we don't think so much over that this is only the habitual outlook of NGOs. For the Nazi party was like the Bolsheviks an NGO, an association of professional managers for national self-assertion and development, who in a moment of crisis manages a social movement to their own ends. Like the Bolsheviks, the Nazis chose their constituency, by appealing to its needs when nobody else did. The difference between them was of course that the Bolsheviks worked for the equality of a semi-periphery, while the Nazis worked for the hegemony of a momentarily enfeebled center.

The background of the Nazis was the Bavarian high society with links to the para-militaries that had repressed the workers in 1919. Their program was mainly stolen from the organisation of the commercial large farms, Bund der Landwirte - government responsibility for the economy, expansion eastwards, the superiority of the Germans and worthlessness of Poles and Jews, and the need for professionals to rule, see chapter 7 [103]. This was supplemented with some planks for middle-class and farmers' needs, like attacks on big business and commercialization in general; these items were not taken seriously in government position, though, but the items taken from Bund der Landwirte were faithfully carried out [104].

The Nazi party was a fringe until 1928. At that date it was singled out by some industrial interests who needed personnel for a campaign against an American plan for paying German reparations. And well-funded with money it proved effective; better than the industrial interests it was able to tie together the campaign with attacks on the industrial and labour establishments in a way that appealed to the middle class democratic self-esteem.

In power, the Nazis relied on the thrust for hegemony to keep the active support of capital, and Keynesian economics to keep the passive support of the direct producers.

But the Nazis are also the most outstanding example of a movement that except directing upwards, against the privileged, directs downwards, against people who have even less privileges than the movement's middle class participants . The aim is, of course, defending privileges that are for some reason threatened, and the instrument of doing this is usually appealing to the privileged for protection, applying to something the movement participants share with these. For example, the nation.

Future national movements

 

National movements aim, to quote Rokkan again, at defending a territory that is at a disadvantage in a center-periphery relation. The disadvantage may be economic (the center directs the investments), political (the center decides whom should be coopted), and/or cultural (the center decides the codes). The ultimate aim is to cancel the disadvantage, that (more of) the control over investments, cooptation and codes should be decided by people within the territory.

The growth of a national movement is as a rule a successive process. For the direct producers, it is generally more reasonable to interpret the encroachment and bullying of outsider elites as crimes against justice and aim at old laws or popular power in one for or another. Only when it proves impossible to communicate with the outsiders it appears self-evident to see them as outsiders, and only when a common identity for the inhabitants of the peripheral territory has been formulated, the movement takes a national form. The easier it is to form such a common identity, the faster the movement turns national.

Several authors have poked fun at non-European movements copying a European "national" language in their endeavour to assert themselves against European power [105]. But of course, the language isn't European. It is a global peoples' movement language, made necessary by the global spread and geographical stratification of the world market system

The first step, to create a national identity and secure that the inhabitants of the peripheral territory identify with it, is usually not easy. Many national movements have stumbled on it. There are so many other things to identify with - classes, religions, other territories. The successful national movement has usually been the ones that have been able to free-ride on other identities, like Catholicism in Ireland and peasants in China.

The identity and language creation, the mobilizing and action in the peripheries have been complicated by the fact that the national movements have consisted of so many different classes and groups. They have been effective when they have linked up with the needs and confrontation opportunities of the majorities.

The classic confrontation methods of the national movements have been boycotts of the goods and services of the center power, with strikes against center-owned businesses second. Sometimes this has been enough, particularly when other successful peoples' movements have contemporaneously enfeebled the center powers and forced them to compromises. This was the case during the 1945-1975 era, when the accumulated strength of many national movements made it possible for many of them to reach their immediate aim without much effort. But for the total resistance of the system peripheries, violence has also been necessary to force the system center to retreat. For example, peasant rebellions in India and war in Vietnam was necessary to make center powers, enfeebled by other wars, give up.

Strategically, the first aim has generally been, since the Creole revolutions, to get a state of their own. This has been natural, since the state is the only actor that has "the right" to defend local interests in the world market system. And this aim has been reached by many national movements during the twentieth century. But the overarching aim for the national movements - that the power over investments, cooptation and codes should be with people living in the territory - seems to be as far away as it has always been.

In the sections about the national movements of the system periphery, I suggest three things. Firstly, that the movements had a political success because the colonial empires really were abolished to the benefit of states built on citizens. Secondly, that they had a marginal economic success because the growing economic gap tended to be stagnate and even close, at least in times of mobilization. Thirdly, that they had some cultural success because the naive racism and Eurocentric worldview that had ruled for some hundred years at least were challenged.

Against this it is possible to contend that it is no improvement that the regional elites take over the regional government power in a world where governments, at least in the system peripheries, lose out to global powers, that it still is in the system center the most important economic decisions are made, ant that the western upper middle class culture and its codes seem more expansive than ever, irrespective of being challenged or not.

In the light of the present corporate globalization, the national movements seem to have failed grossly.

But yet, such a contention should be conditioned.

Firstly, the failures are not equally big everywhere. They tend to be biggest in Africa, where the peoples' movement mobilizations were smallest. The successes tend to be biggest in East Asia, where the mobilizations were biggest and where the Chinese and Vietnamese peasant revolutions dominated the development. This may be a coincidence, but it may also be a manifestation of a social law - if a majority shares the responsibility of development, the society is more capable than if the majority is only a victim.

Secondly, the national movements may not be outright failures but only to the extent they have applied a mistaken strategy.

Like it was to the labour movements, the government power strategy was double-edged, despite its convenience. It placed power with the social layer whose interest in the ultimate goal of the national movements was the least, according to Rokkan, the publicly employed upper middle class. It discouraged cooperation between peripheral territories about breaking center-based monopolies and encouraged each country to look for short run benefits by offering services to system centers and system center based businesses. It encouraged demobilization of the popular movement that had been the base of the victories of the movements: strikes and tax resistance had to be prevented in the name of national development, despite the fact that the peripheral status depends of low wages more than anything else. In most countries, the strength of the national movements decreased after government power (except in East Asia).

These facts have induced some authors to contend that the national movements have strengthened the world market system instead of challenging it - they have spread both the state system and the world market adaptated western culture to the whole world and to the best of their abilities legitimated it to the global majority [106].

The state fixation of the national movements has caused conflicts within the movements themselves. I have touched above upon the conflicts between the centers and peripheries within. But the conflicts have also been strong within the movements, between the state-constructing elites and the rank-and-file which are interested in safeguarding the civil society and peoples' spontaneous expressions of life. The systemic necessities are strict for a peripheral state, and to assert itself it has to place heavy burdens on its own citizens. As a rule though, the citizens in the new state is primarily organised in the national movement, and when its leadership suddenly deserts them to perform state duties, people are disillusioned and paralysed and have no tools to defend themselves with. Thence the authoritarian, hierarchic politics that has often afflicted peripheral countries after liberation.

There was at least one country where this conflict got a distinct expression, which in the long run resulted in a fairly democratic society, despite demoralization in the short run - Ireland.

The Irish national movement was, as always, led by the urban middle class, but had close ties to the countryside through the successful tenant movement against British landlords in the 1880s. Irish nationalism was primarily spread by a Celtic sports movement turning to youth, and these youth was later mobilized to the liberation war through an anti-conscription movement. Youths had for hundreds of years had the task to defend the Irish villages against bailiffs and policemen, and the increasing level of conflict didn't change anything except that "the Public Band" was renamed IRA. When the movement leadership organised a state based in a peace agreement with Britain, these youths saw no reason to subordinate themselves under this state and its world market career. They continued the war, against the Irish state [107].

Tom Garvin has examined the goal conflict between youths and the movement leadership, in a way that isn't damaged by his sympathies being on the side of the leadership. The youths wanted a republic of cooperating villages; their aim was to protect the civil society of the villages and its spontaneous expressions of life. The leadership wanted to build a modern society where the villages were subordinated under the world market. Garvin expressed this in opposites like subsistence against commercialization, equality against meritocracy, community against individualism. When the movement that the youths had belonged to wasn't a peoples' movement any longer but an official institution with an alien goal, their understanding and language were confused: Garvin describes them as undemocratic and elitist, and when you express yourself in an official language when you are cornered it may sound so.

It is another matter that their high level of conflict jeopardized the civil society they tried to protect.

While the national movements were ambiguously successful in defending the system peripheries, they were exceptionally successful at an unintentional level, where the success caused a lot of trouble for them.

Since the national movements have been so desperately dependent of bringing home the territorial identities and solidarities in their struggle against the system centers, they have easily come into conflict with popular movements stressing other identities. Labour movements, peasant movements, and women's movements have tended to be repressed in the name of unity, at best been treated paternalistically as a subordinated ally, at worst been terrorized to silence. Few national movements have escaped this conflict; some have even let themselves out as henchmen to ruling classes within the territory. The "national" has for this reason, despite its roots in the democratic revolt, become the principal ideological weapon against the self-assertiveness repressed classes and categories. This is also true for national state projects with roots in peoples' movement traditions and peoples' movement mobilizations, not least those who refer to communist identities but also for example the USA [108].

Meanwhile, these repressed classes and categories have to a great extent been caught in the concept formation of the national movements. The labour movement defined itself nationally as early as in the nineteenth century - the name is the International, not the Global for example - and to form a government in a nation was the main strategy at the same time. The intellectual and professional advocates of the repressed classes and categories were even more caught - while "the left" in the nineteenth century was a movement for equality between human beings and between classes, it is today principally a movement for equality between nations [109]. And I suppose it has been so since the Third International decided to focus on anti-colonial struggle in 1921.

This has weakened the national movements themselves. For it has weakened other social movements against the destructive consequences of the world market system, movements that would have been able to curb the adversaries of the national movements by struggling for other themes. And it has hid the ultimate aim of national struggle, democratic autonomy, behind group identities whose value is never more than occasional and pragmatic.

It is perhaps possible to argue that a national movement that is exclusively national, i.e. sees only the center-periphery stratification of the world and disregards that there are also classes and genders, has to be statified as soon it has any success, and that it then has to play ball with the world market system not to be shattered.

There may be reasons for future national movements to reconsider some things they have taken for granted. And in the tracks of the neo-liberal thrust of the ruling classes, and the so-called globalisation of capital some new trends seem really to be under way among periphery defending movements.

One possible choice is what we have seen in the tracks of bankrupted national state projects in Eastern Europe or World Bank shattered economies in Africa: a war all against all about shrinking resources, formulated as a hate against all "others". As a long-run peoples' movement strategy it is perhaps not very wise, but it may arguably work as a tactics for casual survival in a world where market war all against all is the conformist behaviour.

Another more positive possibility is the one recommended by Alain Touraine: broad, radical democratic, "Grundtvigian" regional movements against all hierarchies and technocracies, under the cover of regional culture. The advantage of this is that labour movements, women's movements, environmental movements and other are easily subsumed, and that it doesn't obstruct mobilization it may benefit from due to contemporaneousness, and that it avoids cooptation into state building projects it can't take a responsibility for [110]. This is not an impossible way, which is shown by the Norwegian national movement in the nineteenth century, the Indian movements and much of the anti-WTO movements of today, see chapter 10.

And a third possibility is to simply disregard the center-periphery stratification in the tactics of the everyday struggle and exclusively deal with what creates it - the low incomes of the direct producers. A global trade unionist solidarity to strengthen the self-assertiveness of trade unions in the South may be the most effective weapon against the center-based monopolies, and by that way also the center-periphery relation as such [111].

It is far from certain which of the possibilities that will prevail. For the time being, some years into the 21th century, it seems that the typical form of peripheral defense is the governments of the 77 group, defending their own commons against encroachments from the center, exhorted by agrarian movements, see Chapter 10 -- but this may be conjunctural. The only thing that is certain is that the inbuilt center-periphery relations will create new national movements as long as the world market system remains.

 

Footnotes

 

[1] Stein Rokkan & Derek Urwin, Economy, territory, identity, Sage 1983. For an original description of the ways a center controls the periphery in the economic sphere, see Jane Jacobs, Cities and the wealth of nations, Vintage Books of Random House 1985.

[2] "Hegemony is more than just a hierarchy of power among states. It is a complex pyramid of actors operating at many levels of social organisation. At the apex of the hegemonic pyramid are the elite classes in the hegemonic coalition, classes located both in the center and in the periphery, i.e. dispersed throughout the pyramid at key points." Barry K. Gills, Hegemonic transitions in the world syste, in A.G. Frank & B.K. Gills (ed): The world system, Routledge 1993.

[3] For example, there are E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 : Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press 1992, and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso 1996; the latter tends to write off all nationalism as groundless. Anthony D. Smith, The ethnic origins of nations, Blackwell 1986, states however that no ideologies are possible if there are no interests to warrant them. The best survey in my opinion is Øyvind Østerud, Hva er nasjonalisme, Universitetsforlaget 1994.

[4] Joshua Miller, The rise and fall of democracy in America 1630-1789, Pennsylvania University Press 1991, describes the inheritance from the Puritan local communities as strongholds against the central power. Pauline Maier, From resistance to revolution, Alfred Knopf 1972, relates the action methods of the local communities and the way they successively fused. There is also a short conventional description in M.J. Heale, The American revolution, Methuen 1986.

[5] David P Szatmary, Shay's rebellion, University of Massachusetts Press 1980.

[6] Joshua Miller, The rise and fall of democracy in early America, also describes the trick the American upper class used to repeal democracy under full democratic respectability. They introduced a mythical "people", incarnated in the elected authorities, which at any time would be mobilized against real popular initiatives, with the motivation that real popular initiatives never can live up to the claims one may lay to the mythical "people: absolute majority from the beginning, expressed at particular occasions and under specific, by the authorities defined forms, for example general elections.

[7] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, many editions, for example Random House 1954.

[8] Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian revolution, The University of Tennessee Press 1972, C.L.R. James, The black Jacobins, Allison & Busby 1980 (first issue 1938).

[9] John Lynch, The Spanish American revolution 1808-1826, W.W. Norton 1986, Leslie Bethell (ed), The independence of Latin America, Cambridge University Press 1987.

[10] Symbolically, the different cultural climates in Mexico, La Plata and Peru can be inferred from the identity of the equestrian statue at the main square of the capital, says J.H. Perry in The Spanish seaborne empire, Pelican 1976. In Mexico it is Cuautémoc, the last Indian king. In Buenos Aires it is the Creole hero San Martín. In Lima it is the Indian-killer Pizarro.

[11] The strategist behind the program was the same man who invented the trick to repress the local autonomy of the peasants, finance minister Alexander Hamilton. It would later have its theoretical formulation by Friedrich List, Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie, many editions, for example Fischer 1920. The fundamental concept is "productive force", not "market". Cristóbal Kay, Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment, Routledge 1989, has indicated influences from Hamilton through List and East European economists like Rosa Luxemburg and Constantin Stere, to the Latin American proponents of import substitution in the so called dependency school, see chapter 2. Early Indian economists like Dadabhai Naoroji thought in the same categories.

[12] Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital and European states A.D. 990-1992, Blackwell 1992.

[13] Miroslav Hroch, Social preconditions of national revival in Europe, Cambridge University Press 1985.

[14] Adrian Lyttleton, The national question in Italy, in Mikulas Teich & Roy Porter (ed), The national question in Europe in historical context, Cambridge University Press 1993. The more democratical faction and its complete inability to communicate with the peasant majority is related in Clara Lovett, The democratic movement in Italy, Harvard University Press 1982.

[15] Norman Davies, God's playground, Clarendon Press 1981. Ironically, the peasants were indebted to this aristocratic nationalism for their freedom since the abolishment of serfdom was a government policy to counter it with.

[16] About Croatia, see Mirjana Gross, The union of Dalmatia with modern Croatia, in Teich & Porter, The national question; Ivo Basic, The national question in Yugoslavia, Cornell University Press 1984 isn't very lucid but gives about the same picture. About Catalonia see Gerald Brenan, The Spanish labyrinth, Cambridge University Press 1960.

[17] Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, National movements in the Baltic countries in the 19th century, 1983.

[18] Trond Nordby, Det moderne gjennembruddet i bondesamfundet, Universitetsforlaget 1991.

[19] A standard work about the Irish national movement and Ireland generally is Robert Kee: The green flag - a history of Irish nationalism, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1972) Penguin 2000. It can be supplemented by F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland since the famine, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1971, and James Coonolly, Labour in Ireland, At the Sign of the Three Candles, no year, first published in 1910, which is a scathing critique of the "official" national movement from a labour movement perspective. The often ambiguous relations between peasants and nationalists are highlighted by Samuel Clark & James S. Donnelly (ed), Irish peasants, The University of Wisconsin Press 1983.

[20] Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, Jonathan Cape 1995. As a curiosity, the initiator of the Celtic renaissance as an organised movement, Augusta Gregory, was inspired by the Arab revolt in Egypt in 1881 and by different Indian syncretist religions popularized by the so-called Bengal renaissance, see below.

[21] D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, Routledge 1982.

[22] Ryle Dwyer, The man who won the war, Mercer Press 1990, is one of many biographies of the resistance organiser Michael Collins and his strategy.

[23] An introduction to the demythologization of the Russian revolution, informed by new reserarch about the actual conduct of people during 1917, is given by Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian revolution, Edward Arnold 1990. - The description of the Russian communist party as primarily nationalist is not unique; Immanuel Wallerstein hints at it in several articles. And Lenin was fairly outspoken, in for instance What is to be done, many editions, for example International Publishers 1973, about that what he really objected to was Russian backwardness rather than the bad conditions of the workers.

[24] Victor Magagna, Commuities of grain, Cornell University Press 1991.

[25] There are whole libraries of books about the Russian revolution. Among the newer works starting from the actions of popular movements rather than well-known persons are Daniel H. Kaiser, The workers' revolution in Russia 1917. Cambridge University Press 1987; Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, and Edith Rogovin Frankel et al (ed), Revolution in Russia, Reassessment of 1917, Cambridge University Press 1992.

[26] This process has been described in hundreds of books, arguably best in Moshe Lewin, The making of the Soviet system, Methuen 1985. Lewin explains the increasing brutality of the regime with its combination of (relative) incompetence and excessive ambitions; again and again it started huge projects without a hint of how to do it, let it drag along for a while, and then tidy it up in panic. Also the forced collectivization in 1929 was a panic action caused by the non-existent book-keeping according to Lewin; the government suddenly discovered that the money to pay the state officials with would run out within months.

[27] According to Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's peasants, Oxford University Press 1994. Unlike the more famous trials in Moscow, the countryside trials were serious and built on evidence from the peasant victims.

[28] According to David Kotz, Revolution from above - the demise of the Soviet system, Routledge 1997, the regime shift around 1990 was staged by exactly the people who had earlier carried the nationalist regime, and the aim was to save the privileges that were threatened by the economic crisis and the accompanying claims for democracy.

[29] Anthony D. Smith, State and nation in the Third World, Wheatsheaf Books 1983. Joseph Schumpeter is expressing a similar thought when he refuses to acknowledge investments forced from without as "development" (The theory of economic development, Harvard University Press 1949).

[30] Stein Rokkan & Derek Urwin, Economy, territory, identity.

[31] Some people think this is possible to show physically in terms of energy content. For example N. Georgescu-Roegen, The entropy law and the economic process, Harvard University Press 1971, quoted by Stephen Bunker, The exploitation of labor in the appropriation of nature, in Charles Bergquist (ed), Labor in the capitalist world economy, Sage 1984.

[32] There are few comparative studies and analyses of anti-colonial movements. Anthony D. Smith, State and nation in the Third World is a serious one. L.S. Stavrianos' lengthy Global rift, William Morrow 1981, uses almost a thousand pages to the development of the north-south conflict during five hundred years but focuses primarily at south as a victim; poplar movements appear as an abstract "defence of the nation" where actions, actors and strategies disappear and the differences between different approaches appears as ideologies.

[33] Eric Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century, Harper & Row 1973, has like Joel Migdal, Peasants, politics and revolution, Princeton University Press 1974, emphasized the important role of the peasants in the national movements, and have touched at the role of the educated urban middle class. Anthony D. Smith, State and nation in the Third World, deals primarily with the latter. Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, Stanford University Press 1986 includes a long passage where he analyses the strategic role of the labour movement, see also chapter 5.

[34] Quoted by Anthony D. Smith, State and nation in the Third World.

[35] The Indian movement is rather well told. Bipan Chandra et al, India's struggle for independence, Penguin 1989, gives an overview, and Ravinder Kumar, Essays in the social history of modern India, Oxford University Press 1983 shows the social background; both are rather Gandhian in outlook. Jan Myrdal, India waits, Lake View Press, 1986, gives more room for the radicals in the movement. The British repressive rule is reviewed in Mike Davis: Late Victorian holocausts, Verso 2001.

[36] Gandhi always maintained that his non-violence strategy was effective, not that it primarily was morally "right". Thanks to the low conflict level, the social costs for the participants would be kept low and permit many people to participate, thanks to the low conflict level, prestigious deadlocks could be avoided and allow the adversary to concede without losing face. See for example Arne Næss, Gandhi and group conflict, Universitetsforlaget 1974, and chapter 1.

[37] This movement was called the Khilafat movement, referring to the position of the Turkish Sultan as Caliph. The emphasis on the unity of the 'umma was strong within Indian Islam, particularly in popular sufian movements, see for example Olivier Roy, Islam and resistance in Afghanistan, Cambridge Middle East Library 1990.

[38] J.F.T. Jordens, Hindu religious and social reform in British India, in A.L. Bashan (ed) A cultural history of India, Oxford University Press 1975.

[39] Barry Pavier, The Telengana movement, Vikas Publishing House 1981.

[40] Shashi Joshi, Struggle for hegemony in India, Sage 1992.

[41] M.C. Ricklefs, A history of modern Indonesia, Macmillan 1981.

[42] Baruch Kimmerling & Joel S Migdal, Palestinians, the making of a people, The Free Press 1993. The inception of the Palestinian movement is also related in Ted Swedenburg, The role of the Palestinian peasntry in the Great Revolt 1936-39, in Edmund Burke & Ira M Lapidus (ed) Islam, politics and social movements, University of California Press 1988.

[43] More about the Islamists in the next section. The Qassamites are treated in Abdullah Schleifer, Izz-al-Din al-Qassam, preacher and mujahid, in Edmund Burke (ed) Struggle and survival in the modern Middle East, University of California Press 1993.

[44] Eric Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century, John Dunn, Modern revolutions.

[45] See chapter 9.

[46] Anthony D. Smith, State and nation in the Third World; Robert I Rothberg & Ali A. Mazrui, Protest and power in black Africa, Oxford University Press 1970; and Donald Crummey (ed), Banditry, rebellion and social protest in Africa, Heinemann 1986. John Iliffe, Africans - the history of a continent, Cambridge University Press 1996, describes the de-colonization.

[47] Endre Sik, The history of black Africa, Akadémiai Kiadó 1974.

[48] Wunyabari O. Maloba, Mau Mau and Kenya, James Currey/Indiana University Press 1993

[49] David Birmingham, Frontline nationalism in Angola & Mozambique, James Currey 1992.

[50] Eric Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century, and John Dunn, Modern revolutions, relates what happens up to 1970. Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam, anatomy of a war, Allen & Unwin 1986, relates what happens up to 1976.

[51] The Nghê An rebellion is the case study in James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant.

[52] Joel S. Migdal, Peasants, politics and revolution, Princeton University Press 1974.

[53] According to Walden Bello, Brave new third world, Earthscan Publications 1989.

[54] According to Gérard Chaliand, Revoution in the third world, Harvester Press 1977.

[55] From the Resolution about colonial policy, of the Second International's Congress in Stuttgart, 1907, quoted in Jan Sandegren, Arbetarklassen och de förtryckta folken, Oktober 1974.

[56] The solidarity expressed itself, except in material support, in an interest in Indo-European syncretic religions, popularized by the Bengal renaissance. European Theosophy of the 1890s was a direct counterpart to the European Maoism of the 1970s. For example, the organisers of the Celtic renaissance in Ireland were all Theosophists, won for anti-colonialism by Asian movements as much as by Irish.

[57] For example Michael Burawoy, The countours of production politics, in Charles Bergquist (ed), Labor in the capitalist world-economy, Sage 1984.

[58] The term development despotism is from Tulio Halperin Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina, Alianza Editorial 1969, an incrediby tight description. The term refers to the "developmentalist" ideology surrounding Diaz' dicatorship which didn't differ much from the authoritarian liberals of today. It may be noted that the intellectuals that framed the ideology, the socalled científicos, were more hated by the people than the political bosses that were content with prosaic plunder.

[59] Alan Knight, The Mexican revolution, Cambridge University Press 1986 is a thousand pages description of the time up to 1920. Eric Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century and John Dunn, Modern revolutions, are summaries. John Tutino, From insurrection to revolution in Mexico, Princeton University Press 1986 and Dana Markiewicz, The Mexican revolution and the limits of agrarian reform 1915-1946, Lynne Rienner Publishers 1993, are reasonable descriptions of why the peasants succeeded as much as they did. But the most fascinating and moving relation is John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican revolution, Vintage 1968.

[60] James Dunnkerley, Rebellions in the veins, Verso 1962 focus on the miners. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed but not defeated - Peasant struggles among the Aymara and the Qhechwa in Bolivia 1900-1980, UNRISD 1987, focuses on the peasants.

[61] Eric Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century, John Dunn, Modern revolutions, and Leslie Bethell (ed), Cuba, a short history, Cambridge University Press 1993. The post-revolutionary Cuba is poorly studied but Frank J. Fitzgerald, The Cuban revolution in crisis, Monthly Review Press 1994, seems to make the best of it.

[62] About the Castro epigons, see Régis Debray, A critique of arms, Penguin 1977.

[63] I follow Jean Chesneaux, Peasant revolts in China 1840-1949, Thames and Hudson 1973; and Jean Chesneaux, Françoise Le Barbier & Marie-Claire Bergère, China from the 1911 revoltuion to liberation, Harvester Press 1977. Jack Gray, Rebellions and revolutions - China from the 1800s to the 1960s, Oxford University Press 1990, is a traditional history. Eric Wolf, Peasant wars, and John Dunn, Modern revolutions, have also a lot to say, as has Joel Migdal, Peasant politics and revolution.

[64] The Chinese secret societies are described in chapter 3, and in Jean Chesneaux (ed), Popular movements and secret societies in China 1840-1950. Stanford University Press 1972

[65] The way this movement initiated the most explosive womens' movement of the twentieth century is shown in chapter 8.

[66] Jack Gray, Rebellions and revolutions, and William A. Jones et al (ed), New perspectives on the cultural revolution, Harvard Contemporary China Series 1991. It is striking that western liberals support communist party bosses as a matter of fact against their victims. But it is self-evident that a liberal científico always support "Development" against poor peasants and contractual workers. And then it doesn't matter who is the agent of "Development".

[67] The figures according to Angus Maddison, Monitoring the world economy 1820-1992, OECD 1993.

[68] Walden Bello & Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in distress - Asian miracle economies in crisis, institute for Food and Development Policy 1993. - Usually South Korea's and Taiwan's export oriented industrialization is seen as the opposite to import substitution. But it was the great theorist of import substitution, Raúl Prebisch, who as early as 1961 suggested that the new national industries should be stimulated to aggressive marketing abroad to rise the volume and reduce costs. The concept of opposites is probably an effect of the opposite results on power relations. Import substitution calls for high purchase power domestically, including high wages for the workers, which is favourable for trade unions; export oriented industry calls for low wages to make the prices competitive, and thus repression of trade unions.

[69] M.E. Yapp, The making of the modern Near East, Longman 1989, and The Near East since the First World Waar, Longman 1994, and Gabriel Baer, Fellah and townsman in the Middle East, Frank Cass 1982.

[70] Some books with basic facts about Islamism are François Burgat & William Dowell, The Islamic movement in North Africa, University of Texas 1993, Olivier Roy, Islam and resistance in Afghanistan, Cambridge Middle East Library 1990, and Olivier Roy, The failure of political Islam, Harvard University Press 1994. The last one is very critical. A short history is Jamil Abun-Nasr, Militant Islam, a historical perspective, in Ernest Gellner (ed), Islamic dilemmas: reformers, nationalists and industrialisation, Mouton 1985.

[71] Richard Mitchell, The society of the Muslim Brotherhood, Oxford University Press 1969.

[72] Or, to use an expression from one of the most popular ideologists of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shari'ati: Muhammed founded a classless democratic society, and not any fucking religion.

[73] Nikki R. Keddie, Roots of revolution - an interpretative history of Iran, yale University Press 1981; Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between two revolutions, Princeton University Press 1982; John Walton & David Seddon, Free markets & food riots, Blackwell 1994.

[74] See chapter 3. The 'ulamate is organised as a corps in Iran.

[75] Juan R.I. Cole & Nikki R. Keddie (ed), Shi'ism and social protest, Yale University Press 1986.

[76] François Burgat & William Dowell, The islamist movement in North Africa.

[77] Olivier Roy, The failure of political Islam

[78] Ralph Premdas et al (ed), Secessionist movements in comparative perspective, Pinter Publishers 1990. Stein Rokkan & Derek Urwin, Economy, territory, identity, is also topical as is Anthony D. Smith, State and nation in the Third World.

[79] Endre Sik, The history of black Africa.

[80] Gérard Chaliand, Le malheur kurde, Seuil 1992; Nader Entesar, Kurdish nationalism, Lynne Rienner 1992.

[81] Samuel Tan, The Moro secessional movement in the Philippines, in Ralph Premdas et al (ed), Secessionist movements in comparative perspective.

[82] Martin Smith, Burma, Insurgency and the politics of ethnicity, Zed 1991; David Brown, The state and ethninc politics in souteast Asia, Routledge 1994.

[83] S.W.R. Samarasinghe, The dynamics of separation, the case of Sri Lanka, in Ralph Premdas et al (ed), Secessionist movements in comparative perspective.

[84] According to Anil Kohli, Democracy and discontent - India's growing crisis of governability, Cambridge University Press 1990, these center-periphery conflicts are also class and group conflicts, because different classes or cstes struggle for government patronage. The Tamil movement was for example also a lower class revolt against the Congress-based Brahmins.

[85] Harun or-Rashid, Bangladesh; the fist successful secessionist in the third world, in Ralph Premdas et al (ed), Secessionist movements in comparative perspective.

[86] Donna Lee Van Cott (ed), Indigenous peoples and democracy in Latin America, Macmillan 1994; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed but not defeated; Diego Cornejo Menacho (ed), Indios - Una reflexión sobre el levantamiento indígena de 1990, Ildis/El Duende/Abya-Yala 1991. See also chapter 7 and 8.

[87] See for example Gordon Laxer, Popular national sovereignty and the US empire, in Journal of World-System Research XI, 2005.

[88] For Africa, this phenomenon was early described by René Dumont, False start in Africa, Andre Deutsch 1966. Rajni Kothari, Masses classes and the state, in Ponna Wignaraja (ed), New social movements in the South, Zed 1993, is a more recent description.

[89] John P. Powelson & Richard Stock, The peasant betrayed - agriculture and land reform in the third world, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Gunn & Hain 1987.

[90] There is a whole literature about this attack. Walden Bello, Dark victory, Institution for Food and Development Policy 1994, focuses on the actors while Philip McMichael, Development and social change, a global perspective, Thousand Oaks 1996, focuses on the way the Keynesian development policy up to 1980 created structures which made the subsequent dismantling inevitable, not least through the debt crisis .

[91] This is Samir Amin's prescription, for example in Social movements in the periphery, in Ponna Wignaraja, New social movements in the South.

[92] According to Walden Bello, Brave new third world, Earthscan Publications 1990. The same thing happened to OPEC - Saudi chose to deal separately with the center about the oil prices which almost dealt a death blow to OPEC.

[93] There has been much debate about the capacity of the peripheral countries to at least "reformulate" the relation between center and periphery. See for example Cristóbal Kay, Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment.

[94] One author arguing for this perspective is Stephen G. Bunker, The exploitation of labor in the appropriation of nature: Toward an energy theory of value, in Charles Bergquist (ed), Labor in the capitalist world-economy, Sage 1984.

[95] Stein Rokkan & Derek Urwin, Economy, territory, identity.

[96] Jack E. Reece, The Bretons against France, The University of North Carolina Press 1977.

[97] Alain Touraine, Sociological intervention and the internal dynamic of the Occitan movement, in Edward A. Tiryakian & Ronald Rogovski, New nationalism of the developed west, Allen & Unwin 1985.

[98] Jack E. Reece, The Bretons against France; Suzanne Berger, Bretons and Jacobins, reflections on French regional ethnicity, in Milton J. Esman, Ethnic conflicts in the Western world, Cornell University Press 1979; Michael O'Callaghan, Separatism in Brittany, Redruth 1983.

[99] The Norwegian resistance to the EU is poorly related. Tor Bjørklund, Mot strømmen, Universitetsforlaget 1982 is an, according to the author, "a little too near-sighted" account of the way it was organised. The classic acount of the power of peripheral Norway over economy, politics and culture is S. Rokkan & H. Valen, The mobilization of the periphery, in Stein Rokkan, Citizens, elections, parties, Universitetsforlaget 1970.

[100] Marianne Heiberg, The making of the Basque nation, Cambridge University Press 1989.

[101] Reliable accounts of the Yugoslav breakdown will probably appear soon. But it is likely that it wasn't a matter of national movements at all, but simply local strongmen or local bureaucrats aiming at creating empires out of the crumbling Yugoslav edifice.

[102] The research on Nazism is not nearly as developed as the research on, let's say, the Russian revolution. Pierre Aycoberry, The Nazi question, Pantheon Books 1981, makes an overview of the literature and judged by Norwegian and Swedish university libraries it hasn't developed much since. Still, historians tend to see Nazism either as a conspiracy between some leading figures while the mobilization that supported the Nazis is forgotten, or as a psychological disease. There are some statistical surveys of who supported it, by for example Peter Manstein, Die mitglieder und Wähler der NSDAP 1919-1933, Peter Lang 1990, but the only account of the social dynamics that led to it seems to be Peter Fritsche, Rehearsal for Fascism, Oxford University Press 1989.

[103] For a German, or French, or Russian, nationalist this constant carping on Jews was not as arbitrary as it may seem a hundred years later. The reasonable enemy, about 1900, should be the hegemon, the British empire. But the most important finance center of the empire was Rothschild's bank. And to the Germans, Polish Jews played about the same part in the economy as Muslims do today, as easily dispensable casual workers who had to organise in mafias to survive (see for example Abraham Léon, Jewish question - a Marxist interpretation, Pathfinder 1970).

[104] Some authors, for example Alan Bullock, Hitler, a study in tyranny, Pelican 1962, seem to think that the Nazis were completely pragmatic, with no program at all. This os obviously exaggerated.

[105] For example E.J. Hobsbawn, Benedict Anderson, et al.

[106] Georgi M. Derlugian, The social cohesion of states, in Terence K. Hopkings, Immanuel Wallerstein et al, The age of transition - trajectory of the world-system 1945-2025, Zed Books & Pluto Press 1997.

[107] Tom Garvin, 1922 - The birth of Irish democracy, Gil & Macmillan 1996.

[108] Of course states have used nationalist themes to discipline their citizens. I haven't dealt with this since I write about national movements, not nationalist ideologies.

[109] I can't interpret otherwise the near exclusive focus on North-South issues among the intellectual left. See for example their behaviour at the Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, when it proved impossible to make them focus on class, unemployment and precarization of the labour market. The sad story is told in a pamphlet by Friends of the Earth Sweden: En miljard nya jobb till år 2000, in Tord Björk et al (ed), Arbetslös?, Miljöförbundet Jordens Vänner 1997.

[110] Alain Touraine, Sociological intervention and the internal dynamics of the Occitanist movement.

[111] This seems to be the strategy of the Indian peasant movement, according to Gail Omvedt, Reinventing the revolution, M.E. Sharpe 1993.