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85 Ja m e s m . m C p h e r s o n “Two irreconcilable peoples”? Ethnic Nationalism in the Confederacy Ethnic nationalism is one of the most powerful forces in the modern world. It broke up Yugoslavia into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Kosovo and caused sometimes deadly conflict among these ethnic nations. It shattered the Soviet Union into a bewildering checkerboard of ethnic nations that can scarcely be said to live in peace with one another or with Russia. It split Czechoslovakia in two and threatens to do the same to Belgium. At one time it appeared that Canada might follow the same path. Kurdish nationalists fight in vain to carve out their own nation from portions of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Ethnic and religious conflict have kept Ireland, Nigeria, and Sudan embroiled in violent conflict or on the verge of it numerous times over the years, and it recently split Sudan into two nations. Distrust and violence between Jews and Arabs in Israel and the West Bank have so far prevented either a one-state or a two-state solution to the problem of Palestine. Sunni and Shiite Muslims war with each other in several Arab nations. Tribal, religious, and ethnic conflicts threaten to undermine or erode some of the democratic and nationalist aspirations of the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” in 2011. Even in the United Kingdom, the British government has recognized ethnic nationalism by devolving a degree of sovereign power to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. From these and other examples one could cite and from the work of numerous scholars who have studied nationalism, we can derive a definition of ethnic nationalism as the sense of identity and loyalty shared by a group of people united among themselves and distinguished from others by one or more of the following factors: language, religion, culture, and, perhaps most important but also most nebulous, a belief in the common genetic descent of the group. As one student of nationalism explains, because “there are very few groups in the world today whose members can lay any claim to a known common origin, it is not 86 • James M. McPherson actual descent that is considered essential to the definition of an ethnic group but a belief in a common descent.”1 This quotation points up an important element in any kind of nationalism, ethnic or otherwise: it is self-defined. As two other scholars have noted, nationalism “is first and foremost a state of mind”; it “is subjective and consists of the self-identification of people with a group.”2 Ethnic nationalism is far from unique to our own time. Revolts and civil wars that involved the Dutch against Spain or Scots and Irish against English rule were examples of such nationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, violent as well as nonviolent movements of ethnic nationalism included the Greeks against Turkey, Hungary versus the Hapsburgs, Poland against Russia, Norway against its union with Sweden, and some of the German states against Napoleon. The ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth century originated in part from the response of German intellectuals and cultural leaders to the French Revolution and to Napoleon’s conquests. They constructed the concept of a German Volk whose blood ties should unite all Germans against French domination. This idea of the Volk grew more and more powerful until Otto von Bismarck, who urged Germans to “ think with your blood,” united most German-speaking peoples into a single state in 1871. This model of ethnic nationalism was a top-down creation constructed by intellectuals and diffused into the culture through literature, music, art, and, eventually, political discourse to support the struggles of Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Norwegians, and other ethnic nationalities for independent nationhood.3 Ethnic identity is not the only form of nationalism. Another powerful current in the modern world is civic nationalism. The example closest to home is the United States. What binds Americans together is not ethnic solidarity but common citizenship and collective allegiance to a set of legal and political institutions forged by historical experience. There is no American Volk. The origins of American civic nationalism can be traced not to descent from an ancient bloodline but to the Declaration of Independence, the flag, the Constitution, and the shared history of a victorious struggle for independent nationhood. Almost from its founding the United States was a multiethnic nation. Although English language, law, and culture predominated, nearly two...

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