ABSTRACT
Nation-state creation and the Hemoclysm In many histories the nineteenth century is designated as the age of nationalism. In contrast the twentieth century is viewed as the age of ideology or the age of modernization. This picture is incorrect. It is incorrect because it fails to come to grips with the fact that nationalism really took off in the twentieth century. The nation-state system – viewed as a system in which the world is divided into states that profess to be nation-states – is a by-product generated by the great upheavals of the twentieth century. As a by-product it has had amazing survivability. Nationalism has trumped every ideology – Communism, capitalism, liberalism, Fascism, Islamism, personality cults – rolling on like a wave of thunder, pushing aside all attempts to dam and dike up its momentum. In particular the most dramatic expansion of the nation-state system occurred during the period 1914-1975, the eponymous Hemoclysm. According to my reckoning of the 196 countries that exist today, 95 (48.5 percent) were created during this period.1 What is the Hemoclysm? During the period 1914-1975 much blood was shed, in wars civil and international, in famines that could have been prevented (especially in the Soviet Union and Maoist China), in a major reshuffling of the populations or Europe ushering in a situation in which Europe nationalism increasingly overlapped with proto-nationalism, that is, with ethnicity, language, and religion. This is known as the Hemoclysm. Panel A of Table 10.1 and Figure 10.1 summarize some of most salient features of this blood tide. One of the remarkable aspects of the Hemoclysm is that it is also the period where nationalism spread, when successful nation-state branding was established in most regions of the world. With the conclusion of World War I, a wave of nation-states creation spread across Europe and the Middle East. Some of these states survived between the two world wars; some didn’t, being absorbed by larger nation-states (notably Germany and the Soviet Union). The “small state” problem evinced by Yugoslavia condemned many of these states to being gobbled up in anticipation of another global conflict. In the aftermath of World War II the map of Europe was redrawn again, nation-states once destroyed arising from the ashes of the global conflict. Ethnic cleansing carried out during
World War II and in the five years following the formal end of the conflict – the virtual extinguishing of Jewish communities in Shoah, the resettlement of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and Czechs – produced a postwar Europe in which proto-nationalism and nationalism overlapped to a greater degree than it ever had prior to the cataclysmic conflict.
