Modernity has caused grave injustices which will generate continuing violence far into the coming millennium.  If we date modernity from the post-Westphalian era (17th century) we can easily understand that the Industrial Revolution led to the flood of peasants to urban centers where their conspicuous poverty in the midst of affluence produced the protest movements that led to totalitarianism and mass genocide.  Less commonly, we fail to notice that industrial imperialism, rising in the 19th century and collapsing in the 20th, has also generated new injustices often attributed to pre-modern forces rather than modernity.

The first and most conspicuous of these involved the conquests in which both civilized and relatively "primitive" people were brought under the domination of industrial "democracies," countries that had empowered their "citizens" to be represented in governments which, as imperial powers, denied representation to their conquered "subjects."  Revolts against the imperial powers -- expedited by the inter-imperial conflicts that produced two World Wars and the ensuing Cold War -- led to the birth of a host of new states on the ashes of the collapsed empires during the second half of this century.

Although we are well aware of the grave problems confronting all these new states, and attribute many of them to their continuing poverty and their failure to industrialize (with notable exceptions that are much celebrated) we need to pay more attention to the crises of ethnic nationalism produced by modernity in many of these countries.  They may be attributed to the political aspects of modernity that accompany industrialization: most notably democracy and nationalism. Sovereignty in pre-modern states was attributed to rulers who claimed supernatural sources of authority that could benefit all subjects.  By contrast, the collapse of monarchic authority and its replacement by representative institutions has created expectations of equality for all citizens that remain as unrealized in most of the new states as they were under imperial domination.  The sense of injustice created by this transformation is stronger than what subjects felt in traditional regimes where inequality was expected and viewed as quite legitimate.

Nationalistic norms reinforce the sense of injustice created by democratic ideals. Although ethnocentric ideas about the inferiority of outsiders has pervaded all traditional societies, these ideas have acquired a new potency under the impact of democracy and industrialism.  The shift from royal to popular sovereignty required the replacement of the traditional grounds of political legitimacy with a new source of authority and this was provided by the myth of a nation, i.e. a community whose members had the right to govern themselves through their representatives assembled in legislative bodies at many levels. The tangible evidence of membership in a "nation" was citizenship in a "state," leading to the powerful idea of a nation state, i.e. a state in which it was the nation rather than the king (as in traditional monarchic states) that could legitimize governance.  It seemed unreasonable to expect that everyone living within a territorial space marked out by artificial boundaries could constitute such a nation, however.  This led to competing efforts to generate national states (where citizenship and nationhood would coincide).  Such efforts were organized from above by the rulers of states, and from below by members of ethnic communities claiming sovereignty.  We may refer to the former as state nations which, as in the process of "Americanization", sought to mold immigrants and other subjects into patriotic citizens, members of a single coherent "nation." By contrast, members of many ethnic nations in the world today see themselves as the victims of injustice and oppression, legitimizing their right to establish a state of their own. The paper that follows deals with the rising turmoil among "nations" -- i.e. between states and ethnic nations, two forms, both of which are called nations.

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Updated: 3 Sept. 1997

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