Mahatma Gandhi and the National Question

The concept of ‘nation’ is a modern one, and many definitions of the word exist by authors ranging from John Stuart Mill to J.V. Stalin. The essential common element in these definitions is that, to be a nation, a country or region must be seen as a distinct political entity, whose people possess or aspire to possess a sovereign state of their own. As far as one can see, the word ‘nation’, which in English once also meant a class or community of people, 1 was given its present sense when the French Revolution (1789–94) gave its call for the independence of nations in Europe, a continent then dominated by monarchical states and ‘empires’, such as Russia and the ‘Holy Roman Empire’. When the modern working-class movement began in Europe in the nineteenth century, there was a natural urge to demand that workers of ‘all countries’ should unite (the slogan of the Communist Manifesto, 1848) overcoming all national borders. It was natural that there arose in the working-class movement much suspicion of ‘nation’ as a divi- sive factor so that ‘nationalism’ in classical Marxist usage was always looked at with a critical eye as setting people of one region or country against those of another.