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126 THEMES IWORLDH ISTORY nationalisms are doctrines of popular sovereignty. Nationalist movements believe that political power should rest with the people and this is what makes nationalism a modern concept. Civic nationalism vests sovereignty in all people regardless of language, ethnicity, religion or gender. It seeks to create a community of rights-exercising citizens and defines nationhood in terms of citizenship, not ethnicity or religion. Ethnic and religious nationalisms try to build national solidarities around a given language, religion or set of traditions, defining the people ethnically, not in terms of common citizenship. In a multi-ethnic country, ethnic nationalists might limit the exercise of sovereignty to a chosen people, often assumed to be superior to minority communities. Today, most western countries define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent exception is Germany where ideas of ethnic nationalism have had a long and troubling career going back to the reaction against the French imperial occupation of German states in 1806. Ideologies of civic nationalism have vied with those of ethnic/religious nationalism the world over and this has been so in modern India, China and Japan as well. As with industrialisation, so with paths to modernisation. Different societies have evolved their distinctive modernities. The Japanese and Chinese cases, along with the stories of Taiwan and South Korea, are very instructive in this regard. Japan succeeded in remaining free of colonial control and achieved fairly rapid economic and industrial progress throughout the twentieth century. The rebuilding of the Japanese economy after a humiliating defeat in the Second World War should not be seen as a mere post-war miracle. As Theme 7 shows, it resulted from certain gains that had already been accomplished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Did you know, for instance, that by 1910 tuition fees for studying at a primary school had more or less ended and enrolment had become universal? Japan’s path to modernisation, like that of any other country, has had its own tensions: those between democracy and militarism, ethnic nationalism and civic nation-building and between what many Japanese describe as ‘tradition’ and ‘westernisation’. The Chinese resisted colonial exploitation and their own bureaucratic landed elite through a combination of peasant rebellion, reform and revolution. By the early 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party, which drew its strength from Reprint 2026-27