INDUS TRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NAT! ON ALI S M 283
gered the war, but President Lincoln frankly put preserving the union at the
center of his arguments for the justice and necessity of the war. In his Get-
tysburg Address, he said the war was being fought to test whether a nation
"conceived in liberty" and a government of, by, and for the people could en-
dure. He and others who forged the United States-politicians, historians,
philosophers, writers, thinkers, and citizens in general-asserted a national-
ist idea quite distinct from the ideologies spawned in Europe. Instead of
seeking nationhood in a common religion, history, traditions, customs,
race, or ethnic identity, they proposed that multitudes of individuals could
become "a people" by virtue of shared principles and shared allegiance to a
process. It was a nationalism based on ideas, a nationalism that anyone
could embrace because, in theory, it was a nation any person could become
a member of, not just those who worn born into it.
During that same Civil War, the emerging country gave notice of its
potential power. The American Civil War was the first in which a single
man at one point commanded an army of a million, the first in which
nearly a quarter of a million soldiers clashed on a single battlefield, and the
first in which industrial technology from railroads to submarines to
proto-machine guns, played a decisive role. It's true that in this war the
(dis}united states were fighting each other and posed, therefore, no mili-
tary threat to anyone else, but anyone could imagine what a formidable
power would emerge once the two sides melted back into a single state.
The other European nationalist movement of world-historical conse-
quence and immediate relevance for the Muslim world was Zionism. This
bundle of passion and ideas was just like all the other nineteenth-century
European nationalisms in its arguments and appeals. It agreed with Herder
that people who share a language, culture, and history were a nation. It
agreed with Mazzini that a nation had a right to its own self-ruling state
situated securely in a territory of its own. It agreed with the likes ofTre-
itschke that a nation-state had a right (even a destiny) to include all of its
own people within its borders and a right to exclude all others if necessary.
If the Germans were a nation and had such rights, said the founders of po-
litical Zionism, if the Italians were a nation, if the French were a nation,
then by God the Jews were a nation too.
There was, however, one key difference between Zionism and other
nineteenth-century European nationalisms. The Italians, Germans, Serbians,