Nationalism and its Foreign Leaders

March 2024

Across history a disproportionate number of major nationalist figures trace their origins to areas separate to the core of the civilisation they are seen to represent. That is not to say that this is common across history. But it is certainly a notable exception that recurs frequently. It is even more unusual when one considers that these leaders often willingly engaged in wars and acted in the interest of the greater civilisation at the expense of their home territory. 

Below I list a few examples of: Leaders / Their Place of Association / Their Place of Origin 

Alexander the Great / Greece / Macedonia 

Joseph Stalin / USSR & Russia / Georgia 

Napoleon Bonaparte / France / Corsica & Italy 

Adolf Hitler / Germany / Austria 

Qing dynasty / China / Manchuria 

Christopher Colombus / Spain / Italy 

Muhammad Ali Pasha / Egypt / Albania 

The Founding Fathers / America / England 

The British Royal Family / UK / Germany (latterly) and much of north western Europe

I say ‘place of association’ here in the loosest sense. In some cases their association will be for linguistic, religious, or political reasons. 

Why does this phenomenon occur? I believe it is a combination of political opportunism and of nationalism’s dynamic characteristics.  Ambitious leaders use larger neighbouring powers as a springboard for personal ambition, regardless of whether the larger power has the desire to host such ambition. Alexander, of semi-barbarian Macedonian origin, willingly took on the mantle of Hegemon of the Hellenic League in his efforts to unite the Greek states and conquer the Achaemenid Empire. The rump of his empire ended up divided between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Kingdoms based around Hellenised Egypt and Persia respectively. We can presume, and primary sources suggest this, that Alexander’s ambition was for a Pan-Hellenic empire in the classical Greek sense. An approximate analogy can be made to Napoleon. The Corsican spoke Italian natively and only started to learn French at the age of 10, yet his ambitions morphed inseparably with the volatile influence and power of France at the turn of the 19th century. Stalin would go so far as to fight to deny Georgia autonomous statehood, and instead prioritised Russian over his mother tongue, and suppressed local cultures. A similar pattern can be seen by the Manchus who established the Qing dynasty over China and continued to use Chinese Mandarin as the language of bureaucracy, and upheld Confucianism as the state ideology.

In some cases the larger empire institutionalise the active recruitment of outsiders. The largely Italic Roman Republic gave way to a cosmopolitan Roman Empire that recruited heavily from beyond its Romano-Hellenistic core. No Western (pre-476 AD) emperors were born in the modern-day borders of Portugal, Greece, Britain, or Romania; countries all richly synonymous with Roman history. Yet after Italy, what we nowadays call Serbia produced the most at 14 emperors, as well as contributions from Bulgaria, Syria, Libya and Turkey. During and after the Crisis of the Third Century, it was the warlords of Ilyria (Aurelian, Diocletian, Constantine) and then Germania (Aetius, Majorian) that staved off western Roman collapse for two centuries. The Arab Caliphates and Ottoman Empire relied on a similar system of forcible outsider recruitment for the military and bureacratic classes via the mamluk and devshirme systems respectively. 

If there might be any equivalent today it is the US. Approximately two-thirds of US unicorn startups have been founded by 1st or 2nd generation immigrations. Large parts of its political class too are immigrants or children of immigrants. These groups do not map out as ‘nationalist leaders’ in the same way as the above examples, but they certainly represent the powerful elite of the country.