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Africa: As the population of imperial powers began to settle parts of Africa, and the freed slaves of the United States began to resettle in Africa, many Africans began to involve themselves in struggles against the expanding imperialism of the Europeans. Between World War I and World War II, Africa saw great economic and population expansion and began to develop a great sense of self determination. By the start of World War II, almost every nation in Africa had its own economy and factories. After World War II, the African nationalist movement found itself at the forefront led by men like Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Great changes were also occurring in other parts of the world after World War II. The European colonies in Asia demanded and earned independence from Europe. The independence of India and Pakistan from Britain in 1947 and a dramatic impact to many Africans who saw India as an example of what was politically possible for their own countries.
Turkey & Middle East: Once Britain and France defeated the Ottoman Empire in World War I, they set about dividing the Middle East to suit their needs. The nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Transjordan, and the territory of Palestine, were created under a system called the mandate system, that was devised by the League of Nations, an international governing body that aimed to ease disputes between countries after World War I. Other nations such as Turkey, Egypt, and Iran, which already had independent national governments, were allowed to remain free of foreign guidance within their newly defined borders. Arabia, a vast desert in the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula, was left in tribal hands, with the Saud family bringing order to the region by the early 1930s. The mandate states, as the first group was called, all had difficult beginnings. Iraq, for example, was created with boundaries that did not conform to geographical features or ethnic groups; it contained Sunni and Shiite Muslims (two branches of the Islamic religion that differed on who should hold power in the religious community) as well as a large Kurdish (non-Arabic Muslims) population. Lebanon was expanded from its original foundation as a Christian community surrounding Mount Lebanon into a much larger territory that included Christians and several Muslim factions, all of which might have been better suited to live in neighboring Syria. Lebanon's odd construction was driven by France's desire to contain the power of Muslims within Syria. Palestine was not defined as a nation, but as a territory under British administration, for the British recognized the difficulties that faced Zionists and Palestinians as they fought for control in the region.
From these difficult and unstable beginnings, nations of varying degrees of stability were formed. Turkey provided an example of the power nationalism had to organize a people. Turkey was originally under the control of the Ottoman Empire and after World War I many different groups, including the Greeks, the Italians, and the Armenians (Christian Turks) fought to take possession of Turkish land. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), a Muslim Turk, started a movement within the Muslim community in Turkey to not let their Turkish culture and heritage be destroyed by outside forces. Using the idea of nationalism, Atatürk encouraged people of the Muslim faith in Turkey to bond together and with his newly created forces defeated the Greek and Italian armies and kept the Armenians from taking over large amounts of land to create their own country. Atatürk quickly created a new government and began to modernize Turkey by adopting secular laws, creating new roads and transportation systems, and promoting economic growth through trade with Western countries. By the time the mandate system was put into place, Turkey was already an independently functioning country and was not forced to operate under foreign rule. Other countries that were not as stable as Turkey, such as Syria, Lebanon,Iraq, and Transjordan (later Jordan), functioned during the mandate period (c. 1920–1940s) with relatively stable national governments, although they were based on European models and had leaders hand-picked by the European powers. However, these governments tended to be autocratic, which meant that a strong central figure, usually a king, held most of the power, and the general population had few choices regarding their governance. Moreover, popular opinion in these countries was deeply divided, with some groups preferring identities based on tribal loyalty, ethnicity, or religion over nationality.
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