I was reading a review of "Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas" and the reviewer was noting how the essays expanded on the Confederate's ultimately unsuccessful nationalist movement. It made me wonder how many other groups like the Confederates made up a nationalist movement but, for whatever reason, failed to achieve regular nationalist goals (e.g. self-determination or representation in government).
It would seem like failed nationalism would be a regular occurrence throughout history but I haven't been able to find any decent scholarly background on failed nationalist movements or the theories behind failed nationalism itself. Thoughts?
Here's an interesting example: The Fante Confederation in West Africa (Gold Coast) in the 19th century. There are a number of different interpretations of this series of events, but principally it was organized by a number of formally-educated West African men, many of them professionals and Christians, some of them of mixed heritage (Euro-African). Together with chiefly officeholders (some of them relatives of these professional men) from a number of southern Akan-speaking polities, they formed a Confederation in the late 1860s and early 1870s and even wrote several constitutions modeled largely on the German constitutions of the era. For a while, they enjoyed popular support from the asafo companies -- the 'hoplites' of the region, i.e. armed male sodalities. Their main agenda was to turn back the threat of the Asante state to the north, allied with the Dutch. The eventual collapse of the Dutch presence in the region largely accomplished their goals, but the Confederation then fell apart. There are several explanations for this: British opposition to the Confederation's existence, squabbling among the chiefly officeholders, but certainly one was the failure of a national consciousness among the mass of people within the Confederated states.
I would think that Gran Colombia following the Latin American revolutions would count, though I'm not an expert in the area or period.
The French attempted to create a "Saarlois" nationality in the Saar Protectorate following WWII (in order to deprive German of the resource-rich area).
Many post-colonial countries have had mixed luck with this, creating a national identity in lands where borders were arbitrarily drawn by imperial powers.
I would argue that the attempts to create "Soviet man" in the 1920s and 1930s is a sort of failed nationalism, especially considering that once Germany invaded in 1941, the USSR primarily resorted to Russian nationalism for propaganda.
Straining (or possibly breaking) the 20-year rule, I wonder if Belgium would be considered this in the modern era.