National Renaissance: “The Insider-Outsider Tension” (Part 1)

How do identity, belonging, and renewal evolve across scales from civilisation to the individual in a rapidly changing world?

Preface: A Curious Dance with History

History always tells us about the future. The signs are there, the patterns repeat, but most of the time we only look at the big events and forget the little triggers that set them in motion.

My earliest encounters with history weren’t in a classroom. I can’t even recall ever having a proper history teacher. By the time I got into secondary school, history wasn’t really part of Nigeria’s syllabus anymore. If I had it at all, it must have been in my first year of senior secondary, but even that memory is faint. I graduated from a science class where the focus was biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics. Not much of the past, not much of history.

But certain books found me. They shaped me long before I could appreciate what they were doing. I remember being barely a teenager and picking up Conquest Over Japan from the shelves of Methodist High School in Okitipupa, where my mother taught and worked as a Guidance Counsellor. I can still see that red leather cover in my mind, simple on the outside but packed with images of emperors and generals, presidents and battles, and the tides of nations. That was my first real history lesson, though I didn’t know it at the time.

I was about 13 or 14 years old when I got to know about Hitler, and it came from the pages of Leon Uris’ Mila 18. That book pulled me right into the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. It wasn’t history told from a distance. It was day by day. It showed me the desperation of a people herded into extermination camps, the weight of their suffering, and the moments of resistance when some could be rescued by cannons and others were lost altogether. Through those pages I felt, for the first time, the grief and resilience of the Jewish people, and how history can be lived as both tragedy and defiance.

Then there was Eagle in the Sky. On the surface it was the story of David, an Israeli fighter pilot. But what struck me was the fervour of nationhood in Israel, how a young man searching for his own identity could carry the burden of a young nation-state on the brink of war. He lost his identity in the battle, lost the love of his life that he was fighting for, and in the end had to rebuild himself from the ruins. It was a lesson that identity is never fixed. Sometimes it’s broken so that it can be found again.

And then there was Flight of Eagles, borrowed from my sister. A war novel about twin brothers who flew on opposite sides of World War II. What stayed with me most was a manoeuvre: the Immelmann turn, performed by the German ace “Max”. There I was in our simply furnished bedroom in Okitipupa, legs on the window’s burglary proof, and suddenly I wasn’t just a boy holding a book. I was inside the cockpit, banking hard, pulling the sky around me. That book gave me the sensation of courage, of rivalry, of what it means to stand on opposing sides of history.

Now I am 35. A husband, a father, a son, a leader, a friend, a citizen. I look back and realise those books planted something in me. They made me curious about the world, and that curiosity has only grown.

I recently watched The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime, and it really got me thinking. The series imagines a world where Nazi Germany won the war, which makes you confront how power, exclusion, and identity could be completely redefined under such circumstances. That scenario sparked my own reflections on insider–outsider dynamics: from Europe’s response to the Jewish question, to Africa’s difficulty in being homogeneous, to ethnic tensions in Nigeria, and down to the individual and family in today’s shifting global order.

It has led me to think deeply about something I call National Renaissance. A way of seeing how nations lose themselves, how they find themselves again, and how uniquely personal that collective journey can be. To mark my thoughts, I’ve put together this six-part series. It isn’t just about the past. It’s about the triggers from history and what they can tell us about the present and the future to come.

This is the start of a conversation I’ve been having with myself for years. Now I’m inviting you in.

Introduction: National Renaissance in the New World Order

This is a six-part essay series on National Renaissance in the New World Order, exploring how nations and societies navigate the insider–outsider tension across different layers of life.

Part One looks at Europe and its evolution in response to the Jewish question.
Part Two shifts from the global European lens to an African lens.
Part Three narrows further into a Nigerian focus.
Part Four brings the conversation to the level of the citizen.
Part Five turns to the family as a unit of national rebirth.
Part Six examines the tension between man and machine in our fast-approaching tech-driven future.

Each essay is an attempt to understand how identity, belonging, and renewal play out differently depending on the lens we choose.

The Persistent Drama of Belonging

Every nation that has ever risen wrestled with the same riddle: who belongs, and who does not? The tension between insiders and outsiders is not simply about bloodlines or borders. It is one of the crucial forces where ideologies are forged, revolutions kindled, and states reshaped.

Europe, more than any other continent, became a laboratory for this drama, and the Jewish experience within Europe provides one of the most illuminating case studies. For centuries Jews lived as both centrally and marginally indispensable to Europe’s culture and economy, yet perpetually marked as outsiders. That contradiction generated ideas, movements, and upheavals that would help shape the modern world.

This part examines how Europe grappled with the “Jewish Question” and how the insider–outsider dynamic (alongside economic, political, and technological forces) produced transformative movements that still reverberate globally.

From Ghettos to Emancipation: The First Cycle of Tension

The medieval and early modern periods established a particular pattern. Jews were confined to ghettos in cities like Venice, Frankfurt, and Prague, barred from land ownership, universities, and most guilds. Yet exclusion from mainstream institutions pushed them toward specific niches such as money-lending (forbidden to Christians), long-distance trade, medicine where permitted, and intellectual labour. In being locked out of traditional paths, they developed competencies that European societies increasingly required.

The Enlightenment and its aftermath cracked open possibilities. Emancipation came in waves. France granted Jews full citizenship in 1791. Prussia followed gradually through the 1800s. Austria-Hungary came last in 1867. Jews gained access to universities, professions, and civic life. In Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, Jewish families became prominent in journalism, law, and banking.

But integration came with conditions. Cultural assimilation was often demanded, legal equality remained fragile, and social acceptance proved elusive. The insider outsider tension actually got worse. Jews were now visible in parliaments and concert halls, making them both more influential and bigger targets for backlash.

Ideological Innovations: When Marginalisation Inspires Vision

Exclusion and partial integration created a unique social position that led to remarkable intellectual breakthroughs. European Jews became heavily involved in movements that would reshape modern thought. Their contributions came from complex interactions between their particular experiences and broader European thinking:

• Socialist and Communist Thought: Karl Marx came from a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity, but his experience of being an outsider likely shaped his critique of society. More directly, figures like Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany and Leon Trotsky in Russia brought Jewish experiences of exclusion to political movements that promised to eliminate all hierarchies.
• Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud worked in antisemitic Vienna and developed theories that exposed the hidden truths about Western civilisation. His position as a cultural outsider may have helped him see through social pretences, though his ideas also drew from broader trends in medicine and philosophy.
• Zionism: Theodore Herzl was a largely assimilated journalist who witnessed the Dreyfus Affair in France and concluded that Jewish integration had failed. His radical solution was simple: stop asking for acceptance, build a homeland.
• Modern Banking: Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds shaped Europe’s financial system, creating networks that crossed national boundaries. Their success bred both admiration and conspiracy theories that would have devastating consequences.

Each represented different strategies for transcending outsider status. Some chose universal revolution, others psychological insight, separate nationalism, or economic influence.

The Twentieth Century Crucible: Ideology and Catastrophe

The early 20th century intensified these dynamics amid broader crises of European civilisation. Economic instability, imperial competition, and the trauma of World War I created conditions where the insider-outsider question became lethal.

Many Jewish intellectuals and activists found homes in socialist and communist movements, sometimes from genuine conviction, sometimes because these ideologies promised equality in societies that otherwise marginalised them. In the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), international brigades ( including significant Jewish participation) fought Franco’s fascists and lost. That defeat previewed Europe’s larger catastrophe: fascism’s answer to modernity’s contradictions was to eliminate “corrupting” outsiders entirely.

Meanwhile, economic crisis and political instability made scapegoating attractive. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a fake document, but it gained circulation because it offered simple explanations for complex problems. Jews became symbols of everything destabilising about modern life. Capitalism and communism, globalisation and revolution, tradition and change. They were blamed for all of it.

The Holocaust and Israel: Destruction and Recreation

As evidenced in the run-up to WW2: Hitler needed an enemy to define German rebirth against. If it hadn’t been Jews, it would have been someone else: Slavs, Communists, Bolsheviks, The West, Blacks. His politics wasn’t sustainable without that “other”.

Nationalism drove an unholy wind of change through post-WW1 Germany. They had lost land, been humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, inflation destroyed savings, people starved. National pride was shattered.
The desire to stand again was natural and justified, the delivery was not.
When nationalism is about self-belief and civic orientation, it becomes life-giving; when it’s about purity or exclusion, it treads into dangerous, deadly territory.

The National Socialist Party (Nazis) made national pride dependent on exclusion and annihilation. They built their national project on the idea: “We rise only if others are destroyed (others in this case being mostly Jews).”

Fascism’s “final solution” was systematic murder. Six million killed across occupied Europe. The outsider was to be eliminated completely to secure the insider’s fantasy of purity and stability.

Yet from that horror emerged the ultimate reversal: Israel, founded in 1948. Jews finally had not just survival but their own country. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, the ultimate outsiders had a state, an army, and the power to defend themselves.

But the insider outsider dynamic didn’t vanish. It moved locations and got more complicated. Israel’s establishment necessarily displaced Palestinian Arabs, creating new outsider populations. Today, Israel itself wrestles with questions of belonging. Who is a Jew? What defines citizenship? How do you reconcile Jewish self-determination with Palestinian national aspirations? The same riddle appears in new forms.

It is a question that has present day Israelis locked in the same scenario “you’re either with the nation or against it”.

Zionism achieved Israel, but it also seeded long-term unrest in the Middle East. The displacement of Palestinians, wars with Arab neighbours, and cycles of retaliation all stem from the same turning point; granting an outsider an insider status.

A Portable Framework: The Dynamics of Belonging

Europe’s Jewish experience reveals recurring patterns that extend beyond any single group or region:

Exclusion creates adaptive innovation. Outsiders develop alternative competencies and perspectives.

Partial integration generates new tensions. Outsiders gain influence while remaining targets of suspicion.

Crisis intensifies the belonging question. Economic or political instability makes scapegoating attractive.

Resolution reshapes the political order. Through elimination, assimilation, or new state formation.

This cycle operates alongside other historical forces like technological change, economic development, and geopolitical competition. But it provides one crucial lens for understanding how societies define themselves and manage internal diversity.

Insiders usually hold power, privilege and access. They are the ones who benefit most from the status quo. Outsiders live on the margins. They carry the weight of exclusion, but often, they also carry the seed of change.

Hitler tapped into ultranationalist fervour, rebuilt pride, and turbocharged industry. The legacy of that mobilisation did lay foundations for Germany’s later economic strength (post-war, West Germany became a juggernaut).
Yes, strong leaders can mobilise, but if they’re unchecked, it often ends in disaster. Hitler’s nationalism didn’t just rebuild industry, it also led to 60 million dead.

The question then is; “Where do we draw the line? How does nationalism accelerate change, yet remain fundamentally human, good and equitable?
“What about us, makes us seek out an enemy” “What makes the presence of the other an ultra motivation to defend the State?”

In Feyi Olubodun’s The Villager, he writes on the African construct of “The Enemy” with the axis of a common statement/dogma “May my Enemy live long…” It appears that there are parallels in this tensions after-all, playing out across different continents, distinctly different peoples, yet possibly possessing common motivations?

I’m interested in this tension because it doesn’t just shape nations, it shapes people. It’s personal. You can feel it in families, in communities, in tribes, in religions. You can feel it when you’re denied entry or when you’re handed the keys.

Conclusion: Beyond the Jewish Question

The “Jewish Question” was never only about Jews. It was Europe’s laboratory for working out the fundamental problem of modern belonging. How can diverse populations coexist within single political units? The solutions Europe generated became templates exported globally. Liberal assimilation, socialist universalism, nationalist separation, fascist elimination.

The same dynamics now appear everywhere. In Nigeria, they show up in our complex ethnic federalism. Take the recent tax reform proposals that have sparked nationwide debate. Northern states worry that new tax structures will favor the South, while Southern states argue they generate more revenue and deserve to keep more. Each region sees itself as either unfairly burdened or unfairly excluded from federal resources.

The Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo each position themselves as insiders defending legitimate interests while painting others as outsiders gaming the system. These tax debates aren’t really about numbers. They’re about who belongs at the center of Nigerian power and who gets pushed to the margins.

In America, in ongoing struggles over immigration and racial justice. In every nation, outsiders serve as mirrors that reveal how insiders understand themselves and their societies.

Understanding these patterns does not predict outcomes, but it illuminates choices. The insider-outsider tension will persist as long as political boundaries exist. The question is whether societies will channel these tensions toward creativity and inclusion, or allow them to degenerate into scapegoating and violence.

Part 1 has established our framework through Europe’s pivotal experience. In Part 2, we shift our lens from European to African contexts, asking: What are Africa’s particular insider-outsider dynamics, and what forms of renaissance might they generate?