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NATIONALISM
NATIONALISM AND WAR
Nationalism
and War

IOHN HUTCHINSON

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In Memory of Professor Anthony D. Smith (193972016)
 Preface and Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation of over ten years, during which I have
discovered (and continue to discover) fascinating studies in many different
elds. Even now, I believe if I had time to read another 200 books and articles,
I would only be scratching at the surface of this enormous subject.
Various people contributed wittingly or unwittingly to this book. Professor
Steven Grosby made useful suggestions. I would like to thank the four
anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for helpful criticisms which have
helped me improve the book. I am also indebted to Professor Ioep Leerssen,
who commented on two chapters. The faults that remain are mine entirely.
I would like to acknowledge the participants at several venues to whom
I presented some of this material in earlier forms. These included the confer
ence Beyond the nation? at Queens University, Belfast; several meetings of
the Australasian Association of European Historians; and the UCSIA Summer
Workshop on Religion, Culture, and Society. I am grateful to Dr Sibylle
Scheipers for her invitation to speak at the very stimulating conference Post
Heroic War, organized as part of The Changing Character of War pror
gramme at Oxford University and for her astute comments on a chapter
I contributed to the subsequent book collection.
I have considerably revised and extended parts of this book which have been
published before. I thank the publishers for permission to publish material
from the following:

Warfare and the Sacralisation of Nations: The Meanings, Rituals and Politics
of National Remembrance', Millennium: Iamnal of International Studies,
38 (2) 2009,1213. 401717.

Nationalism and V iolence', in Keith Breen and Shane O'Neill (eds.), After the
Nation? Critical Reections on Nationalism and Pastnatianalism. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 120738.

Public Ritual and Remembrance: Beyond the Natioantate?, in Sibylle Scheipers

(ed.), Heruisrn and the Changing Character of Way: Toward PastrHeraie
Warfare? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 349766.
I thank the Government department of London School of Economics for
granting me two sabbaticals, which gave me time to think and read. I have
learned much from the students who took my MSc course Warfare and
National Identity, from the many doctoral students and academic visitors
viii Preface and Acknowledgements

who attended the LSE PhD Workshop on Nationalism and Ethnicity, and from
conversations with my (now former) colleague, Professor Iohn Breuilly. The
annual conferences organized by the Association of Ethnicity and Nationalism
(ASEN) at the LSE also provided considerable intellectual stimulus. It is a matter
of deep personal regret that the great tradition of nationalism studies at the LSE,
institutionalized by Anthony Smith and stretching from Elie Kedourie, Ernest
Gellner, Kenneth Minogue, Anthony Smith, Iames Mayall, and Brendan
OLeary to Iohn Breuilly, may be coming to an end.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my teacher
Professor Anthony D. Smith, who died just as this book was going into
production. Anthony Smith was not only a truly great scholar of nationalism
but also a dear friend and inspiration to me in countless ways. I, with his many
former students, feel a deep sense of loss at his passing. A man of profound
learning and original thought, he wrote with great penetration on the subject
of nationalism and war, as he did on so many aspects of nationalism. To my
regret he was unable to read any part of my manuscript because of illness. In
spite of its imperfections, I hope that this book is not unworthy of his memory.
Iohn Hutchinson
London School ojEuunomu-s
[uly 2015
 Contents

Introduction
t European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States 12
Introduction 12
Tilly/Mann and the Military Revolution 13
Warfare, National Identity, and State Formation 21
Modernist Colinlerclaims 27
Warfare, State Fragility, and Regenerative Nationalism 30
War, Citizenship, and the Establishment of Mass National
Solidarities 36
Firsl VVDrld War: Uemocralizalion and Dictalorship 42
Wars as Critical [tinctures 45
War and a World System of Nation States 46
Conclusion 49

t Warfare, Memorialization, and the Formation of National

Communities 5U
Introduction 5U
Warfare and the Sacred Foundations of Nations 52
Myths and Meanings 52
War Experiences and Colleclive SelerilTerenliulion 57
War Mobilization, Collective Rituals, and Symbols 59
Longrlerm Social and Polilical Missions 63
The Nation as Community of Sacrice 65
Commemoration and National Unily 65
Myths vs Realities of Popular Revolls 68
Nationalism, interstate War, and Collective Sacrifice 70
Myth Construction, Identity, and Politics 72
Old and New Myths 76
Denationalizing Wars? 80
Pacic and Martial Nations 82

t Warfare, Imperial Collapse, and the Mass Creation

of Nation States 86
Introduction 86
Geopolitical Power vs Nationalist Ideology 89
War, Nationalism, and the Imperial Dissolution 92
hall or Dynasti Continental Empires 92
'l'he Dissolution or the European Natioanlale Overseas Empires 98
x Contents

The Collapse of the USSR 103

Concluding Remarks 107
Why the Shift from Empire to Nation States? 108
Imperial Legacies and Natioantate Formation 114
Empire and Security in a World of Nation States 120
41 Contemporary Warfare and the End of Heroic Nationalism? 125
Introduction 125
War and the Transition to Postnationalism? 127
The Second Thirty Years War: From Martial Heroism to the
Politics of Restitution 127
Decline of the Citizen in Arms 130
Wars of Choice 132
New Wars outside the European Heartlands 133
Postmodern Deconstructions and Cult of Victims 135
Nationalism Transformed, Not Transcended 138
Collective Trauma and Nationalist Mobilization 139
The Nation and Its Military: Volunteer vs Conscription Debates 142
The National Bases of International Missions 145
The Old Features of New Wars 147
The Resilience oi Nationalist Commemorative Narratives 149
Global Religion, Cosmic War, and Battle of Civilizations 155
5 Is Nationalism War-Prone? 160
Introduction 160
Blood Sacrice and the Nation 161
The Poison of Nationalist Ideology 167
The Nation State as Military Power Container 172
Unsatised Nationalisms and Intrastate Wars 180
Conclusions 184
Concluding Thoughts 189

Biblivgmphy 197
Index 217
 Introduction

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than

cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. the great wars of this century
are extraordinary not so much in the unprecedented scale on which they
permitted people to kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down
their lives So observed Benedict Anderson in his classic text, Imagined
Communities (Anderson 1991: 9, 144). Yet Anderson views mass sacrice in
war only as an indicator of the power of nationalism. Surprisingly, warfare and
its commemoration have no place in his explanation of the rise of nationalism
and nations. Anderson is not alone: interpretations of nationalism tend to
focus on the nation as a recent phenomenon generated by various forms of
modernization, for example, secularization, industrialization, print capitalism,
and bureaucratic state formation, in which war is an incidental actor. I will
argue, however, that the study of warfare, premodern and modem, is central to
an understanding of nationalism.
In this book, I address four aspects of the continually changing relationships
between warfare and nationalism:
. how they contributed to the rise of nation states as distinctive units
integrated by citizenship;
- how they have resulted in the sacralization of national communities;
. how they led to the collapse of empires and establishment of nation states
as the global political norm;
. how in the contemporary period they take new forms in different regions
that both disrupt and sustain the existing global order.
I end by considering whether there is an intrinsic connection between natioir
alism and war. Each of these topics has generated an extensive scholarship, so
let me set out where this book claims to be original. I make the following claims.
First, nationalism in conjunction with war has played a major role in the
ways states form. Conventional interpretations view nations and nationalisms
as recent products of bellicose political formations. I argue that nationalisms
and nations emerge independently from states from the early Middle Ages and
2 Nutiunalism and Wm

may drive both state development and dissolution in war. States and nations
are often in tension, and a heightened sense of nationhood typically arises at
times of state crises in war. In triggering a reconsideration of national values,
this often throws up ensembles of competing repertoires that can shape both
the (rer)formation of states and the international system. In short, nationalism
is a dynamic force for political change.
Second, nations are moral communities, in whose identity formation and
reproduction a key role is played by the memories and myths of war that
sacralize them. Commemoration of the war dead becomes central to this cult
in the modern period because of secularization and changes in the character of
wars which increasingly threaten whole populations. I reject, as limited,
instrumentalist interpretations of war myths as eliterinvented political tradir
tions. Such myths can form spontaneously from multiple social actors out of a
search for meaning and purpose in the face of existential threat. They also
have radical oppositional potential. Commemorations resonate long after the
original conicts only when memories of war are embedded in everyday life,
where they offer metaphors by which to understand more general challenges.
Third, whereas most scholarship on warfare and nationrstate formation has
focused on the early modern period and the nineteenth century, I argue that
most nation states and the current international system came into being
recently through geopolitical changes arising from nationalist military revolur
tions that culminated in waves of sudden imperial dissolution. However,
generally held assumptions that the age of empires has gone are false. Most
of these new states are fragile or have emerged in contested borderlands
between great states. The resultant security problems have encouraged recurr
ring projects of rerimperialization in which we see a variety of symbioses
between national and imperial principles.
Fourth, I therefore take issue with claims that we have moved into a
postnational global era, in which the UN Charter together with the spread
of weapons of mass destruction deters interstate war between advanced states,
whereas there is a proliferation of new' intrastate wars in postcolonial states.
There are instead in the West limited interventionist wars of choice justied
by universal principles, and nationalism, it is argued, is irrelevant in building
collective identities in new states. I argue this is a West Eurocentric perspecr
tive. Global norms are themselves contested, and nationalism remains vital in
sustaining coalitions of nation states in peacekeeping operations, while nation
staterbuilding continues in many of the new wars.
Finally, it is generally assumed that nationalism is warrprone and a threat
to a stable world order. I maintain that the relationship between nationalism
and warfare is largely contingent and that there are many varieties of natiorr
alism, some of which have sponsored the growth of international law and the
establishment of regulatory transnational organizations. Secessionist and
irredentist claims continue to present a problem to the international system,
 Introductiun 3

but in many parts of the world the problem arises from an absence of national
solidarities, and nation states remain as essential mechanisms through which a
stable order can be maintained.
These arguments are explored in ve substantive chapters. In Chapter 1,
I propose an interactive approach that analyses the dynamic interplay between
the formation of national communities and states that was often activated by
the fortunes of war. I take issue with the classic interpretations of Charles Tilly
(1992) and Michael Mann (1986; 1993). These claim that states arose as a by
product of a late medieval/early modern European military revolution and
that nationalism and nations in turn emerged in response to state centralizing
pressures. I argue rather that nationalism and national communities formed
much earlier during the early Middle Ages, and taking on sacred' qualities via
associations with the Crusades, played a crucial role in territorial state forma
tion and warrmaking. War, although often accelerating state development,
could also destroy states: without a strong sense of nationality, political units
might disappear after conquest. Warrinstigated state centralization, by trigr
gering reactive minority nationalisms, could threaten the breakup of states. It
is often from such crises of states that there was a renewed focus on (compete
ing) national traditions (where they were available) to provide transformative
models of political renewal. The revolutionary nationalism of the French
republic that formed almost as deus ex mucking in the accounts of Tilly and
Mann has much older roots.
A sizeable literature also argues for the close linkage between the pressures
of war, including demands for mass conscription and general taxation, and the
extension of national citizenship in the modern period. I, however, question
the capacity of such institutions to create national citizens in the absence of
existing ethnic or national traditions. Such traditions often have dynastic and
religious as well as secular origins. The consequences were that at times of state
emergencies in war in the modern period competing hierarchical (religious as
well as secular) and democratic conceptions of the nation could emerge. The
success of one or other option is largely determined by the outcomes of war.
This qualies, therefore, Manns claim that nationalism originates as a drive for
democracy and also throws doubt on claims that wars of peoples are necessarily
a force for ciwc inclusion. I point to the exclusionary as well as the inclusionary
effects of war. In the total wars of the twentieth century they can result in
authoritarian, even totalitarian, reg'mes and violent ethnic cleansing.
In Chapter 2, using an ethnosymbolic framework, 1 build on the previous
chapter to elaborate a systematic analysis of how warfare in premodern and
modern eras contributed to the formation of nations as sacred communities of
sacrice. I propose four mechanisms. Wars offer raw material for myths whose
narratives (often shaped by religious conceptions) endow populations with a
sense of meaning and unique destiny; produce werfhey stereutypes that result
in collective selfrdifferentiation; generate public rituals which produce a sense
4 Nutiunalism and War

of inrgroup commonality; and instigate political projects that embed symbols

and myths of war in everyday life. I consider counter positions which claim
that public rituals have limited efcacy in largerscale diversied societies; that
ghting capacity in modern conicts has more to do with military innovations
than sacricial nationalism; and that war myths are elite inventions for
political purposes.
In response, I contend that commemorative rituals resonate to the degree
that war memories have become embedded in popular culture to produce an
everyday nationalism and that there is a consequent interplay between the
two (a point taken up in Chapter 4). I further argue that nationalist ideology,
in addition to military structures, is crucial to sustaining the war effort
through its legitimizing, mobilizing, and coordinating functions, and that
myths are created spontaneously by individual agents and social groups in
order to nd meaning in the face of mass death. Indeed, developing points
made earlier, I discuss how the experiences of war regularly throw up come
peting myths, offering rival visions of the nation, that may threaten dominant
power holders. Such contestation may reinforce a sense of national identity.
Not all wars, however, have this effect, and I explore examples which produce
longrlasting cleavages. Warfare, I repeatedly stress, is only one factor in nation
formation, and in the nal section, I examine cases of pacic' nations to draw
limits to my arguments in this chapter.
With all these caveats, interstate warfare in the medieval and early modern
period undoubtedly contributed to nationrstate formation, through the mutual
emulation by rival polities of innovations in public administration, taxation,
and military organization over the longue dmee. However, the majority of
nation states came into being suddenly and in successive waves in the twentieth
century through a different route: that of imperial dissolution in total war.
Chapter 3 examines the relationship between nationalism, total war, and the
downfall of empires and the consequences for postrimperial nation states and
the interstate system. It focuses on three waves of imperial collapse: of dynastic
continental empires arising from the First World War, of natiowstate overseas
empires during and after the Second World War; and of the Soviet Union
arising from the Cold War.
I offer an alternative interpretation to those who view nationalism either as
a cause of or as a consequence of imperial collapse produced by geopolitical
rivalries. It was both a cause and consequence. I show how the military
revolutions instigated by nationalism transformed the balance of power between
nation states and empires, leading to increasing geopolitical instability and
imperial collapse (something further explored in Chapter 5). The effects of
twentiethrcentury total wars, characterized by intense mass mobilization,
national stereotyping and scapegoating, and forced population movements,
were to catapult into power nationalist elites governing illrdened territorial
units, sometimes carved violently out of ethnically mixed territories and
 Introductiun 5

lacking developed economic and political institutions. The transition to a

world of (often fragile) nation states has been accompanied by a sense of
victimhood and political insecurity in a state order still dominated by great
powers. I claim that the disruptive effects of the largerscale entry of such states
into the interstate system has regularly inspired projects of rerimperialization,
and that in an age of ever greater global interdependence empires might return
in new forms, albeit while paying lip service to national aspirations.
Following from this, Chapter4 considers a range of positions that assert
because of a revulsion against the destructiveness of twentiethrcentury war
technologies we have moved into a postnational and postrheroic period in
which global standards and institutions (e.g. the United Nations) are super
seding national norms. Now it is claimed that, on the one hand, the institution
of interstate war, one of the primary mechanisms of nationrstate reproduction,
is too dangerous to be deployed by nuclearrarmed great powers and that, on
the other hand, intrastate conicts predominate in fragile new states, under
mining nationrbuilding. I assess the signicance of the decline of mass conr
scription armies in favour of professional specialists, the proliferation of wars
of choice dedicated to humanitarian rather than national missions, the phe
nomenon of new or intrastate wars, the growing emphasis on the victims and
traumas of war, and nally contemporary religiously based conicts.
I contend that postnational perspectives are largely limited to Western
Europe, and largely in response to the special horrors of the two world wars
and of the Holocaust. Elsewhere, contemporary conicts are often a product of
imperial legacies of weak states lacking legitimacy (discussed in the previous
chapter), which can contribute to nationrstate formation in spite of claims
to the contrary. Moreover, there is little evidence that universalrglobal are
replacing national norms as motivators of military action, either domestically
or internationally. Coalitions of nation states remain central to defending a
conception of world order. Romantic ideas of war may seem outmoded in
favour of a greater recognition of individual loss, but heroic commemorative
frames maintain their potency, while the perception of war as traumatic may
itself contribute to national solidarities.
The arguments of the book then follow an arc. We begin with the analysis of
the variety of professional, militia, and mass conscription forces as related to
state and nation formation, shift to a discussion of total wars that ushered in a
world of fragile nation states, and nally assess the future of nation states in
the light of contemporary conicts (fought by armies of highly professional
specialists and paramilitary insurgents) that take on global signicance, given
the interconnected character of the planet. From this perspectiv , what we
mean by warfare is continually changing, affected by continuous revolutions
in technology, forms of social and political organization, and ideologies. So too
is our understanding of states, nations, and the interstate system. The world of
nation states is relatively recent, bringing with it new challenges.
6 Nutiunalism and War

In short, while highlighting the effects of warfare on nationalism, a key

contribution of the rst part of the study refers to the persistent case for
nationalism in shaping war and peace as well as politics, society, and culture
more broadly. This is in spite of all the changes, qualications, and limitations
which I acknowledge, especially since the Second World War, and even more
so following the end of the Cold War. Such reservations are essentially limited
to post71945 Western Europe, to a large extent due to the special trauma of the
two world wars and their effects on the continent.
Whereas these chapters largely assess the effects of warfare on national or
nationrstate formation, Chapter 5 turns to the other side of the equation to
examine nationalism (broadly conceived) as a cause of intergroup violence.
This, I believe, is the most systematic attempt to consider contentions that
there is such a connection. It evaluates four such positions, drawing on the
analyses of the previous chapters. The rst asserts that national formation and
reproduction are dependent on regular cycles of interstate war. This includes a
discussion of demographic politics and the purposes of national commenr
orative rituals, often viewed as a means to prepare young men for future
martial service, but which I argue have more complex purposes. A second
claims the ideology of nationalism is inherently violent. Here I am sceptical of
the role of ideas by themselves as motivating factors and point to the many
varieties of nationalist ideology. A third maintains that war is embedded in the
nationrstate system. I suggest that although nationalist transformations of the
state may result in shocks to existing power balances, this itself is not a cause of
violence, since nation states have also developed international institutions by
which to regulate conict. A fourth argues that intrastate war is a product of
the contradictions between ideas of state sovereignty and the ideology of
national selfrdetermination. The chapter concludes that, although there are
particular contexts which make nationalist violence more likely, claims of a
systematic relationship are false.
Let me offer some preliminary denitions of the central concepts used in
this study and outline briey its approach. These denitions will be further
elaborated in the individual chapters. I adopt Miguel Centenos (2002: 34)
denition of war as a substantial armed conict between organized military
forces of independent political units, which can be nonrstate actors. Some
scholars have attempted threshold denitions of war, such as 1,000 deaths per
year, but these are arbitrary and devised for the purposes of statistical come
parison. I also consider as pertinent the preparations and institutions associr
ated with war (e. conscription and national education) and their political
impact. This means that activities of even peaceful states such as Switzerland
that organized their populations for military defence are relevant. We can
modify Charles Tillys denition of the state (Tilly 1992: 44). As he suggests, in
order to draw the changing map, it must be relatively loose, to refer to any
organization that commanded substantial means of coercion and successfully
 Introductiun 7

claimed both pulitiml legitimacy (my addition) and durable priority over other
users of coercion within at least one bounded territory. Michael Manns
denition of the state ts better more modern developments: a differentiated
set of institutions and personnel embodying centrality that claims a monopoly
of rulerbinding authority over a territory, supported by physical violence
(Mann 1986: 37). We should note, however, Susan Reynolds claims (1997:
324, 334) that in Webers terms we see from 900 to 1300 in Western Europe
the beginnings of a shift from traditional and patrimonial government to
bureaucratic government, and that from the eleventh century there were
some kingdoms within which their rulers could claim the control (though
not the monopoly) of the legitimate means of force over their territory.
Dening nationalism and nations is more problematic and necessarily
requires some discussion of the sometimes erce debates within the eld of
nationalism studies. Here nations are considered as named communi 'es, restr
ing on conceptions of common descent, regulative customary practices, the
possession of a homeland, and a distinctive culture, that claim or aspire to be
selfrgoverning. There is a strong denitional overlap between ethnic groups and
nations, but Adrian Hastings (1997: 2576) argues the latter are differentiated by
the possession of written vernaculars that become the vehicles of a reexive
public culture (including literature, historical writings, laws, religious writings,
and administration). Tilly (1992: 273) uses the term national state because he
rightly observes that most such states contain minority nationaliti However,
while acknowledging this, I employ for convenience the term nation state to
denote a state governed by the norms and institutions ofa dominant nationality.
As a starting point, natiunalism broadly can refer to sentiments of belonging as
well to any form of political practice that deploys the concept of the nation
(Gorski 2006: 15475). However, we need more differentiation.
Denitions are only tools of analysis and there is considerable dispute
between those modernist scholars who see both nationalism and nations as
peculiarly modern and those (called perennialists) who argue for their much
older existence (cf. Breuilly 2004; 2005 vs Hastings 1997). Modernist scholars
concede the existence of a national consciousness in the medieval period, but
they are sceptical about how far this extends beyond an elite: for them nations
must have a mass public political character that only emerges after the
eighteenth century and derives from new ideas of popular sovereignty
(Breuilly 2005). Modernists also maintain that what medieval historians call
nutiunalism is xenophobia and lacks a positive programme of social and
political transformation which is to be found only in the modern period.
A major problem in resolving this dispute is the paucity and patchiness of
evidence of what the mass of the population felt and thought, but, as Anthony
Smith has observed, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There are arguments for both sides. An indication of the interpretative
complexity is conveyed by the elastic use of the term pama or panic in the
8 Nutiunalism and Wm

medieval and early modern period, which has been described as functioning
like a Russian doll. Depending on context of social rank, place, and time, these
terms could refer to ones hamlet, city, bishopric, province, kingdom, or
heaven (Duke 2004: 34). By the late thirteenth century French jurists (and
much later, their German equivalents) had begun to differentiate the commur
ms pama (the kingdom of France) from the more limited puma or pays.
Whereas the horizons of the nobility extended to the kingdom, outside the
ranks of the nobility puma would normally refer to ones native town or
province. It was not until the early sixteenth century in France that the
distinction was being made between panic (as the whole kingdom) and pays
(region) (Duke 1982: 12475).
Terms are one thing, however, and concepts another. As Ian McBride
(2005: 265) observes, while fourteentlrcentury Englishmen thought of thenr
selves as a nation, the real question is what they meant when they did so.
A problem with interpreting the use of words like pama or nation is often to
identify the context in which they are used or not used. Identities are mostly
tacit, taken for granted, and unvoiced. Susan Reynolds argues forcefully that in
medieval Europe it was widely assumed that what we call nations existed as
natural, objective communities, each with its common historical myths, culr
ture, and destiny, and as political communities with rights to be self
governing. She further asserts that in many societies it was taken for granted
kingdoms belonged not just to their monarchs but to the communities of their
peoples (gentes, Marianas, pupuli) (Reynolds (2005: 54, 57).
1 take an intermediate position in this debate, accepting that the key terms
change in meaning over time (see also Scales and Zimmer 2005). One can use
the concept of nation as a community of the realm before the modern period
in the manner of Reynolds. With some exceptions, nations as political entities
tend then to have an elite character, as layered hierarchical communities. This
contrasts, as modernists observe, with the egalitarian ideas introduced by the
French Revolution. This, however, has to be qualied. As Reynolds maintains,
in the medieval period it would have been expected that the great men of a
kingdom would speak for the interests of their inferiors. Moreover, we shall
see that many modern national communities also have a substantively hierr
archical character. To agree that there are examples of premodern national
communities and kingdoms does not entail that there are continuities between
these and modern nations, though there may be. A sense of nationality may
form and dissolve. Many of the political units described by medieval historians
as national do not correspond to those today: Reynolds (1997) and Wickham
(2015) refer as such to Normandy, Saxony, Sicily, Venice, Pisa, and Milan.
One can make similar points about the term of nationalism. Although the
word is of nineteenthrcentury coinage, the concept is arguably much older.
Modernist scholars such as Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson
(1991) would deny nationalism a political character before the eighteenth
 Introductiun 9

century, conning its meaning to forms of consciousness or sentiment. But

this is too narrow. As Reynolds argues (2005: 58), people also thought polity
ically in these ways, and rulers occasionally used nationalist ideas to mobilize
support for their own purposes. A famous example is the Declaration of
Arbroath of 1320 by the nobility and commoners of Scotland, which invoked
a mythical Scottish nation to resist claims of the English king and asserted that
kings derived their authority from the community of the realm (Ferguson
1970; Ichijo 2004: 1224). Indeed, nationalism at times took on a mass
character (albeit fused with religious passions) during the early modern period
(see Gorski 2000).
This is not to deny the distinctive character of modern nationalism, which
became a surrogate religion as a result of secular revolutions inaugurated by
the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Anthony Smith provides a helpful
denition of this new nationalism as an ideological movement for the attainr
ment and maintenance of autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a
population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential
nation' (A. D. Smith 2000: I). As Smith argued, these revolutions gave rise
to a new type of scientic state whose proponents constructed sweeping
programmes of sociopolitical reform as part of a project of emancipating
populations from ignorance, poverty, and inequality. In turn, this created a
crisis of dual authority (science vs religious tradition) one of whose solutions
was the nation (1971: Ch. 10). Individuals could nd meaning and immortalr
ity in an uncertain world by connecting themselves to the nation, felt to be a
primordial but continuously evolving historical community that combined a
commitment to traditional values and secular progress. A transfer of authority
and meaning from God to originating peoples and their cultures inaugurated a
drive to actively identify with what nationalists believed were the unique
histories, landscapes, and vernacular cultures of their nations and thereby to
transform social and political institutions (Hutchinson 2005: Ch. 2). This
produced a transformation of notions of the individual self, as well as pror
grammes for social and political reformation.
As we shall see, such an ideology is likely to resonate in times of war, when
cults of the national dead are potent, extolling that those who die will live
forever in the memory of the nation. It is important to qualify this. Nationr
alisms are rarely uncontested by other ideologies and vary in strength in time
and place. In particular, the rise of nationalism did not eradicate the power of
religion. Even in the West, nationalism was an amalgam of secular visions and
religious traditions, and, at various points, we shall observe recurring debates
about the balance between the two. In much of what sociologists of religion
call the tworthirds world' (outside Western Europe), religion remains a
powerful site of mobilization, and even where it has historically intertwined
with a national life or culture, there can be a shift to religious traditions, albeit
one inected by secular political assumptions.
lU Nutiunalism and Wm

If I then agree with scholars of the modernist school about the distinctive
character of nationalism since the French Revolution, 1 also emphasize in
contrast to them the episudic character of nationalism as a movement, the role
of the national histories and cultures as sources ufmeaning, and the tmnsrstafe
orientations of nationalism. To recognize the dynamic properties of nationalr
ist ideology is not to accept the position proposed by modernist scholars such
as Ernest Gellner or Eric Hobsbawm (1992) that modern nations are largely
the constructs of ideological nationalists, and that the nationalist project is to
be understood in relation to the rise of capitalist industrialization. In this
perspective the role of nationalists is to invent a homogeneous culture that
sustains the emergence of a new type of state able to nurture a modern
economy. This produces a teleological story that infuses many interpretations,
not just that of Hobsbawm, which depicts nationalism as having a rationality
as a political project only in service to phases of modernity. When industrir
alism goes global, nationalism becomes increasingly irrational, degenerating
into an escapist identity politics.
In my Nations as Zones 0f Conict (2005), I argued nationalism forms and
reforms because of the unpredictability of the modern world and is concerned
as much with the construction of meaning as with state power. It is true that
once nationalists establish a nation state, they are often able to routinize
national values in the society via control of dominant institutions (e.g. parliar
ments, law courts, schools, armies). However, such routinization regularly
breaks down in the face of unexpected shocks, such as wars (as well as
economic dislocations, ideological revolutions and mass migrations, and
demographic change). This generates nationalist revivals that seek to sysr
tematically redene national goals and redraw boundaries in a totalizing
fashion, as well as to construct political programmes.
Nationalism, then, is necessarily an episudic phenomenon. At crisis points,
nationalists look to a national past offering cognitive maps, meanings, and
inspiration. Here I differ again from standard modernists who, in viewing the
nation as a retrospective invention, reject claims it can offer a directive force
capable of inspiring collective projects. Pervasive historicist assumptions that
we understand ourselves through our origins and development in time give
the past a degree of objectivity even though it is always viewed through
selective lenses. It is better to use the term national reruppmprialion to convey
the way in which people perceive the past. This is shaped by the culture and
traditions into which they are thrown, their preoccupations of the present, and
hopes for the future, through which they create cultural novelties.
The past to which nationalists look may in some cases be vestigial. Nationr
alists, we shall nd, in some, though not all, postcolonial countries have little of
a common heritage with which to work, and their goals are subject to challenge
from other loyaltiesireligious, ethnic, familial, and class. Where there is a
thick sense of national history and culture, it usually contains multiple and
 Introductiun ll

often conictual legacies, which are carried into the present to the degree that
they are embedded in institutions and practicesiin religious texts and instir
tutions, legal codes, canonical literatures, language communities, and urban
architecture. Some legacies may be a consequence of earlier wars or civil wars
that have given rise to competing sociorprojects. The invocation of the past
then may result in cultural wars, the outcome of which is often crucial to
explaining the subsequent strategies of political activists.
A nal point which I shall explore in later chapters is that such nationalisms
are not necessarily focused on state power. The state is just a means to an end,
and nationalists may work through panrnational alliances, coalitions of nation
states, international institutions, or imperial blocs to achieve their goals.
I nish with a word about my methodological approach. The aim of this
book is to offer general insights into the different relationships between warfare
and nationalism over the lungue duree rather than to establish scientic cone
clusions. As such, it enters a eld that is, on the whole, underdeveloped. Its scope
is necessarily synthetic and based on secondary sources. Each chapter addresses a
different set of problems and issues, and I draw on theoretical scholarships
relevant to these issues. A certain amount of eclecticism, then, is built into the
study, the perspective of which is interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarship from
History, Sociology, Political Science, and International Relations.
Such analysis is exploratory and I have eschewed, even if it was in my
powers to achieve, the pursuit and rigorous testing of models. Given the
extensive range of phenomena classied under war, the protean character of
nationalisms, and the intricate and changing nature of the interrelationships
between nationalism, warrmaking, and state formation affected by contexts of
time and place, I doubt the utility of such approaches. 1 have instead sought (to
borrow the words of Robert Gilpin) to provide conceptual frameworks and
sets of questions, using them to identify recurrent patterns, common elements,
and general tendencies, as well as major turning points in the phenomena in
question (Gilpin 1981: 3). I also do not offer a detailed and systematic case
study analysis. Attempting to do this in a rigorous fashion would have blown
out this study to elephantine proportions. This, no doubt, is a limitation, but
no study stands on its own. Just as this book relies on the achievements of
earlier scholars, so too its worth will be judged not by any internal validation
but its success in opening up a debate about the questions it has tackled and in
the arguments it has presented.
 European WarMaking and the Rise
of Nation States

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the relationship between European warfare from the
Middle Ages onwards and the rise of nation states as the primary political
units of humanity. Armed conict between political entities is, of course, a
universal in human history, and so we might question the privileging of
Europe as the setting. Indeed, scholars have linked warfare to the rise of
an interstate system and nationrlike entities in various historical eras: for
example, in ancient Mesopotamia (Smith I981a), ancient China (Hui 2005),
and in South East Asia from the fteenth century onwards (Lieberman 2003:
4174). Furthermore, many of the innovations responsible for the development
of nation states in Europe were appropriated from other civilizations, for
example, China's gunpowder revolution (McNeill 1984: Ch.3). However,
several claims can be made for the signicance of Europe:
. Unlike other areas of the world, dominated by empires, the European
subcontinent was a permanently divided multiractor civilization, culturr
ally united by its Roman and Christian heritage but with polities engaged
in incessant military struggles to become a successor imperial hegemon.
- It was the site of a military revolution in late medieval/early modern
Western and Central Europe that privileged the formation of centralized
territorial units with strong commercial economies that became temr
plates of the later nation states.
. The {deploy of nationalism, powerfully articulated in the French Revolur
tion, emerged in late eighteentlrcentury Europe, out of the wars between
European states. This generated new forms of war that welded peoples to
states and an intensication ofstatermaking that sought to cage populations
in national societies.
. European warfare was responsible for the gradual development of an
interstate system, rst on the continent, and then worldwide as European
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 13

nation states engaged in global imperial expansion. Postrwar settlements

such as the Treaty of Westphalia, the Treaty of Versailles, and the League
of Nations, and nally the United Nations established the nation state as
the planetary norm.
All four ofthese propositions are associated with a vast literature, an analysis
of which could encompass a discussion of even larger topic uch as the rise
of the West and the relationship between war and authoritarian or constitur
tional polities. My focus is narrower, to examine more precisely the complex
interrelationships between novel forms of European warrmaking and state and
nation formation. I will initially focus on the militarist and political approaches
of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.
The chapter addresses ve aspects of this topic. First, I outline what might
be called the militarist thesis to be found in the work of Charles Tilly and
Michael Mann that maintains the state arises out of a European military
revolution and in turn creates the template for the (modern) nation and the
international system. Second, against this I argue that in some regions, a sense
of nationality developed independently, taking on a sacred quality, and shaped
both warrmaking and state formation. Third, although warfare can produce an
integration of state and nation, it is frequently in the defeat or the breakdown
of states that a sense of national consciousness is heightened. I then examine
how warrmaking in the age of nationalism affects the status of groups within
the nation state, in some cases resulting in democratization, in others stigmar
tization and ethnic exclusion. Indeed, victory or defeat may trigger intense
struggles between rival conceptions of the nation that may threaten state
cohesion. Finally, I argue that although warrmaking is responsible for the
global formation of a state system based on national norms, it has the effect of
intensifying a disjunction between the world of states and of nations.

TlLLY/MANN AND THE MILITARY REVOLUTION

Citing an eminent European medieval historian, Michael Howard argued that

the origins of Europe were hammered out on the anvil of war. He further
claimed that most nation states that came into existence before the mid
twentieth century were created by war or had their boundaries dened by
wars or internal violence (Howard 1991: 3941). These twin claims of the
martial character of the European continent and the role of war in nationrstate
formation underpin the pathrbreaking works of Charles Tilly (1992) and
Michael Mann (1986; 1993) that offer the most systematic account of the
role of war in the genesis of the modern nation state. They draw on older
coercive perspectives in the work of Max Weber and Otto Hinze, and Ludwig
14 Nutiunalism and Wm

Gumplowitz (see Malesevic 2010), as well as a continuing historical debate on

the European military revolution, inaugurated by Michael Roberts (1956),
Geoffrey Parker (1976, 1996), Jeremy Black (1994), and W. H. McNeill (1984).
We can consider Tilly and Mann together, though there are subtle differences.
Tilly considers states as (coerciverwielding apparatuses (1992: 2), indeed as
giant protection rackets. Baldly stated, Tilly argues the modern nation state is a
byproduct of rulers efforts to acquire the means of war, and war is an
organizational phenomenon from which the state derived its administrative
machinery. The two are mutually reinforcing, as summarized in Tillys dictum
war made states and states made war. The most effective state form, the
national state, is that which is able to combine coercive power with access to
capital. In similar guise, Mann distinguishes between states exercising despotic
and infrastructural power, the rst a zerorsum approach that operates through
coercion, and the second that is generative arising from social cooperation.
The latter is characteristic of what he calls the organic state, emerging in
England around the time of the 1688 Revolution, which, marrying state to a
reformist aristocracy and a commercial bourgeoisie, created imperialrglobal
networks to become the leading edge of the West as well as the prototype of
the new nation state. In contrast with Tilly, Mann is prepared to acknowledge
a greater role for ideology and conceptions of legitimacy in the rise of the state,
in the form of protornationalist' sentiments and its judicial functions.
Both view postrRoman Europe as a multiractor civilization culturally united
by its Roman and Christian heritage but whose major polities fought to
become a successor imperial hegemon. From 990 to the fteenth century,
Tilly argues, war took patrimonial forms, in which rulers funded military
adventures from their own demesne or extracted capital in the form of feudal
levies from their subjects. The critical development was the military revolur
tion of the fteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a time of nearly continuous
wars: the great powers fought wars 95 per cent of the sixteenth century and
94 per cent of the seventeenth century (Tilly 1992: 72, 7879). This revolution,
Mann argues, introduced new technologies (heavy artillery, fortications, and
more powerful navies), tactics, and strategies (the reintroduction of battle lines
that enhanced the killing powers of infantries armed with muskets), drilling
methods, more centralized military organizations using mercenary soldiers,
and a rapid increase in the size of armies relative to the population (Mann
1986: 454). Now the preparations and waging of war, raising professional
infantries, and nding resources to pay for them became the main focus of
polities, as reected in their budgets, taxes, and the raising of debt. Until the
modern period, the majority of state revenues were expended on war or its
preparations.
Tilly examined the implications of this revolution for three types of polity
(idealrtypicallyicoerciverintensive, capitalrintensive, and hybrid) in 1500.
The rst described (largely imperial) territories with extensive agrarian estates
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 15

and few cities where rulers (for example, of Brandenburg Prussia) developed
state apparatuses to raise revenues from their populations by squeezing their
landlords. In some cases (Poland), they faced resistance from their nobility
that paralysed the polity. The second were mercantile city states low in
coercion, but high in movable resources (e.g. Netherlands), where rulers did
not develop largerscale permanent state structures but relied on compacts with
capitalists and the purchase of military forces (mercenaries). The third were
substantial kingdoms such as England and France where rulers combined both
modes, balancing the interests of capitalists and landed gentry, while through
seaboard imperial expansion pioneering a world capitalist system. They were
able to eld large standing armies from their peasantries, as well as accessing
the wealth of urban merchants. Both Tilly and Mann argue it was this model
that proved triumphant, more capable than its agrarianrbureaucratic rivals
of tapping the wealth of a monetized economy and its attendant banking
systems, and able to raise large forces that could overwhelm city states. It was
strengthened by global imperial and commercial expansion to the Americas
and Asia, giving incipient states access to bullion, luxury goods, agricultural
products, and colonial revenues.
The result was a radical consolidation of the European political map. To
survive, the other polity types had to adapt, though they would be shaped by
their earlier forms. Tilly (1992: 46) calculates (depending on ones criteria)
that between 200 and 500 polities in 1500 had reduced to 20 or 100 states
by 1848. Poor and small polities vanished, but the limited character of
war (because of relatively poor communications and the need to pause for
harvests) meant that stalemates developed between larger states, ensuring
the development of a permanent competitive multistate system (Mann
1986145778).
From the sixteenth century onwards government taeraiSing evolved from
arbitrary exactions to regular taxes on trade, property, and income. Rulers
relied on military entrepreneurs for mercenary armies and independent Capr
italists for loans and raising revenues and taxes. Administrative machinery
and taxes, once introduced in war, continued into peacetime, leading to a
permanent expansion of the state. From the seventeenth century we see the
development of courts, treasuries, systems of taxation, regional administrar
tions, and public assemblies, and in the eighteenth century, agricultural
improvement and communications (Tilly 1992: 75). Standing armies became
widespread, enhancing the power of rulers over external neighbours and
internal rivals.
Mann suggests that a shift from medieval conciliar government to public
institutions with legislative functions led to a bifurcation between absolutist
and constitutional states. With the former, ofcial structures centred on the
court, whereas with the latter power, was shared with representative assemr
blies (Mann 1986: 45879). Both states to function militarily needed to support
16 Nationalism and Wm

trade and impose taxation, but a key variable was whether military power
was land or searbased. Whereas standing armies could be used for internal
repression, navies could not. A new unied territorial consciousness develr
oped as rulers used their military power to tear down nobles battlements
within their kingdom, while marking their borders with fortications. The
extraction of resources and the accompanying political struggles created the
central organizations of the modern nation state.
During the eighteenth century periods of peace alternated with intense ware
making on an expanding scale, conducted by ever larger standing armies. Both
scholars depict this time as one of increasing nationalization, though in Tillys
analysis this appears to refer to a staterterritorial consciousness, ar ng from
the interaction of state and population. Tilly (1992: 8074) states that rulers
increasingly resorted to direct recruitment of their national population from
a concern about the rising costs of war and the loyalty of large armies of
foreign mercenaries. Such exactions had previously excited rebellions, gener
ally of a regional kind, because of the parcellized nature of early modern
society. Now, the increased demands provoked a broader territorial opposition
and consciousness.
Mann (1993' 215718; 1995: 4577) also charts the emergence of protor
national identities, in two phases, religious and commercial/statist. During
the former, literacy networks linked to the moral world of family and local
community expanded to make possible the later formation of broader cultural
communities. In particular, Protestantism inspired the spread of vernacular
written cultures and popular uprisings against religious and state elites. The
wars of the CounterrReformation crystallized national consciousness among
the popular classes, where the boundaries of warring states and linguistic and
confessional community coincided. In the second phase, during the eighteenth
century, staterled military modernization and the ourishing of commercial
capitalism led to the proliferation of government records, commercial cone
tracts, army manuals, and business contracts. This contributed to a further
extension of literacy, and, with this, a rise of territoryrwide social classes. By
this time, a stratum of Enlightenment intellectuals linked older kinship ideas
of fatherland to ideas of political citizenship in the form of republicanism.
The rise of nationalist ideology in the French Revolution began a new phase,
triggered by a considerable state centralization and a new kind of peoples war.
For Tilly (1992: Ch. 4), the tax exactions ofa bankrupt state were a catalyst ofa
republican revolution and further administrative expansion and standardizar
tion of rule throughout the territories. The invasion of France by the European
monarchies, provoked a popularrnationalist rallying, exemplied in the leve
en masse. This fusion of state and people enabled rst the republic and then
the Napoleonic regime to recruit motivated mass armies that swept aside the
professional armies of the ancien rgime. States such as Prussia found they
had to appropriate the lessons of direct rule and national sentiments or perish.
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 17

In 1811 the Prussian reformer, Gneisenau, in the face of the mass armies of the
French considered it was necessary to contemplate sources of resistance which
governments had until then feared, the arming of the people (Hewitson 2013:
489). The wars of this period mobilized populations around new national
symbols, languages, and cultures.
Mann acknowledges the quasirreligious fervour of popular nationalism
underpinning new forms of warrmaldng, when the masses were enlisted on
an unprecedented scale. But he argues it was not war per se, but the (tense
quent pressures of states on populations that transformed elite protornations
into fully edged national multirclass communities in the later eighteenth
century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century states absorbed 5 per cent
ofGNP in peace and 10 per cent in war, but by the 1760s the respective gures
for war were 15720 per cent. By 1810 states were extracting 25735 per cent of
GNP and conscripting in armies 5.5 per cent of the population (Mann
1995:47), gures identical to those of the two world wars. State demandsi
scal (through regressive taxation) and military serviceimeant that they
began to signicantly affect social life.
Both offer a similar interactive mechanism to explain the rise of the nation
state. The power of the national military model forced minim regime states to
seek to coropt it. During the nineteenth century European states, faced with
intensied military competition from their neighbours, used nationalist
appeals to extract ever greater resources (including military sacrice) from
reluctant populations through policies of centralization and circumscription
(Tilly 1995). States steadily reduced intermediary authorities in substituting
direct for indirect rule. These toprdown pressures on populations produced
oppositional movements from below on a broad territorial basis, demanding
control of states. Indeed, Tilly characterizes the period from 1850 onwards as
one of specializatiun, when the military became a specic arm of the state, and
a general civilianization of the polity occurred. Representative institutions
took new powers, and there was a considerable increase in the distributional,
regulatory, adjudicatory, and compensatory functions of the stateithat is,
initiatives in education, the regulation of employment and health in the
interests of the people. Although expanding in numbers and expenditures,
the military became a subordinate sphere of government in which the
competing demands of the civilian economy and society were predominant
(Tilly 1992: 115722; 1995).
Similarly, Mann argues that a nationrstate consciousness arose as a reactr
ive movement for political representation in the name of the people against
the demands of the state. The impress of the state resulted in emerging
classes exing their growing muscles in politics rather than ghting other
classes in civil society (Mann 1993: 20). In the process they were caged
within a nation state. Demands for representation in the state were rst
voiced by bourgeois and petit bourgeois males, but they were followed by
18 Nutiunalism and Wm

workers, peasants, and women. In an early militarist phase this took two
forms, staterreinforcing and statersubverting. With the former, the struggle
was to achieve power within an existing state, whereas with the latter,
national minorities were mobilized by their elites against imperial authorr
ities in defence of provincial autonomies.
From the midrnineteenth century, civilianized states were more concerned
with industrialization than with warrmaking. However, while the period
185071914 was one of relative peace, 40 per cent of state revenues were
devoted to war or its preparations, and military virtues and masculinity were
strongly associated (Mann 1995: 54). As the link between industrialization and
military power became evident, geopolitical pressures produced a staterled
drive for heavy industrialization, railway construction, and welfare provision,
rst in laterdeveloping polities such as Germany and then more generally. By
the 1880s a militaryrindustrial complex formed even in Britain and the USA
(Mann 1993: 491799). In the industrial phases, broader social strata (workers
and peasants) became increasingly enmeshed with the state as it expanded
services in education, communications, and welfare.
In short, this interaction led to an incorporation of potentially rebellious
classes with transnational interests into the nation state. There was an increas
ing internal pacication in which poli ng and surveillance of a penetrative
state replaced direct coercion. This coexisted with mounting geopolitical
tensions between the great powers and nationalist mobilization that caged
populations within their states (Mann 1993: 20). In the modern period, wars
were more infrequent but more lethal. Both Tilly and Mann argue that the
costs and strains of war remain a key force in explaining political develop
ment: all the great European revolutions arose in warinot just the English
Civil War, the French Revolution, but also the Russian Revolution.
Finally, a further way in which warfare has profoundly affected political
development was in forming the global state system. Through war, European
states controlled 7 per cent of the worlds land mass in 1500, 35 per cent in
1800, and 84 per cent in 1914 (Tilly 1992: 183). Tilly (1992: Ch. 6) notes three
striking developments over the last 500 years: the transformation of almost all
European states into nation states with wellrdened boundaries and mutual
relationships; the spread of a European state system to virtually the entire
world; and the growing inuence of states acting in concert over the territory
and organizations of new states. He relates this to secular trends in the nature
of wars: initially they comprised struggles of rulers over internal rivals, and
then encompassed conicts between neighbouring states, and increasingly
struggles within a wider state system. In due course Europe, which 5.990 was
demarcated into four or ve clusters of rival polities, became by 1500 a unied
space, as a result of the expansion of trade and territorial struggles. The
rules, norms, and institutions of the European state system were dened
through a series of peace agreements at the end of periods of conicts between
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 19

concerts of states. Although they were rst Continental, they became, through
European imperial expansion, global.
Among the landmark peace agreements were the Treaty of Westphalia in
1648 (after the Thirty Years War), which locked the European state system into
place and blocked the consolidation of (the Habsburg) Empire; the Congress of
Vienna, which rewrote the map of Europe, bringing into being the Kingdom of
the Netherlands; the Versailles Treaty, which endorsed the breakup of the
Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires into nation states and estab
lished the League of Nations; and the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, which
recognized a bipolar USA and Soviet hegemony and instituted the United
Nations. In short, in the last three centuries agreements between concerts of
powerful states have increasingly dened the political norms of humanity,
setting up international institutions by which to monitor them and diffusing
standard models for state bureaucracies, armies, and economies, thereby nary
rowing the options for domestic actors.
These justly celebrated interpretations and the historical research on which
they are based, as well as that which they have stimulated, have identied
several points now generally accepted.
First, warrmaking or preparation was an incessant activity of polities in
much of the late medieval and early modern period. Until the French Revor
lution, the classic conicts were long and attritional, made up of multiple
campaigns. These included the Hundred Years War' between England and
France, the Eighty Years War' in the Netherlands; the Thirty Years War' in
German territories, the Great Northern War', to name but some. War or its
preparations in these periods swallowed the bulk of public expenditures.
Second, warrmaking took on a new character as a result of military innovr
ations that were diffused through a competitive multirpolity system. There is
still debate among historians about this military revolution: about its origins,
whether medieval (Tallett and Trim 2010b) or early modern (Roberts 1956),
and about its character as a discrete phenomenon, a continuous evolution, or a
cyclical process (Gat 2010). What is clear is that the capacity ofpolitical units to
mobilize armies between 1300 and 1750 expanded dramatically, although the
population of Europe increased only within narrow limits. In France during the
reign ofPhilip the Fair (128571314), the maximum size ofan army was 15,000;
40,000 under Louis XI (1461783); over 100,000 under Henry IV (158971610);
and over 400,000 under Louis XIV (164371715) (Contamine 2000: 475). The
grand army of Napoleon was 600,000 strong. This was accompanied during the
seventeenth century by a new use of repower and of fortications, together
with novel forms of organization of standing professional armies marked by
impersonal discipline, coordinated drilling, and tactical innovations, all made
possible by new nancial instruments (Parker 1996: 43).
Third, military pressures stimulated a drive by rulers for organizational
development and monetary resources. As armed forces grew larger, so there
20 Nutiunalism and War

was a shift from a desmesne to a taxation and nally to a scal state, combined
with broad networks of credit, and with this a rationalization of the political
order in the form of centralized territorial units (Gunn 2010: 5172). Permanr
ent and professional armed forces under the direct control of rulers could
permit the conquest of new territories, the expansion of state revenues, the
pacication of existing territories, and the enforcement of a monopoly of
legitimate violence that enabled the protection of economically productive
classes. Centeno also speaks of a transfer of the means of violence from private
hands to public authorities and, with an expansion in the size of armies, of a
shift in their composition so that they were increasingly drawn from the
territory of the state (Centeno 2002: 102).
Fourth, this late medieval/early modern military revolution was only one
of several that continue into the present (see Chickering 2010). Knox and
Murray (2001: 6713) propose there were four following revolutions. A second
revolution in the midreighteenth century came in the form of light infantry
and cavalry, of selfrcontalned divisions, standardized mobile artillery, and,
during the French Revolution, the advent of mass ideologically driven armies
combined with new strategies of battleeld elimination of enemy forcesi
which David Bell (2007) viewed, perhaps with some exaggeration, as the rst
total war (Hewitson 2013: 454). A third was the industrial and communica
tions revolution in the nineteenth century, which enabled states to arm,
clothe, feed, pay, and move swiftly mass armies, and which intensied their
control over populations. New technologies of war in all elds (from artillery,
ries, and machine guns to armoured battleships) and innovations in
communications required greater specialization within the armed forces,
including general staffs expert in logistics as well as strategy (Parker 2005:
416718). The fourth, in the First World War, combined the legacies of
the French and Industrial Revolutions in forms of total war that integrated
air, sea, and land campaigns and inspired new collectivist political models
of the nation. Finally, the advent of nuclear and computerized high
precision weaponry constitutes a fth revolution. We shall explore in
Chapter 4 ifthese later military innovations have come to erode the viability
and legitimacy of nation states. Nonetheless, war has resulted in a trans
formation of the map of Europe (and later the world). By 1900, after
centuries of war, Europe had become consolidated into twentyrve states
(Centeno 2002: 103).
Fifth, the combination of state centralization, demands for increased
administrative and military professionalization, and heavier scal and manr
power exactions on the mass of the population eroded aristocratic hierarchr
ies, promoted meritocracy and gave impetus to a popular politics demanding
representation in the state. Although popular representation civilianized the
state in the nineteenth century, military concerns were important in the
developmental strategies of many states, including industrial, educational,
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 21

and welfare policie The armed forces became important nationalizing

agents, combating dis dent ideologies (Weber 1976).
Sixth, war diffused the national model through the imperial expansion of
the European states or through its selective imitation by noanestern state
elites who could see the capacities released by nationalism. An outstanding
example is that of Meiji Iapan, which adopted German military models, and
whose success against the Russian Empire in 1905 made it in turn an exemplar
for Asian nationalists seeking to modernize their states (see Chapter 3).
Finally, this military expansion has led to the development of an internatioir
al system, seeking to regulate state relations, initially through the formation of
diplomatic missions and a codication of the laws of war. As wars extended
from a European to a global scale, this brought together ever greater concerts of
states into association with each other, and the treaties at the ends of inter
national wars established the frameworks of a global order. In Chapter 3 we will
explore settlements in the twentieth century, carved out of collapsing empires,
that may be said to have created the current system of nation states.
However, the militarist thesis can be criticized on several grounds. First, it
seriously underestimates the role of national identications as a cause rather
than just a consequence of state development through war. Second, it exaggerr
ates the capacity ofrulers through state administrations to command territories
and populations. Warfare was but one, albeit important, factor in the making of
states, and we need to distinguish between how it impacted on state as opposed
to nation formation, processes which often cut across one another. War and
conquest were a constant threat to state formation, and could reveal the
disjunction between states and nations. Indeed, it was often through the
collapse of states in war that nations have emerged as political entities and
that a powerful national consciousness has formed. Third, the linkage in the era
of nationalism between war and citizenship integration, implied in the concept
ofcaging, is problematic. In the modern (as well as the premodern) era, warfare
has been a generator of ideological cleavages and can lead to the triumph of an
authoritarian exclusionary politics. Finally, although postrwar settlements may
establish the norms and institutions of a global system of states, they have not
been able to create a world of nation states. Indeed, they have exacerbated
divisions between the world of states and of nations.

WARFARE. NATIONAL IDENTITY,

AND STATE FORMATION

A signicant weakness of Tilly is that he plays little attention to the concepts of

legitimacy underpinning the state development. He recognizes that rulers had
to bargain with their subjects, whether urban mercantile classes or feudal
22 Nutiunalism and Wm

lords, but in his materialist approach states rest primarily on coercion and
alliances of interest. Mann acknowledges rulers' important judicial functions
and distinguishes between despotic and infrastructural poweribetween the
capacity to compel and to mobilize resources through social cooperation. Yet
he tends to view infrastructural power as a quality of modern commercial
societies. However, medieval political authority was dependent on rulers
observing norms of legitimacy that were shaped by nationality and religion
with which the martial ambitions of rulers might combine or conict. Warr
making is dependent not just on organization but on normative consent and
motivations, and in Tilly's story nationalism comes in late as a dens ex
mucking. Mann considers nationalism as primarily a modern phenomenon
because he links it with the emergence of mass citizenship and communica
tions, neglecting the longrrange identity effects of recurring war experiences.
However, many medieval historians consider ideas of nationality to be
widely diffused in the Middle Ages, when they were associated with commu
nities of language and with assumptions that peoples should be governed
according to their own customs, laws, and languages (Bartlett 1994: 221).
Susan Reynolds (1997: 285) describes how in medieval societies rulers were
bound by custom and law. As early as the tenth century, kingdoms and
peoples were in large part perceived to be identical. By the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries polities in England, France, and Spain were not simply
kingdoms but layered communities whose populations conceived themselves
as national, sharing myths of common descent (classical and biblical), specic
characteristics, often based on supposed biology, and beliefs that they were or
should be politically autonomous (Reynolds 1997: Ch. 8; 2005: 55760).
As I mentioned in the Introduction, the existence, extent, and depth of
national sentiments and identities are subject to much dispute (cf. Breuilly
2004; 2005 contra Hastings 1997). While there is evidence of an elite medieval
nationalism, it is often unclear how far this carried down the social scale.
Identities are normally tacit, and only given explicit expression at points of
conict. For that reason, although national sentiments may have played a
hidden regulatory function in some populations, nationalism as a galvan' ing
force was episodic. Bartlett nds evidence of the latter when examining
populations in competition in the ethnic borderlands of Europe, created
by colonization and migration. The English parliaments enactment of the
Statutes of Kilkenny (1367) in Ireland reects an explicit linkage between
Irish practices and political disloyalty to the English Crown. These statutes,
responding to Irish uprisings, imposed savage penalties on English settlers
who adopted the Irish language, laws and customs, dress, forms of horse
riding, sports such as hurley, and who maintained minstrels and intermarried
with the natives (Bartlett 1994: 239). The exclusion of the Irish from ofcial
life was total, and Irish and English churchmen were to the fore in xenophobic
propaganda against the other nation (Frame 2005: 149750).
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 23

Reynolds charts how a sense of national solidarity had emerged in the

kingdoms of England, France, and Scotland by 1300 through the provision
of law and justice over the royal territory from the ninth century, and through
collective actions that suggested the existence of a community of the realm
(Reynolds 1997: 262786). Many scholars, however, have maintained that a
sense of nationality at this stage was subordinate not only to dynastic but to
religious loyalties. John Darwin (2008: 3072) argues that the Christian Church
played an indispensable role in staterbuilding, providing rulers with divine
legitimation, stafng public ofces, and offering through its territorial strucr
ture close population control. By 1400 a new Europe was developing as a loose
confederacy of Christian states, with a common high culture, similar political
and social institutions, and a developed interregional economy. These states
engaged in conict as well as trade with the richer and more culturally
advanced Islamic world.
These religious wars, however, contributed to nation formation and state
building. Waging a crusading war in defence of the putria (in the early
medieval period largely viewed as a heavenly kingdom) against indels
could be a holy act meriting paradisal rewards for warriors fallen in battle.
Crusading wars against Islamic territories were important sources of state
building, used by rulers to centralize power, impose taxation (including over
the clergy and military orders) legitimized by papal bulls, unite populations,
and pursue territorial expansion (cf. A. W. Marx 2003). The kingdoms of
Aragon and Castile unied Spain in crusades against Muslim power, and
French monarchs declared a crusade to extirpate the Albigensian heresy and
bring southern regions under their rule in the fourteenth century, as did the
Habsburgs in crushing the Hussite revolt during the fteenth century.
As a result, Kantorowicz (1951; 1957: 23677) argues the concept ofmartial
martyrdom became thisrworldly to encompass a heroic death for a fatherland.
Through this, the idea of the nation as a holy land, requiring sacrice in its
defence, was formed, long before the modern period. By participating in the
Crusades, kingdoms and their rulers could achieve sacred status, notably so in
the case of St Louis IX of France, in the thirteenth century. Such transference
was reected in the ubiquitous appropriation of the cross as national uniform
across Europe', including the red cross of the English (Tyerman 2004: 188). By
the end of the thirteenth century the idea of the loyal soldier dying for the
puma in ofcial propaganda was being charged with religious expression
(further transformed by an emerging humanist revival), as the putria was
transposed to a national kingdom, now conceived as a mystical body
(Kantorowicz 1957: 236742; Strayer 1969). In 1302 Philip the Fair summoned
the three estates of the French parliament against the claims of the Pope in
order to appeal to their amorputriue and make subventions (including on the
clergy) for a war in defence of the fatherland, now explicitly dened as the
kingdom of France. Here the Gallican clergy were dened as an integral part of
24 Nutiunalism and War

the patria, thereby setting the corpus mysticum putriue above that ofthe corpus
mysticum ecclesiue (Kantorowicz 1957: 25078). Although as I noted in my
Introduction, this conception of pinyin (as referring to kingdom) was formur
lated by lawyers, the networks of protests from all over the kingdom in
1314715 in the name of cammun du myaulme against the royal imposition
of a tax without the justication of war suggests a broaderrbased understand
ing of political community (Reynolds 1997: 28577).
Norman Housley locates the growth of a sanctied patriotism that, to
varying degrees, shaped both staterbuilding and popular mobilization from
the fourteenth century, in England and France (during the Hundred Years
War), Bohemia (the Hussite rebellions), and the Spanish Habsburg territories.
Such conicts were suffused with crusading imagery and claims that kingdoms
or peoples were new Israels (Housley 2000: 22374). The Hundred Years War
between English and French crowns was initially fought for dynastic reasons,
but, after the attempt of the English king Henry V to unite the two kingdoms
in the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, it developed into a war in which religious and
national feeling were united (Housley 2000: 22778). Under Philip the Fair and
Charles VII the idea of France as a holy land, inhabited by a chosen people was
born (Housley 2000: 225). Now crystallized the key insignia of the French
monarchy: the eurrderlis, Salic law, and the holy ampulla (Beaune 1985).
Although such conceptions were articulated by Thomist writers and court
propagandists, they were diffused downward to be employed by a peasant
woman, loan of Arc, to galvanize Charles VIIs troops (Housley 2000: 23374).
Housley is one of many who argue that national sentiments focusing on
common language, shared history, and unique piety were also present in the
Hussite revolt of 1419 against the surrounding German states, in which the
Czech Bohemian kingdom was described as the most Christian kingdom
(Housley 2000: 230). In Habsburg Spain, under Charles V and Philip II, a
sense of providential mission to unify the country under Castile developed
into a genuine Spanish patriotism, directed against Jews and Moors and
validated by victories in Granada, North Africa, the Indies, the discovery of
America, and naval conicts with the Muslim Ottomans.
Housley admits such Hussite and Spanish nationalism was subordinate to
religious and, in the latter case, also to dynastic and imperial sentiments,
though it was much more powerfully observed in England and France, as the
crusading impulse died. Evidence of the social depth of national sentiments is
patchy, but loan of Arcs success indicates a popular nationalist consciousness,
as do Spanish military memoirs recording the patriotic vocation of soldiers
(Housley 2000: 24578). These states, France, England, and Spain, later became
the template for European polities. More broadly, Bernard Guene'e argued that
in medieval Europe the common burdens of war in combination with dynastic
continuities, administrative centralization, and a sense of resentment against
intrusive foreigners generated national sentiments, expressed in a sense of
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 25

shared language, religion (including national saints and churches), and history
(Guenee 1985: 50755).
This intertwining of religion and nationalist sentiments was intensied by
the wars of the CounterrReformation, when rulers, supporting the Catholic or
Protestant cause in general European wars, sought to mobilize their popula
tions against neighbouring powers. Confessional differences could threaten
the integrity of states and nations, as in France, plunged into the civil wars
(1562798) between Catholics and Huguenots. In Protestant England, however,
the conicts, rst with the Catholic powers of Spain and then France, gave
rise to a nationalism linked to conceptions of parliamentary liberties and
of England as a New Israel. This culminated in the revolution of Gods
Englishman, Oliver Cromwell, who crushed Irish Papists and rebellious
Scots (Hill 1970). The largerscale revolt of the United Provinces or Nether
lands in 1572 against Habsburg Spain resulted in punctuated conicts (dubbed
the Eighty Years War), during which competing ideas of the Dutch emerged
against a Spanish Other. These were a Calvinist Hebraic belief (of chosen
ness); a republican ethnic myth (of descent from ancient Batavians); and a
monarchical conception centred on the Orange princes. Calvinists favoured a
central authority with powers to impose an ecclesiastical discipline on Dutch
society and the reconquest of the Southern Netherlands. They generally
allied with the monarchicalrpatrlarchal visions of the House of Orange,
who portrayed themselves as modern Davids or Solomons. Their rivals were
the regents of Holland, the dominant province and main carrier of Batavian
myths, who supported separation from the South, state control over the
Church, and a federal system that Holland could dominate. These external
and internal conicts formed the Dutch nation state (Corski 2000; 2006: 151).
A similar symbiosis between religion and nationalism, generating a more
demotic cult of patriotic martyrdom, occurred during the near total Great
Northern War (1700721) between the Lutheran kingdoms of Sweden and
Denmark. This was the culmination of Swedens imperial era between 1560
and 1721, during which Sweden was in a nearly permanent state of war and
suffered burdens reaching nearly Napoleonic proportions: Charles XII of
Sweden and Frederic IV of Denmark elded more than 100,000 soldiers
each from populations of about 2.5 million. Under Charles XII (169771718)
the pressure of nearly continuous war began to level the differences between
nobility and peasantry, so that the Swedish campaigns were sustained by
the latters conscripted military service and taxes (Marklund 2013: 164).
A pervasive propaganda of royal proclamations, local sermons from the
Lutheran clergy, and broadside ballads distributed to a relatively wide audir
ence evoked parallels between ghting soldiers, biblical heroes, and heroic
precursors from previous wars. This created a myth of communal identity and
of Swedens chosenness. Although centred on the King as exemplary male
hero and the nobility, this propaganda also praised the honour ofthe common
26 Nutiunalism and Wm

peasantry, connecting notions of martial manliness and patriotic sacrice

(Marklund 2013: 151, 15779).
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as state confessional
rivalries faded, so there were developments in international law to regulate
both war and peace, particularly after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).
Older schemes of achieving peace via universal monarchy (e.g. a new
Roman Empire), championed by a succession of great powers, were challenged
by concepts of the importance of maintaining a balance of power between
competing sovereign polities. In this international society, states were my
creasingly equated with nations (McBride 2005' 25578). During this period
dynastic and imperial ambitions inspired a series of wars between the great
powers fought by large standing armies. This peaked in the reign of Frederick
the Great of Prussia. These wars are often viewed as struggles of absolutist
monarchs, in which national sentiment played little part, when a military
professionalization enforced by draconian disciplines reached its zenith. This,
however, generated fears that such armies could be employed for the internal
repression of peoples. Perceptions of the widening gaps between soldiers and
(incipient) citizens resulted in a revival among republican intellectuals in
France and the Netherlands of Machiavelli's call for citizen armies. By the
late eighteenth century we nd a reconceptualization of heroism as a psycho
logical property capable of being possessed by common soldiers as well as the
nobility (Van Nimwegen 2010: 16172).
The almost continuous wars between England and France in this period
(described by historians as a Second Hundred Years War ending in 1815) led
to an intensication of national characteris 'cs and stereotypes. During the
Seven Years War middlerclass nationalists in England, critical of the alleged
Francophilia of the aristocracy, evoked the ancient constitution of Anglo
Saxon times in support of parliamentary reforms. They extolled an English
national character based on honesty, good beef, and bourgeois virtues
(Newman 1987: esp. Ch. 4). A counter, more elite French nationalism, porr
traying France as the heir of Roman civilization critiqued England as a
predatory materialist Carthage (Bell 2001: Ch.3). These wars bankrupted
the French state, forcing King Louis XVI to summon the Estates General in
May 1789 for the rst time since 1614, triggering the revolution. As Reynolds
suggests, this was a reassembling of the community of the realm, but one now
being radicalized by new ideas of universal individual rights (Reynolds 2005:
61). In short, the revolutionary nationalist fervour exhibited by the French rst
in the leve en masse, then in the mass conscription armies of the republic, did
not come out of the blue, but was the culmination of longer developments.
I argue thus for an interactive, if non teleological, relationship between
warfare, nationalism, and state formation, marked by advances in state and
national formation as well as breakdowns. In this relationship nationalism,
though as a galvanizing force an episodic phenomenon, played at times a
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNation States 27

driving role. To objections that nationalism is conjured as a dens ex machimz

by Tilly or is inaccurately described by Mann as of marginal importance before
the modern period, there are a number of possible responses.

Modernist Counterclaims

Randall Collins (2012) offers a possible counter. He argues that new natioir
alist collective identities were constructed by intense brief moments of crisis
(what he calls time bubbles) at the end of the eighteenth century in the
dominant European state, France. Sudden geopolitical crisis (defeat in war)
together with nancial bankruptcy and famine generated a revolt at both elite
and popular levels against an unpopular regime. Dramatic events assembled
crowds in spontaneous interactive rituals in major cities that produced a
collective effervescence and a sense of us and them, heightened by military
invasion. The collective energies from group assembly, mutual focus, and
shared mood had longrterm effects, creating symbols, common standards of
morality, and forms of action (the Marseillaise, the tricolour, Marianne, and
the levee en masse) that stored emotional energy which could be tapped later.
However, such an approach fails to explain why, in rejecting the regime,
people turned to French nutiunal rather than class conceptions and why the
revolution dened itself in terms of France's exceptionalism. In other words,
the revolution itself fed off older ideas of France and ideas of its providential
mission to Europe.
Tilly views nationalization as coming relatively lateiin the eighteenth
century, because only from the late seventeenth century do we see the role
of mercenaries declining in favour of large standing armies. Mann acknowr
ledges the role of earlier (protornatlonal' sentiments, but he too views them as
playing a secondary role in the formation of modern nationalism. They
represent the extension from the sixteenth century of the moralrregulatory
world of family and locality to broader communities, during which the notion
of nation and homeland as family or kinship group emerges. It is only when
this is fused with the horizontal politics of citizenship arising from the caging
of competing classes within a coerciverextractive territorial state that the mass
nation crystallizes (Mann 1993: 249750). He makes three further points. First,
he doubts the existence of an early modern nationalism because religious
sentiments were geared more to a transnational crusade rather than a particur
lar territory (Mann 1995: 5). Second, he rejects those who tie the power of
modern nationalism to much older ethnorcommunal traditions and sentir
ments, arguing that, though vibrant, these were local and inchoate, and the
successful nationalisms of antirstate minorities arose in populations already
identifying with provincial units (Mann 1995: 4879). The rise of nations
emerges from campaigns for democracy which privileged movements within
28 Nutiunalism and Wm

already recognizable political structures. Where nationalism took statersubverting

forms, this was a reaction of provincial units against the extractive demands of
a centre. Finally, political rather than ethnorcommunal factors best explain the
formation of multirclass national communities. As the exactions of the state
increased (through war in particular) and the state extended its reach, caging
its populations, so a struggle to capture the state ensued which tightened the
bonds between polities and their civil societies.
1 will take up some of these points in later sections. P0streighteenthrcentury
nationalisms undoubtedly took on an ideological character, demanding an
active identication with the history, landscape, vernacular culture, and the
common people, and generating transformative political programmes that
differentiated them from most premodern nationalisms (Hutchinson 2005:
Ch. 2). However, we can make the following replies to the modernists. First, as
we have noted, medieval historians acknowledge that national sentiments
coexisted with often stronger local, dynastic, and indeed imperial loyalties.
While such sentiments might be evident amongst the warrior class whose
sacrice was recognized, there is only patchy evidence for the political
salience and depth of nationalrterritorial sentiment in the Middle Ages,
where feudal levies and later mercenaries were key components of European
armies. However, Steve Gunn observes that from the fteenth century standr
ing armies of professionals composed only a component of armies at war
which were recruited largely from local population to whom patriotic appeals
(to fatherland and prince) via pulpits and public processions were made
(Gunn 2010: 5779). A national iconography celebrating heroic princes, as
defenders of their peoples, emerged in the public sphere in the form of
triumphal arches in civic centres, cheap woodcut prints evoking military
successes, printed pamphlets, and coins (Gunn 2010: 69). Although in the
modern period warfare was more intensive and came to affect ever larger
proportions ofthe territorial state, from the later Middle Ages one should note
the frequency and length of conicts with signicant others, (such as the
Hundred Years War between English and French monarchies, the eightyr
year Dutch revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs). This, combined with
increasing literacy, the use of state propaganda, and the increasing use of
nonrmercenaries, is likely to have resulted in a growing sense of differentir
ation, manifested in the rise of national saints and churches, rulers' resistance
to Papal taxation as infractions of their sovereignty, and the rise of national
stereotypes.
Second, although there is a distinction between the hierarchical loyalties of
medieval kingdoms and the horizontal ideals of national citizenries, Reynolds
argues this does not necessarily negate the possibility of a general patriotic
sentiment. Kingdoms were overlapping communities in which it was expected
that the king and the great men had obligations to their social inferiors to rule
wisely, to provide justice, to respect ancient constitutions, and to defend the
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 29

true religion and the kingdom from foreigners (Reynolds 1997: 2627302). The
break between traditional dynastic patriotism and modern nationalism may
be more apparent than real: as we shall see, in the modern era egalitarian
ideals of French revolutionary nationalism were countered in the German
territories and elsewhere by monarchical authoritarian conceptions. Even
French nationalism was appropriated by the man on horseback, Bonaparte,
the prototype for later military leaders of the nation (Finer 2002: Ch. 10). One
of the distinctive characteristics of modern South Asian and East Asian
nationalisms is how they have coexisted with historically embedded hierarchy
ies and bureaucratic statesiin India (as with caste), Sri Lanka, and Indonesia
(Tonnesson and Antlov I996: 25).
Third, although there was a transnational dimension to the confessional
wars, the revolt of the United Provinces had the characteristics of a nationalist
crusade against the Spanish (Gorski 2000; Parker 1972: 178). A sense of
Netherlands identity was elusive in the loose confederation at the start of
the conict, undercut by rivalries between the provinces and by religious
divisions Nonetheless, hostility to the Spanish centralizing claims, fears of
the Inqui tion, and the privations of war generated a sense of commonality,
though at the cost of the separation of the Southern (Catholic) Netherlands
(Duke 2004). Hebraic themes of the Dutch as a chosen people combined and
competed with myths of descent from Batavian tribes, galvanizing mass
support through printed propaganda and public ritual of tableaux and pro
cessions, and national iconography on coinage for political programmes that
in their scope, Gorski claims, were comparable to those of the French
Revolution.
The English Civil War was as much national as confessional: a war of three
kingdoms. On the parliamentary and Puritan side, a popular English sentir
ment was directed not just against the Catholic Irish, but foreigners in general
during the 1640s. The loyalty of the Welsh and Cornish to the Crown as a
guarantor of their constitutional privileges in the British state led to a
xenophobic pamphlet war against them by English Puritans, suspicious of
the Welsh support for the conservative Anglican establishment. Although an
alliance with the Calvinist Scots at rst tainted the national credentials of the
Parliamentarians, it also aroused fears that England was threatened by armed
foreigners on all sidesiby Irish Catholic troops recruited by the royalists as
well as Scots using the conicts for their own interests. Cromwell, in con
structing the New Model Army on English lines, exploited this English
nationalism, turning against his former Scottish allies and establishing a
Protestant Commonwealth (Stoyle 2000; 2005).
Cromwell's Commonwealth then waged a erce naval war with Dutch
correligionists, one of three AnglorDutch Wars fought in the seventeenth
century between economic and naval rivals. The English accused the Dutch of
being CryptOrCathOllC: treacherous, cowardly and tightrsted, while the
30 Nutiunalism and Wm

latter retaliated by describing the English as godless, treacherous and tyranr

nical'. These wars were accompanied by patriotic propaganda battles conductr
ed in the public sphere through pamphlets, poems, plays, petitions, and
religious propaganda, during which hostile mutual collective stereotypes
were constructed (Rommelse 2016: 20175). This is evidence that national
claims could prevail over confessional similarities.
Fourth, even if one accepts that nationalism coalesced with transnational
causes, this does not justify a sharp contrast between earlier national and
modern secular nationalism. This combination of religious sentiments and
homeland nationalism is to be found in the modern period. In response to the
campaigns against the revolutionary and then Napoleonic French armies, a
conservative loyalty to the monarchy and British constitution was married
to an upsurge of patriotic Protestantism (exemplied in the Methodist
revival). A combination of religious, dynastic, and nationalist sentiments
also motivated resistance in the Spanish and German territories, and in later
Greek revolt against the Ottomans in the 1820s popular millenarian fervour
provided an undergirding of a secular nationalist project. As many scholars
have pointed out, nationalist movements usually combine with transnational
ideologies (liberalism, socialism, racism), in presenting the nation as part of a
wider commitment to humanity. In the contemporary period too, outside
Western Europe there has been a renewed hybridization between religious
and national motifs.

WARFARE, STATE FRAGILITY,

AND REGENERATIVE NATIONALISM

In Tillys analysis war plays the major role in state centralization, whose
impress nationalizes populations. Mann claims the passions of nationalism
derive from the tighter links between state institutions and the intensive
emotional power of family, kinship networks, and neighbourhood (Mann
1993: 732). The militarized state created a cage that was internalized by its
population as the arbiter of its fate, and one that (with echoes of Gellner)
provided through bureaucracies and educational institutions ladders of mobility.
Indeed, he suggests (1993: 587) that statism is a more accurate description
of the loyalties of nineteenthrcentury middlerclass groups than nationalism.
But how far is this true?
Miguel Centeno (2002) demonstrates that in Latin America there is little
direct connection between war and state formation, but it could be replied that
the template of the modern nation state emerged as a European export. I will
argue that, if war could accelerate state formation, the military collapse of
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNation States 31

states could also uncage populations, and that the passions of nationalism
cannot be easily explained in Manns terms. Both Tilly and Mann underplay
the destructive impact of war on state formation. It is often out of existential
crises arising from state breakdowns that national identities crystallize and
provide resources of collective survival.
There are several reasons to qualify the Tillerann thesis as an account of
the rise of states and nations. Historians have argued that new forms of the
Renaissance state preceded and under-pinned the military revolution (Black
1994; Parker 1996: 15879). Reynolds (1997: 324), we saw earlier, argued from
the eleventh century (and therefore before this revolution) kingdoms corresr
ponded to Max Webers conception of states, though (modern) notions of
sovereignty were not present. Much of the authority of rulers depended on
their exercise of judicial, administrative, and lawrmaking duties, which cone
sumed in peace the majority of state expenditures. While war could reinforce
the territorial reach of judicial and religious authority, it could also
result in breakdowns of such key functions (Gunn et al. 2008: 38678; Strayer
1969: 5879).
Furthermore, one cannot equate the ability of states to raise revenues
through taxation or their levels of centralization with efciency, especially
in war. Revenues in Spain and France were siphoned off by venal tax
collectors, and bureaucracies were often dysfunctional. England and the
Netherlands in the early modern period mobilized more effectively smaller
available revenues for armed conict and gained more territorially (through
colonies) (Lachmann 2013: 46). Parker (1996: 159) argues permanent milk
tary establishments could lead to a private contractingrout of military and
administrative functions, and where there was prolonged conict within
territories, campaigns could be sustained by more primitive local exactions.
Moreover, the ability to raise forces to ght external wars did not necessarily
increase state capacity to enforce internal order. The French armies that
faced down the powerful Habsburgs were unable to defeat the Huguenot
rebellions (Gunn et al. 2008: 374). Mercenaries were often unreliable serr
vants, as indeed could be standing armies, often dependent on local recruit
ment by the nobility. This in part explains why wars before the modern
period were inconclusive.
A further problem was that although medieval monarchs (in England,
France, and Spain) had the rights to demand military service and taxation
from their subjects, these could not be imposed without the consent of free
men (Reynolds 1997: 305). Such demands could otherwise provoke rebellion.
To avoid this, rulers might turn to loans, but by reducing constraints on their
power to wage war, the chief glory of monarchs, they could accumulate ever
greater debts. The waves of wars in the late eighteenth century waged by
the French state through loans resulted in bankruptcy and revolution (Hui
2005: 191). Finally, the many prolonged wars of the early modern period could
32 Nutiunalism and Wm

wreck the productive capacities of states, damaging agriculture, trade, and

communication systems. Philip II brought Habsburg Spain close to exhausr
tion, while driving the Protestant Netherlands to revolt.
Indeed, we see a nationalism crystallizing periodically against rulers to
assert the rights of community of the realm, represented by nobility, clergy,
and urban middling orders, that could degenerate into civil war. Heavier
demands for men and taxes produced revolts in the name of ancient constir
tutions and the establishment of representative assemblies (parliaments) or
charters of rights (Magna Carta) in both England and France. Hoping to gain
support from their subjects, monarchs appealed to xenophobic national senr
timent by the thirteenth century: King Edward I sought to deect internal
dissensions by claiming that the king of France planned to wipe out the
English language (Reynolds 1997: 272). Monarchical failureiof Henry III in
his wars against the French and the Welsh provoked opposition on the part of
the nobility and middling orders combined with demands that he rely on his
natural counsellors and not aliens (Reynolds 1997: 27071). In the seventeenth
century parliamentary resistance to Stuart scal demands and assertion of the
royal prerogative was led by English common lawyers and historians such as
Edward Coke and Iohn Selden, who revived Magna Carta as the basis of
Englands Ancient Constitution'.
A coercive conception of the state underplays the fragility of such states and
the degree to which having a national identity could help preserve them
against catastrophe. Whereas rulers and even governing elites could be over
thrown, it was much more difcult to eradicate the customs and mores of a
people. Housley (2000; also Reynolds 1997: 278782) cites the resilience of
the French kingdom (in spite of the incompetence of their monarchs) because
of a sacralized national mythos', founded on a sense of historic kingship,
religious mission, and territory. English occupation and threat of annexation
of the French kingdom in the fteenth century produced a heightened
national consciousness and mobilization under loan of Arc. The contrast is
with otherwise powerful units such as Burgundy, which lacked a collective
identity transcending the achievements of its ruler and disappeared after
military defeat.
Although a sense of nationality was shaped by the gravitational pull of
political institutions (Reynolds 200 ~ 0), so too state authority developed the
more strongly if it was aligned with an emerging national identity. The
pressures of warfare could result in peripheral regions being brought into
the core. But where rulers of imperial polities required that provinces with
distinctive customs and traditions develop their own scal systems to support
the centre, this could backre. Spanish pressures on the Netherlands accelerr
ated the development of representative institutions whose members demandr
ed control over expenditures, and these institutions provided a platform for
revolt (Gunn 2010: 69770). State conquests and expansion regularly provoked
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 33

rebellions in regions where customary rights were linked to ethnicity, for

example in the Basque and Catalan lands within the Iberian peninsula. This
was true even of a powerful kingdom like France, whose integrity was weak
ened by the association of its national myths with territorial hierarchy and
exclusivity. The core rituals, symbols, and culture of the French medieval
kingdom were northern in origin, manifested in the anointing of the king at
Rheims, the prestige of Paris for its schools of learning, and its ofcial
language. There was a sense of distance between North and South, incorporr
ated by the Crusades against the Cathars, and also later provinces united by
treaty and marriage. French governing elites from medieval times into the
nineteenth century distrusted the loyalty of the frontier provinces. During the
revolution the enforcement of secular republicanism from Paris provoked an
uprising in Brittany, and in the nineteenth century the republic faced autonor
mist movements in Alsace and Lorraine.
Within established states a nationalism could erupt articulating the constir
tutional rights of the territorial community against the polity, just as suborr
dinated minorities asserted that they should be governed according to their
own laws and languages. During the later Middle Ages, we nd a sacralization
of the land and in the early modern period claims of chosenness that extended
to the people as whole. Whereas Mann views nationalism of the modern era
through statist lenses, as a politics of citizenship, I have argued (1987; 2005)
there were also then competing cultural nationalisms. These identied nations
as culturally distinctive and ancient moral communities based on their nat
ural homelands. The objective of such nationalisms was to revive national
traditions, preserved in vernacular languages, literatures, laws, and religious
customs, which were threatened by expansionary bureaucratic states. This
constituted a programme of collective moral regeneration that would make the
state the servant, rather than master, of the nation. Mann argues such natioir
alisms (e.g. German linguistic) were of minor signicance. However, during
the nineteenth century in many stateless nations, such as Serbs, Greeks, Irish
and Poles, a ethnorcommunitarian sentiment was a potent force, particularly
where ecclesiastical institutions, which were more socially penetrative than
states until well into the modern period, operated as spiritual defenders of
the people.
Of antirstate nationalisms Mann proposes that their articulations with
earlier political structures are better predictors of successful national forma
tion than the possession of ethnic traditions and culture. However, he admits
that the core of province nations' (within imperial units) was usually reinr
forced by more than one of a distinctive language, a religion, and an economic
market, which cemented and expanded ethnic loyalties (1995: 49). This begs
the question which came rst.
As Anthony Smith (1998: 83) has observed, if political units determine the
emergence and boundaries of nation states, it is difcult to account for the
34 Nutiunalism and Wm

formation of a German rather than a Prussian or an Italian rather than a

Piedmont nation state. German and Italian unications were achieved from
above by wars that were inaugurated by the political elites of dominant states,
who used nationalism to secure power. This, however, only acknowledges the
resonance of a German or Italian idea. In each case there were problems of
legitimacy since German unication was achieved by the defeat of Catholic
Austria, and Germany was dened on Prussian Protestant terms that excluded
large numbers of Germans from the Reich. This exposed German governr
ments to pressures from paanerman movements to secure a fully authentic
nation state. The imposition of an Imperial Prussian denition produced
reactions at the local German state level and cultural nationalist movements,
such as the Wanderviigel, that asserted the claims of a German national
community against the ofcial state. The construction of Italy from above
resulted in a weak nation state, bedevilled by regional (NorthrSouth) antipr
athies and unable to mobilize sufcient resources from its population to
establish an effective scalrextractive, educational, and welfare system.
Mann is on stronger ground when he cites the importance of effective state
structures for conducting successful wars in the modern era. The French leve
en masse of 1793, summoned to defend France from invasion, had soon to
be replaced by the coercive modes of conscription, as a result of desertions
and patchy support. As Daniel Moran (2003a) has argued, such levees were
the resort of states facing defeat, which voiced threats on those who refused
the call. Historically, a leve was a device of mixed success: Gambettas
appeal to the French in the wake ofthe crushing defeats ofthe French armies
in 1870 failed to achieve a response (Horne 2003). Arthur Waldron has
claimed that Napoleons triumphs rested on the superior professionalism of
his armies, which in turn was a tribute to the French bureaucratic state
(Waldron 2003a: 25879). This was even more true of the German military,
who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, pioneered a general staff
system, led by a professional ofcer corps, as well as the development of
weaponry capable of being used by imperfectly trained mass enlistees.
Waldron, however, also recognizes that states themselves are vulnerable
unless they can tap sentiments from below. A problem with Manns concept of
caging is that it assumes the givenness of states as frameworks for disciplining
the identities of populations, when warfare has regularly resulted in the
overthrow and rise of states, the shifting of states into new geopolitical spaces,
and largerscale transfers of population. This geographical, demographic, and
status mobility has required a continuous redenition of the nature of the
nation state and forced populations to consider existential and prerpolitical
questions of who and where they are. Under these circumstances, elites and
populations looked back to their history and culture in order to provide
lessons for the present and future. This is not to say that in cases of state
breakdown we can assume the existence of strong homeland sentiments.
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 35

Variations in the strength of such sentiments will be examined in ChapterZ.

But we can note that, after the national calamity befalling the Danish state in
1864, when Prussia seized the southern provinces of Holstein and Schleswig,
the Danes, adopting as a slogan What is lost outwardly shall be won inwardly,
inaugurated a popular cultural revival via the Grundtvigian Lutheran folk high
school movement. They set about reclaiming their wastelands and marshes
and revolutionizing Danish agriculture (Yahil 1991: 454). This movement
helped form the liberal populist character of the Danish state, based on a
society of independent farmers.
In the two centuries since the French Revolution there have been very few
European states that have not been shaken and their territorial boundaries
altered by warfare. German national identity, for one, has exhibited a long
range instability. After unication, Germany was regarded by the advocates of
Grassdeutschlund as an unnished nation state, lacking full legitimacy and
with substantial Danish, Polish, and Walloon minorities within its 1871
borders. A succession of maps for 1914, 1918, 1923, 1939, 1941, 1945, 1949,
1961, and 199U illustrates the radically expanding and contracting nature of its
borders, largely through war or state collapse in the twentieth century
(Iarausch and Geyer 2003: 350). The result is a history of territorial overlays
where competing memories and projects of where Germany is and should be
for long remained unresolved (Iarausch and Geyer 2003: 350).
Germany was not alone. Some twentyreight states fought the First World
War and, after the collapse of the Romanov and Habsburg Empires, many new
nation states emerged. Older states were reformed with their borders radically
recongured. Like Germany, Hungary under the Treaty of Trianon was
truncated after the First World War, losing nearly threerquarters of its terrlr
tory and onerthird of its ethnic Hungarian population to neighbouring states,
whereas the Romanian state underwent a considerable territorial expansion,
now having to incorporate sizeable minorities of Hungarians, Russians, and
Jews. After the Second World War there were substantial territorial and
demographic shifts with the forced movements of many millions. Poland,
when restored as a territorial state after its previous partition by Stalin and
Hitler, had moved westwards by over 150 miles on its eastern frontiers and
by about 70 in the west, losing onerfth of its territories, including the
former cultural centres of Wilno and Lwow to Lithuania and Ukraine
(Sharp 1996: 2576).
All this demonstrates the dynamic interplay between state and nation
formation instigated by the fortunes of war. In times of crisis nationalists
often turned back to the history and culture of the national community to
restore autonomy and a stable and distinctive identity. The recurring historical
revivals were driven by the need to overcome radical uncertainty, by nding
concrete models to redene collective goals and myths of destiny by which
to unify and energize populations in the task of regeneration.
36 Nutiunalism and Wm

WAR, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT

OF MASS NATIONAL SOLIDARITIES

To such criticisms Tilly and Mann could have a partial answer: that between
the end of the Napoleonic wars and 1914 there were no general wars on the
European continent, and there was a marked reduction in European interstate
wars. Their thesis about nationalization through state circumscription or the
caging of emerging social classes relates not to wars as such but to scal and
military pressures, arising from geopolitical rivalry. This produced a reactive
politics of representation and of citizenship and in turn a national identica
tion with the territorial state. Nationalism originates as a drive for democracy
(Mann 1995: 53). Undeniably, the rise ofnationalism is linked to the increas
ing penetration of the state as well as to improvements in communications. In
this section I will examine if there is a clear relationship between militarism,
the struggle for citizenship rights, and mass nationalism. In addition, I will
explore alternative interpretations that identify the direct role of modern wars
in diffusion of national citizenship.
T. H. Marshall (1950) differentiates citizenship rights into civil, political
(expansion of the franchise), and social (a welfare state). In the eighteenth
century there had been progress in civil rights in many European countries.
During the nineteenth century a hesitant progress was made in political
representation, which Mann argues has two aspects: participatiun (possession
of the suffrage) and contestutiun (the ability to use representative institutions
to form an alternative government). The latter is more important, as states like
Germany might grant universal male suffrage but deny the sovereignty of the
representative institutions (Mann 1993: Ch. 3). He describes how during the
nineteenth century Britain and the USA led the way, although the former had
a more limited franchise, whereas France caught up by 1880. There was some
movement to a rudimentary social citizenship by the end of the century.
Arguments can be made for a direct link between new forms of warfare,
citizenship, and mass national identities. This does not mean that advances in
citizenship are necessarily related to war (indeed they are often not), but that
particular wars generated powerful innovations that became formative. In
particular, we can examine two periods, of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Wars and the First World War, that have been characterized (in different ways)
as total wars, which create revolutionary models of statersociety relationships.
The French Revolution made an ideological connection between patriotic
military service (via universal conscription) and civil and political rights which
transformed warrmaking. The new bureaucratic state, operating on principles
of meritocracy and direct rule through its eightyrthree uniform departments,
mobilized the population at large and thereby mustered vast armies of free
men (increasing from 200,000 before the revolution to 730,000 in 1794),
reducing war costs, and improving ghting capacity (Hui 2005: 128). Whereas
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 37

generals of the ancien ygims had to exercise coercive supervision of their

troops lest they desert, Napoleon could deploy them much more exibly
because of their ideological commitment, sometimes in dispersed, sometimes
in concentrated formations, manoeuvring independently on multiple routes
with different tactics, yet condent they would support each other. This
allowed him lightning mobility through which he could achieve decisive
victories. Numerical superiority also enabled the deployment of shock tactics,
with the advantage that these required minimal training (Black 1994: Ch. 7;
Knox 2001: 65770). The success of French armies meant that other states
had to adapt. The Prussian king, under pressure from his generals, who
proposed an alliance of government and people, appealed to patriotic sentir
ment, sweetening universal military service with an abolition of serfdom. He
also opened the ofcer class to those of education and merit (Knox 2001:
7071). During the nineteenth century many intellectuals, Clausewitz, Micher
let, and Mazzini, drew connections between national conscription armies and
civic participation. This association had popular resonance, summarized in
the slogan of Swedes agitating for political rights: One soldier, one rie, one
vote (Enloe 1980: 5071).
In the nineteenth century general conscription was institutionalized as
part of citizenship training and nationrbuilding, so that in peacetime armies
were as much about making young men into productive and responsible
members of the community as about national defence. Membership of large
armies contributed to the erosion of localism and of status div ions as soldiers
were exposed to ideas of national destiny, defence against external enemies,
and common rights and duties (Centeno 2002: 217718). Barry Posen states
that the two key institutions of the nation state became the mass conscription
army and the educational system. As technological advances made war ever
more lethal, a mass education system was necessary to inculcate patriotism,
and provide ofcers and recruits with basic (and advanced) skills to use
new weaponries (Posen 1995: 167). Posen cites Eugen Webers Peasants
into Frenchmen, which maintains it was only after 1870 that national supr
planted regional identities in France, following the establishment of general
conscription, a mass primary patriotic education system, and a system of
communications connecting the provinces to Paris. In many countries the
army became the school of the nation, breaking down localism. Later, it could
be viewed as the hospital of the nation, as the governments, aware of
their need to conserve the health of an increasingly urbanized population,
exposed to poor living conditions, began to develop early forms of welfare
state (Centeno 2002: 244).
However, if conscription and popular mobilization in the 178971815 period
had democratizing and nationalizing consequences, they were also exclusionr
ary and generated alternative authoritarian political models that curbed their
radical potential. Feminists have pointed out that the French Revolution was
38 Nutiunalism and Wm

profoundly divisive. By linking citizenship to military service, it justied the

connement of women to the private sphere just when the public sphere was
being dened (Sluga 1998). In her comparative study of popular mobilization
in France and Prussia, Hagemann (2010: 351), with qualications, agrees this
was a formative moment in the masculinization of citizenship in modern
Western societies. Women, as members of the nation, were restricted to the
role of biological producers, educators of future heroes, and symbols of
national purity (Anthias and Yuvaeravis 1989: Introduction).
The Revolutionary Wars were as much civil as international wars, and in
many countries they produced deep seated cleavages. In France republican
massacres of priests and peasantry in the Vendee, the conscations of Catholic
property, executions of the supporters of the uncien rgime, and repression of
movements for provincial liberties and cultures in peripheral regions contribr
uted to the development of a venomous traditionalist antirrepublican subculr
ture. Furthermore, the socialrrevolutionary effects of republicanism inspired
enduring antagonistic political models. In France Napoleon overthrew the
republic, offering an imperial conception of France that under his Civil Code
preserved meritocracy and guaranteed freedom of religion, albeit under the
auspices of a military dictatorship. In Britain and Prussia, we nd monarchies
espousing conservative nationalist principles.
Fearful of the apparent connections between popular mobilization and
revolution, the monarchies of the restored tmcien regime after 1815 returned
to professional armies and sought to avoid a general war in Europe by creating
a stable balance of power through the Congress of Vienna. The legacy of the
mass citizen army was later revived, but during the nineteenth century states
selected from a variety of military models, sometimes a uniform draft, at other
times an elite professional force drawn from reliable sections of the popula
tion. The key point to note is that rather than understanding the development
of legal, political, and social rights as arising out of particular martial practices,
in each country there were competing orientations to war generated by
different conceptions of the national community and its relationship to the
state. These conceptions were themselves shaped by the experiences and
political models arising in the revolutionary period. Iorn Leonhards study
(2006) offers a useful overview on which the following paragraphs are based.
In France, republicans had been inspired by the classical palis, where
citizenship was linked to the willingness to bear arms for the state. However,
the initial assumptions of republicans were that war was the product of a
predatory aristocratic society and that a free republic would be an exemplar of
peace (Bell 2007: Ch. 3). The attack on the revolution evoked the call to arms,
but the granting of citizenship came rst, which generated the obligation of
Frenchmen to defend la putrie. Ideological politics created the citizen
army not vice versa. Monarchical restoration was accompanied by a severe
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 39

restriction of the franchise and the return to a small professional army. In his
coup against the Second Republic, Louis Napoleon adopted universal suffrage
to defeat his radical and royalist opponents and sought to restore French
glories in arms. It was only after the overthrow of Napoleon III at the hands of
the Prussian conscript armies in 1870 that the successor Third Republic
restored the citizen army as part of its democratizing drive. Republicans
advanced mass education and military conscription not just as means of
recovering the annexed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but also as instrur
ments to regenerate a democratic pame, and transform the army, whose
ofcer core was viewed as reactionary. Here again we see political conceptions
shaping military models rather than vice versa.
In the German territories during the early nineteenth century a Prussian
monarchical conception ofthe army as the school ofthe nation competed with a
liberal constitutional movement that valorized the volunteers of 1813. The
Prussian state was suspicious of conscription being tied to political rights or
popular nationalism. Liberal nationalists, inuenced by the French Revolution,
believed that revolutionary war was the means of achieving a united German
nation state. The Prussian military, its ofcers disproportionately drawn from
the aristocracy and upper stratum, by contrast preferred an army of shortrterm
conscripts and a military strategy of short, deci ve cabinet wars, fearful that
any extended conllict requiring mass mobilization would create overwhelming
democratic pressures (Horne 2003). Bismarck coropted the nationalist sentir
ments by uniting the northern German states under the Hohenzollern
monarchy in a series of short, decisive wars, defeating rst Austria, then France
in 1864 and 1870. He also introduced universal manhood suffrage in 1871,
but limited the powers of the Reichstag, marginalizing German liberalism and
enabling the imposition of a Prussian authoritarian militarist conception on
the new German state. The national army was used to propagate patriotic and
religious messages to counteract Social Democratic inuences amongst recruits
from the rural and urban masses (Posen 1995: 164).
In the USA and Britain, by contrast, there were ingrained fears of standing
armies as threats to constitutional liberties. In the USA, after a triumphant
war of independence fought by a volunteer Continental Army (supported by
revolutionary militias), citizenship was granted early on to most free adult
males of property (though this excluded a large proportion of the population).
A decentralized federal conception of the nation emerged that guaranteed states
rights, was suspicious of monarchy and also of European involvements. The
Constitution granted the rights of its citizens to bear arms (infringing the state
monopoly of violence). This, howewer, did not prevent a turn to mass conscripr
tion armies on both sides during the American Civil War, in which distinctions
between civilian and military became blurred, resulting in a democratic war
of unprecedented destructiveness (Chambers II 2003: 176781).
4U Nutiunalism and War

In Britain, historically suspicious of continental despotism, the navy was the

key defence of an island imperial power. The outbreak of war with revolutionr
ary France enabled the British monarchy and the landed aristocracy to rally
patriotic support for established institutions, impose press censorship, and
repress radical movements. During the Victorian period campaigners often
combined campaigns for parliamentary reform with a popular antirmilitarism,
embodied in the Little Englandism' of Cobden and Bright, who looked to trade
and commerce as the means to universal peace. Advances in the suffrage in
1867 and 1885 were products of broader factors, including the strength of
political radicalism and the fear of revolution. Except for the Crimean War,
Britain avoided Continental commitments, and its military engagements after
1815 were predominantly the small wars ofan expanding empire. Britain went
into the First World War initially with a small professional army, supported by
mass volunteering, until conscription was introduced in 1916.
The military legacy of revolutionary France and the ideology of nationalism
in the nineteenth century, then, cannot easily be related to advances in citizenr
ship. Iorn Leonhard notes the use of mass canscyiption armies was only one
mode of national warrmaking in the nineteenth century (2006: 238). Among
the others was the guerrilla war (in Spain in 1808) following the defeat or
collapse of the state, in which the population fought not in traditional military
battles but in small individual actions. A third mode was of militia armies
which combined volunteering with state control and military profession
alism to ght larger battles and embodied a nation in arms. Examples were
the American War of Independence and the early French revolutionary
campaigns from 1792. There was also the pmfessiunal army (as in Britain).
A variety of competing national conceptions shaped modes of war making,
some of which were designed to block liberal movements and incorporate
dissident classes from above.
What of Mann's alternative political explanation? Here mass national
citizenship arises from a combination of toprdown pressures of militarist
competition, the emergence of classes from industrial capitalism, and counr
tervailing movements from below that sought to capture the state. The
explosion of public expenditures from the late eighteenth century led states
not only to improve their extractive capacities but also promote the economic
and social development of their territories. In turn, increasing scal and
military demands mobilized the emerging bourgeoisie and working classes,
whose class competition was diverted into a struggle to control the state. Mann
cannot be accused of a deterministic military scalrextraction proces . Mann
argues that to the degree that states attempted to combine despotic with
infrastructural power their institutions were capable of being captured by
social classes. Thus, he rejects the notion of a unitary state impressing itself
on a society in favour of a more interactive approach. Fiscal pressures eased
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNation States 41

during the nineteenth century as a result of private economic expansion

(Mann 1993: 38879). Military expenditures as a proportion of state revenues
declined in favour of education and communications, and later social welfare
(ibid.: 378781). Both Mann and Tilly emphasize that (with variations) the
political mobilization from below resulted in the increasing civilianization of
the state. As this occurred, the state switched from coercion to policing and
surveillance of its populations.
These analyses show that military and civilian institutions were intertwined.
Industrialization united populations through faster communications (e.g.
railways, postal services), resulted in further military revolutions, and intenr
sied this interdependence. Responses to popular pressures for representation
and citizenship rights differed according to the nature ofthe political system. In
Britain and France the approach was reformist, leading to the gradual incorpr
oration of the middle and working classes. In relatively backward authoritarian
societies the rulers, perceiving the need for rapid industrialization to secure
military security, modernized from above, engendering a militaryrindustrial
complex (Mann 1993: 49179). In the Russian Empire this was combined with
outright repression of demands for civil and political rights, leading eventually
to revolution. In Germany there was a hybrid Strategyiattempting to neuter
liberals and socialists by retaining power in the hands of the Prussian notables
while granting universal male suffrage in 1867, and also seeking to buy off
the working classes with welfare measures (Mann 1993: Chs. 14, 18).
Although this analysis is powerful, it has limitations. A statist account fails
to explain why populations should love their cageihere we seem to have a
version of the Stockholm syndromeior why the drive for democracy must
take nationalist forms (Smith 1998: 83). Rather than being reactions to the
modern state, such nationalisms may be active agents in state formation.
Indeed, state attempts to create patriotic citizens failed when a strong collectr
ive national sentiment was lacking. Conscription in late nineteenthrcentury
Spain and Italy was unable to generate a patriotic unity in the absence of clear
enemies and exacerbated class divisions in Latin America (Centeno 2002:
Ch.5). Frank Trentmann (2006: 289) maintains that, so far from being a
product of statistrmilitary pressures, mass nationalisms were drivers of state
transformation and military interventions. He argues that Mann fails to
recognize the power of popular social movements inected by nationalist
ideologiesiin the case of Britain by an older Protestant nationalism. By the
1740s this welded the language of liberty and patriotism into a mass politics
promoting King, Church, and Empire. Popular politics was a constitutive part
of, rather than a reaction to, a state politics.
This suggests war (and war preparation) could be as much an effect as a
cause of competing ideas of nationalism and was one factor among many in
the development of civil, social, and political relationships between states and
42 Nutiunalism and Wm

their populations. The conclusions too are ambiguous: are we viewing a

process of democratization or a toprdown incorporation of the masses into
the nation state? The proportion of the population given formal rights in the
state may rise without it affecting the terms of their membership of the state.
At times war seems crucial in deciding the terms of the integration of the
masses into the state. Iust as defeat in 1870 led to the overthrow of an
imperial by a more democratic republican conception of France, so Bismarcks
victories against Austria and France enabled him to impose an authoritarian
Prussian order on the unied Germany, subordinating the Social Democratic
working classes.
It could be argued, however, that a linkage between mass military mobilr
ization and political change seemed increasingly plausible in the later niner
teenth century. The triumph of Prussian conscription over the French
professional army inuenced a return to conscription armies. It was evident
to contemporaries that industrialization was transforming the nature of war.
In the American Civil War railways enabled a rapid mobilization of large
numbers of troops, and the introduction of ries and breechrloading that
could be employed with minimal training put a premium on states having a
large military reserve.
Leonhard (2006: 25374) contends that the geopolitical rivalries of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries intensied the civic character of
states while generating external ethnic hostility towards enemies. The scramr
ble for empire between the great powers heightened military competition, and
attendant scal and military pressures encouraged demands for democratizar
tion and revolution. These were now advanced by mass socialist parties
feeding off largerscale urban worker unrest at inflation and high unemployr
ment. The prospect of a general European war was regarded by sections of
both the left and the right as a potential catalyst of revolutionary change. The
German general Moltke in 1890 expressed fears that wars in the future would
no longer fought for limited political and territorial objectives. Rather they
would be indenite existential wars of peoples that would overthrow the
imperial system in Germany (Leonhard 2006: 24475). On the left, Marxist
parties viewed war as a trigger for Europeanrwide revolution. The First World
War seems at rst to conrm these predictions.

First World War: Democratization and Dictatorship

How far can the First World War, as the rst total war, be considered
as a watershed in the formation of mass nation states? I will argue that the
war, by its largerscale disruption of existing patterns, opened a time of
liminality, during which it became possible to consider redening the terms
of inclusion and exclusion of signicant sections (class, gender, and ethnic)
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 43

of the population in the nation state. However, its effects were politically
ambiguous, and were only intelligible when related to broader social, cultural,
and political developments. Although potentially democratizing, it also
exposed ethnic/national and class cleavages in states, triggered episodes of
ethnic cleansing, and generated rival democratic and authoritarian models
of political community.
Arthur Marwick (1974: Ch. 3) tested the thesis that the total wars of the
twentieth century were accelerators of a modern mass democratic society.
Wars between industrial states required not only effective military deployment
of young men but the mobilization of the whole society to produce and supply
armaments in vast numbers. States found they had to break with older liberal
marketrbased methods and intervene to requisition supplies, x prices, direct
labour, control transportation and distribution, ration diet, and regulate large
sectors of social life. To achieve this, it was necessary to coropt and give
legitimacy and representation to social categories and organizations outside
established power structuresito trade unions, and socialist parties (in Britain
and France given positions in government), women and stigmatized groups,
including racial minorities, in the case of the USA.
There were indirect as well as direct consequences. These included
improved wages and employment opportunities for the unskilled working
class and women (because of the diversion of men to armed services) and
increased social welfare measures. As well as offering credibility to previously
marginalized collectivist political models, this raised expectations among
outsiders that their claims for equality and recognition would be realized
after the war. Marwick stressed also how the huge dislocations with civilian
life and participation in an existential struggle engendered chiliastic dreams of
a transformed postrwar world. In victor states like Britain, this led to universal
manhood suffrage, the acquisition of the vote by women (in two stages, in 1918
and 1928), and the replacement of the Liberal Party by Labour. In defeated
Germany, it resulted in the revolutionary overthrow by Social Democrats of the
Second Reich in favour of a democratic Weimar constitution; and in Tsarist
Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution. More generally, some seventeen states passed
measures extending womens suffrage during or immediately after the wars
(Gmyzel 2002: 102).
This seems to conrm Andreskis thesis (1968: 29, 33) that the larger and
more prolonged the conict and the greater the degree of popular mobilizar
tion, the more egalitarian rather than hierarchical modes of authority were
favoured. However, the effects of war, Marwick shows, were mediated by
broader cultural and political factors. Although women were granted the
vote in Britain, this was not so in France. Marwick argues that in Britain the
willingness to grant universal suffrage for men made some concessions to
women necessary, whereas in France men already had the vote. One might
also note that in Britain there had been a more vigorous suffrage movement
44 Nutiunalism and Wm

before the war, articulating arguments on which feminists and their allies
could draw when interpreting the war experience. In France, the womens
suffrage movement was weaker, opposed by the Catholic Church, and, irorr
ically, lacked support from leftrwing parties, which feared womens conservar
tism and Catholicism (Grayzel 2002: 106).
The war also exacerbated existing perceptions of social or ethnic exclusion,
leading to internal class and ethnic conict. In Britain, the privations of the
war, which included high food prices, provoked strikes in the Welsh and
Scottish mines in 1916 and also in 1917, after the earthquake ofthe Bolshevik
Revolution (Marwick 1965: 68775, 203710). The war magnied nationalist
frustrations in Ireland at the delaying of Home Rule, which would culminate
in the Irish war of independence. Nationalist resentments started with come
plaints about the unequal treatment of Catholic and Protestant enlistees,
became violent in the Easter Rising, and took on a mass character after the
threat to impose conscription on the country in 1917. In France, Breton
nationalists complained about the disproportionate casualties suffered by
their peasantry, double in proportion to the rest of France (Enloe 1980: 53).
In Canada, French Canadians opposed a British Imperial war. Their sense of
subordination to British Canada was further reinforced by service in a military
establishment that was heavily Englishrspeaking. As war casualties rose,
attempts to impose conscription in 1917 were abandoned after riots in Quebec
provoked fears about the political unity of Canada (Enloe 1980: 54762). There
is a similar story in Australia, where a referendum to impose conscription in
1917 was defeated in large part because of the hostility of Iriserustralians
enraged by British repression in Ireland.
The experiences of total war also brought into collision competing ideas of
national identity and statehood. The greater participation of outrgroups was
balanced by a government that in the name of the nation assumed near
totalitarian powers over society. In Germany from 1916/17 Hindenberg and
Ludendorff acted as a de facto military dictatorship. Impending defeat, naval
mutinies, and the desperation of the civilian population led in late 1918 to the
overthrow of the Second Reich and the establishment of a democratic Weimar
Republic that socially and politically enfranchised women. National Socialists,
in contrast, would interpret nostalgically their experiences at the front as a
militarized hierarchical male Gemeinschaft of common sacrice in which all
class differences melted and in which German males displayed their heroic
potential (Mann 2004a: 147755). Once again, these rival perspectives were not
war inventions but had their bases in prerwar politicorcultural currents. Iust as
a powerful democratic socialist movement predated the war, so National
Socialism derived from racial and Social Darwinist notions emerging in n
de sicle Europe as well as from older authoritarian ideals (Stern 1961).
This suggests that it is the outcome of war that is crucial for deciding which
version of the nation will triumph (at least in the short term). Victory
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 45

validated the existing coalition of parties in Britain and Franc. Even if from
one perspective workingrclass enfranchisement could be interpreted as a
socialization of the nation state, from another viewpoint it led to the deeper
incorporation of the working classes in its structures. In contrast, defeat of
Imperial Germany triggered a democratic revolution.
The longrterm effects on Germany are more difcult to judge. The humilir
ating Versailles Treaty, and the subsequent political and economic instability
of the Weimar Republic inaugurated a civil war between left and right.
Hitler was one of a cohort of revolutionary conservatives', often exrveterans,
who were able to exploit the lack of legitimacy of the new state and the
socioeconomic insecurities of the Depression to seize power and transform
Germany into a totalitarian militarist state (Von Klemperer 1968). The Nazi
state aimed to reverse many of the citizenship gains, including the social
emancipation of women, whom the Nazis attempted with mixed success to
drive from the professions to become mothers and educators of children
(Fulbrook 2002: 6475).
The German example also indicates that war does not necessarily result in the
staterbased formation of a mass nation. Under the temis of the Versailles
settlement, the new German state lost signicant numbers of Gemians to
neighbouring states. The Nazi response was to merge nationalities (e.g. Austrian
and German) in a racial empire whose boundaries would stretch well beyond its
historic limits. At the same time, it attempted to marginalize, exclude, and even
eradicate from the state social categoriesilews, Communists, Socialists, homor
sexuals, and the disabled. Although the major genocidal event of the First World
Warithe mass killing of Amieniansiwas inaugurated by an empire in crisis, it
could also be said this war was the midwife of the Holocaust.
In short, war is at best a catalyst of social change which can take many
different forms, shaped by many factors. Ideological factors affect the way the
war experience is framed. There is the perceived success or failure of the state
in war. War tests the legitimacy of existing regimes, and defeat may lead to the
triumph of alternative conceptions of the nation, which might be democrar
tizing or authoritarian.

Wars as Critical Iuncmres

The crises of war then can throw up contradictory visions of the nation which
seek to restructure the state. The intensity of such divisions may also produce
persisting antagonistic nationalrpolitical repertoire. As I previously argued
(Hutchinson 2005: Ch. 3), such cleavages, once institutionalized, became
reference points for competing groups, offering different perspectives about
the nature of politics, the status of social groups, relations between regions, the
countryside, and the city, economic and social policies, and also geopolitical
46 Nutiunalism and Wm

relations. Although one conception may become dominant, its legitimacy can
be tested in subsequent wars, the outcome of which may vindicate it or
threaten its overthrow by one of its rivals.
Wars as often unpredictable events can act as critical junctures resulting in
overthrow of one regime by another linked to different social constituencies.
One example is modern France, whose major divisions were triggered by the
revolution of 1789 and subsequent war against the main: yegime of monarchy,
Church, and aristocracy in Europe. The experiences of the revolution
produced three quite distinct versions of the French nation, republican,
counterrrevolutionary, Bonapartist, each of which attracted a variety of social
constituencies and competed at times of military crisi for hegemony. The
First Republic (179274) was overthrown by Napoleon amidst the social and
economic strains of war. On Napoleons defeat in 1815, the Bourbons were
restored. Later in the century, the Second Republic (184851) was replaced by
the Second Empire (1852770) of Napoleon III, on whose defeat the Third
Republic (187171940) was established and able to see off its opponents by
virtue of French victory in the First World War. However, after a crushing
defeat against Hitler, it was deposed by the traditionalist Vichy regime
(19415), which, led by Marshal Pe'tain with the support of the army and
Church and using the slogans of Work, Family, and Fatherland, attributed the
national catastrophe to the sins of the republic. Vichy was overturned after
liberation by the Fourth Republic (1945758), which in turn fell because of its
inability to overcome the Algerian insurgency and was succeeded by de
Gaulles Fifth Republic (1958*). Charles de Gaulle married Bonapartist with
republican traditions in a presidential democracy that would restore Frances
greatrpower status and its leadership of Europe. There are similar patterns in
other countries, including Russia (cf. Hutchinson 2005: Ch. 3).

WAR AND A WORLD SYSTEM OF NATION STATES

What, nally, of Tillys argument that, as it has expanded in geographical

scale, warfare has enabled the formation of a global nationrstate system? He
notes three striking developments over the last 500 years: the transformation
of almost all European states into nation states with \vellrdened boundaries
and mutual relationships; the spread of a European state system to virtually
the entire world; and the growing inuence of states acting in concert over the
territory and organizations of new states. The rules, norms, and institutions of
the state system were dened through a series of peace conferences at the
end of periods of conllicts between alliances of states. Concerts of powerful
states have increasingly dened the political norms of humanity, setting up
international institutions by which to monitor them and diffusing standard
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNatian States 47

models for state bureaucracies, armies, and economies, thereby narrowing

the options for domestic actors. Since 1945, with the international system
guaranteeing the sanctity of existing state boundaries, interstate war has
declined and the great powers are more concerned with maintaining hegemr
ony over other states (Tilly 1992: Chs. 6, 7).
Tilly, however, because of his inadequate understanding of nation, also
mischaracterizes both the creation and consequences of a world statist system
that he imagines homogenizes the world by institutionalizing an order of
nation states. The toprdown model ignores the dynamic qualities of nationalr
ism when exercised by elites seeking to overcome disparities of power in
international relations. While some nationalists will seek to overcome their
countrys backwardness by rejecting native traditions and assimilating to
dominant models, others from a Herderian or communitarian view argue
that the cultural differences are too great, and attempting to imitate others will
result only in a derivative culture. Instead, a modern nation must be built up
from below on the basis of its distinctive traditions, for no nation can follow
the model of another. Such a perspective justied a selective borrowing from
other advanced cultures to advance rather than efface the native culture.
In early to midrnineteenthrcentury Russia this divergence took the form of
the struggle between Westerners who looked to French republicanism and the
Slavophiles who preferred conservative English or German models, but we see
it played out worldwide in most societies threatened by exogenous modernr
izing forces. It encouraged nationalist groups of various stripes to look globally
for models by which to reconstruct their societies to stave off the European
imperial challenges.
Chinese nationalists in the late nineteenth century explored the contemporary
resistance of colonized peoples against Western empires (the Boers against
Britain and the Filipinos against the USA), the struggles of the Young Turks to
modernize the Ottoman Empire, and the successes of the Meiji Refomiers
in Iapan, especially after Iapans defeat of the Tsarist Empire in 1905. The
reformers diverged in their analyses, some stressing the importance of a
strong state, others the creation of a powerful ethnic consciousness, but by
1911 educated opinion had come to believe that the answer to the Chinese
crisis was the transformation ofa foreignrled (Manchu) dynastic empire into
a national state, led by a patriotic elite. Increasingly, they saw China as leader
ofan Asian civilization against the West (Karl 2002: Chs. 2, 476). Later many
African nationalists in reacting against their imperial masters would reject
Western capitalist models of development as unt for their communitarian
societies, seeking to adopt instead the socialist programmes of the Soviet
Union, which they believed had enabled a backward agrarian society to leap
ahead of the West in a few decades.
Challenges to the established order had the potential to lead to military
conict that was partially resolved through peace conferences. But such
48 Nutiunalism and Wm

settlements have intensied division between the world of states and a world
of nations, setting up potential conicts for the future.
Tillys discussion of the constitutive role of postrconict international
treaties is awed on three grounds. First, treaties are generally compromises
between political entities that may differ radically in their ideologies and
interests (empires vs nation states; great states vs small states, democratic vs
communist regimes). The principles they enshrine, therefore, may be ambigur
ous or incoherent. Second, he exaggerates the might of great powers over local
agents who take advantage of the conict: treaties often may rubberrstamp
realities on the ground that develop after the formal end of the war (see
Chapter 3). Third, the terms of treaties may reect only a temporary suprenr
acy that is undermined by the revival of the defeated parties, and the victors
may be unwilling to enforce them as conditions change. The attempt to
impose a particular order upon the world may produce a reaction by those
who feel excluded.
This discussion will be further developed in Chapters 3 and 5, but it would
possible to reverse Tillys causation in which postrwar settlements, so far from
enforcing a normative consensus about a world order, result by their faulty
impositions in further conict. The Congress of Vienna (1814715), designed
to restore the ancien regime and curb the inuence of revolutionary and
nationalist ideas, failed. Revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848 triggered
nationalist (and social) uprisings in much of Europe. Although empires allied
to quell these, the decision of Napoleon III to legitimize h regime by
supporting nationalist causes in Italy, and subsequently Prussia s drive for
German reunication, swung the balance against empires. Ideas of self
determination heightened struggles between emergent nationalities and imr
perial states in Central and Southern Europe and destabilized the international
order before the First World War.
The Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations to
oversee its provisions was an incoherent compromise between the desire of
Allies to punish the Central European empires and Wilsons belief in recow
structing the imperial territories according to the principles of national self
determination (modied in practice to the idea of government with the
consent of the governed). It dismembered the states of the defeated but left
minorities of formerly dominant nationalities in many of the new nation
states. This inspired irredentist campaigns in Germany, Italy, and Hungary
that set the conditions for World War Two. As we shall see in Chapter 3, as
pressure of public opinion in Allied countries led to a withdrawal of military
forces, local wars between the military units of emerging nationalities deter
mined the boundaries of the new states which the treaty conrmed. Finally,
Wilson had aroused the national expectations of much of the colonial world
outside Europe, and their exclusion radicalized the demands of antircolonial
nationalists.
 WurrMaking and the Rise ofNation States 49

In similar terms, the peace settlements of World War Two between Western
powers and the Soviet Union came to lack legitimacy even before the onset of
the Cold War, giving rise to resistance movements in Eastern Europe. The war,
we shall see, began the process of decolonization which accelerated in the
1960s, resulting in the mass creation of states claiming to be nation states, but
in reality multinational or multirethnic states. To avoid a return to the militarist
irredentism of the I930s, the great powers agreed to a United Nations Charter
that forbade external interference in the sovereignty of existing states. In much
of the decolonized world, it has privileged the integrity of state boundaries
based largely on colonial units over the rights of national peoples, intensifying
a split between a world of states and a world of national peoples.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I have argued that the militarist interpretations ofTilly and Mann
have produced important insights into the relationships between warfare and
state formation. However, they understate the disabling effects of prolonged
warfare on the establishment of effective polities. They fail to sufciently
acknowledge that national communities may arise independently of states,
with which populations identify in quasirprimordial rather than instrumental
terms, and both scholars underplay the dynamic role of national identities in
the formation of nation states in the context of warrmaking. In the absence of
national leg-itimations, modern states are weak So far from nations arising from
the caging of populations by states, one might argue it is the recurrent vulnerr
ability of states than triggers a popular nationalism. One of the most serious
threats is warfare, though there are several others, such as mass migrations and
transnational ideological movements (Hutchinson 2005: Ch. 4).
I also argue that wars are not necessarily generative of modern citizenship.
Warfare in the modern period varies greatly, and its effects, mediated by other
cultural and political variables, are ambiguous in the consequences for the
inclusion or exclusion of different population categories. Wars have signir
cance when the experiences of conict generate profound ideologicalrcultural
cleavages and through their outcomes change the balance of power between
rival conceptions of the nation. Finally, although postrwar settlements may
establish the norms and institutions of a global system of states, they have not
been able to create a world of nation states. Indeed, they have exacerbated
disjunctures between the world of multinational states and of nations. This last
point will be elaborated in Chapters 3 to 5.
 2

Warfare, Memorialization, and the

Formation of National Communities

INTRODUCTION

War, I have argued, was a doubleredged sword for effective state formation,
but it generated threats to settled communities that could result in the
crystallization or revival of national identities. In this chapter, adopting an
ethnosymbolic perspective, I will elaborate on how warfare may contribute to
the formation of national communities. Here the nation is conceived as a form
of moral community, and an analysis of nation formation leads us into the
subjective world of meanings. Of course, war by itself can create little. For
populations to combine against an Other', they must already possess a sense
of commonality, if not nationality, which may come from nonrmilitary
sources, including a sense of religious distinctiveness and an attachment to a
territorial homeland.
That said, I will propose and assess four mechanisms through which wars
may be signicant for nation formation. First, they offer raw material for
myths whose narratives endow populations with a sense of meaning and
unique identity. Second, the war experience may produce wcithcy stereotypes
that serve in the process of collective selfrdifferentiation. Third, they generate
fundamental social rituals which engender a sense of commonality. Fourth,
the outcomes of war may instigate public policies and the individual and
associational behaviour of populations that embed national practices and
symbols in everyday life. One of the consequences is the formation of nations
as sacred communities of sacrice.
To be more concrete, warfare may engender a set ofhistorical myths that lodge
in the consciousness of populations so that they become a framework for
explaining and evaluating events. The war experience may unite previously
disparate groups and differentiate them against threatening others. War is
associated with the emergence of commemorative rituals and practices that
contribute to the formation of a cohesive community. Finally, the experiences
and consequences of warfare have often motivated and disciplined the longrterm
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 51

social and political goals of national populations, often at the expense of their
individual welfare.
In Chapter 1, I discussed how religious and national concepts were often
intertwined before the modern period, the former infusing military sacrice
for a territorial pama with holy qualities from the thirteenth century onwards
in Western Europe. In modern Europe, as I argued in the Introduction,
nationalism took on an ideological character to resolve a crisis of dual authorr
ity as secular scientic understandings of humanity challenged the traditional
meaning systems of religion. One of the solutions to this crisis was an identir
cation with the nation, which nationalists perceived to be an ancient
historical community endowed with a unique life force enshrined in a golden
past, synthesizing the values of (religious) tradition and modernity (see
Smith 1971: Ch. 10; Hutchinson 1987: Ch. 1). By identifying with an historical
community embodied in myths, symbols, and culture, which survived disaster
in the past, individuals combined in a society to overcome contingency.
Ideological nationalism thus endowed individuals with meaning and immor
tality in an unpredictable world shaken by dramatic economic and political
change. In the modern world, one of the most farrreaching of these unprer
dictable factors was war, whose incidence cannot be neatly aligned to any
developmental logic. As we shall see, in the nineteenth century central to many
nationalisms were commemorative cults of the collective sacrice, extolling
that those who died in battle would live forever in the national memory. These
resonated because of the mass character of modern wars forcing populations
to come to terms with death and suffering on a greatly extended scale.
The transfer of authority and meaning from God to originating peoples and
their cultures inaugurated a drive to actively identify with what nationalists
believed was the unique histories, landscapes, and vernacular cultures of their
nations which shaped the rituals and social practices of a new age. We will see,
however, that this sacralized concept of the nation did not supplant religious
understandings, and religious institutions maintained considerable power well
into the twentieth century even in Western Europe and remain today dominr
ant in many countries outside the West. The power of secular nationalists
often rested on their capacity to appropriate religious symbols for the nation;
but this was sometimes only partially successful. Allying with religious forces
could lead to a redenition of the national project, and churches could check
what they saw as aggressively secularizing projects.
That said, religious adherents have tended to align their beliefs within an
historicist nationalism. An important focus of the ethnosymbolic approach is
the relationship between memorialization and national identity. Anthony
Smith (1996: 383) summarized this with the formula no memory, no identity;
no identity, no nation, making an analogy between the recollection of indie
viduals and the transmission of ideas and sentiments across generations
(in the form of collective memory). Critics (Bell 2006: 73; Uzelac 2010)
52 Nutiunalism and Wm

have responded that collectivities, unlike individuals, cannot remember, and

this formula seems to preclude the need to specify the mechanisms by which a
sense of the past is constructed in societies. In fact, Smith (1981a) does discuss
mechanisms (e.g. propaganda and rituals) by which public representations of
the past are lodged in the present. I agree that one has to be cautious of
reication when using terms like collective memory and memory'. Noner
theless, I would argue, however, that individuals who identify with a nation
think of themselves as part of an intergenerational we and that they authr
ticate particular pasts as national, through a discourse of commemoration.
The chapter explores ve topics. First, I shall explore how war affects
meaning systems, collective selfrdenitlons, ritual formations, and the indie
vidual and social behaviour of populations. The ethnosymbolic approach
I propose suggests the quasirreligious character of nationalism, and throws
doubt on those approaches that offer an instrumental and narrowly political
account of nations. Second, I shall consider objections to the idea of the nation
as a community of sacrice constructed around myths, rituals, and memories,
in which I discuss the potency of national in relation to other forms of
attachment. Third, I will examine possible criticisms from an instrumentalist
perspective which argue for a political rather than a meaningrcentred inter
pretation of war memorializationiin other words, positing the signicance of
war is selected and xed by political elites for the purposes of social power and
exclusion. This will lead us to consider the multiple purposes of myths of war,
and contestations of meanings. Fourth, I will investigate why war myths
persist long after the participants have died, and why in apparent contrast
new myths can be constructed on the basis of largely forgotten episodes of
history. I then discuss circumstances under which war experiences erode
rather than sustain national cohesion. Finally, I will consider the cases of
nations lacking powerful commemorative myths of war sacrice and the
consequences, if any, for national identity.

WARFARE AND THE SACRED FOUNDATIONS

OF NATIONS

Myths and Meanings

In this section I argue that warfare often acts as a mythamoteuy (or constituting
myth) in the historical consciousness of many populations, becoming an
organizing framework for explaining events and evaluating their place in the
world. There are few areas of the globe not affected by war, and some, we
noted, are marked by long periods of conict of great intensity. Wars throw up
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 53

climactic events, battles that are perceived to decide the longrterm fate of
communities. They generate heroes (and villains) who for later generations
dene the archetypical qualities of the nation and are invoked as models to
inspire and organize communities in their responses to subsequent crises, as
well as to inform the conduct of everyday life.
There are many types of war experience that are mythologized, including
humiliating conquest and occupation, imperial triumph, liberation, and civil
strife. Anthony Smith (1984; see also Schopin 1997; Kolsto 2005) has idenr
tied many kinds of national mythsiof origins in time and space; of golden
ages of achievement; of subsequent decline; and of regeneration. Wars are
viewed as signicant when they are associated with such phases of the nation,
which dene and redene its core values and institutions, territorial identity,
and the achievement or loss of political freedom. Such wars can take on a
sacred character, sacred because they are perceived to establish the frameworks
through which members of the nation interpret their experience in time
and space.
Myths of war may be associated with the origins and mission of the nation
or the nation state, whether these are ancient or modern. German nationalists
in the nineteenth century commemorated in legends and monuments Arminr
ius, victorious over the Roman legions of Augustus; the Free Corps volunteers
of 1813 and the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig; and the battle of Sedan (1870),
which preceded German Unication. Afrikaners evoked their defeat of a Zulu
army at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 as a sign of Gods approval of their
claims to nationhood and territory (Cauthen 2004).
The myths might be of a golden age, for example, the conquistador legends
of Spain which celebrated the Christian Reconquism of the Iberian peninsula
in 1492, the Spanish discovery and conquest of the Americas, and the cultural
achievements of a Cervantes. Indeed, the nation is frequently dened in war as
a bearer of a great cultural mission in the case of populations such as the Poles,
Castiliaanpanish, and Russians, who perceived themselves to be on the fault
line between conicting religious civilizations. Over the centuries of conict
between Christian and Muslim powers these states and their populations came
to regard themselves as border guards of their civilizationias antemurule
Christianitutis, or, on the Muslim side, having ghuzi status (Armstrong 1982:
Ch. 3). Because border regions are also crossroads of migration and cultural
intermixing, there can be a concern with contamination and purication in
such regions, one example being the Spanish concern with blood and confesr
sional orthodoxy (Armstrong 1982: Ch. 2). Modern nationalists in the Middle
East from Nasser to Arafat have likened themselves to Saladin, saviour of
Jerusalem against the Crusaders.
The conicts of the CounterrReformation provided an equivalent function
for the opposing Catholic and Protestant populations. The Calvinist Dutch in
their revolt against Catholic Spain portrayed themselves in their propaganda
54 Nutiunalism and War

as Gods elect, and their Princes of Orange as divine leaders, equivalent to

King David or Moses (Gorski 2000: 143576). Likewise, English Protestants, for
whom the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 and deliverance from the
Gunpowder Plot in 1605 were conrmation of the special destiny of Gods
Englishmen, memorialized in national holidays, medals, tapestries, paintings,
poems, sermons, and prayers (Cressy 1994: 63). It was also the golden age
of the King James Bible and of Shakespearean drama. This was also a period of
civil wars in which the defeated religious minority in many countries became
stigmatized as the internal enemy of the nation.
Military and imperial glories might elevate the nation, giving it a sense of a
civil ing mission. The French kingdom was granted in the medieval period a
special status as the eldest daughter of the Church' by virtue of its role in the
Crusades, and Francis I claimed to be heir of Charlemagne, destined to unite
Europe in a zone of peace (Hirschi 2012: 6678, 18475), claims which shaped a
developing sense of nationality. However, for many populations the memories
of perceived disasters were more potent loci of identity in so far as they could
explain the miseries of the present. These catastrophes might be associated
with imperial subjugation: Greeks lamented the fall of their holy capital,
Constantinople, and the Byzantine Empire in 1453, just as Serbs mourned
the defeat of Tsar Lazar in the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 as marking the
loss of their empire and the beginning of their captivity in the Ottoman
Empire. For the Irish their conquest in the seventeenth century by the
Protestant English under Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell and the loss of
their lands and religious freedoms marked a long night of persecution and
martyrdom (Ford 2001).
The evoked catastrophes might also be civil wars. The Thirty Years War,
triggered by the struggle between German Protestant princes and Catholic
Habsburg emperors, was one of unprecedented destruction because of the
involvement of the leading European powers. For later Protestant German
nationalists this laid the foundations of the modern German nation, by
revealing Germany as Europes nation of destiny through its martyrdom' at
the hands of the CounterrReformation (Cramer 2008: 8273). Moreover, an
awareness of Germanys geopolitical vulnerability, encircled by powerful and
aggressive enemies, reinforced by Prussias near disaster in the Seven Years
War (1756763), created in later German thinkers a perception ofa nation that
must battle for its existence against a world of enemies (Cramer 2008: 84).
Such memorializations in the premodern period were particularly potent
when carried by multiple sites, including sacred religious texts, ofcial chronr
icles, folktales, and epic poetry that celebrated great heroes who became role
models, as well as identifying villains who betrayed the nation. In Serbia a
monastic cult of Tsar Lazar, conveyed in folk poetry soon after his death, was
elaborated in cycles of epic poetry, disseminated by peasant folk singers by the
seventeenth century. They portrayed Lazar as a martyr on the eve of battle,
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 55

choosing to sacrice earthly glory to secure heavenly immortality and the

resurrection of his people from Ottoman rule. Over several centuries this
story, initially of Christian martyrdom, had acquired the shape of an ethnic
mythomotem, aided in the late eighteenth century by the Serbian Orthodox
Churchs sanctication of Serbias medieval rulers (Vujacic' 2015: 13078).
A messianic religious oracular tradition, notably The Prophecy of Patriarch
Germudios, transmitted in textual, oral, and visual forms, began to circulate
among Greeks shortly after the Ottoman conquest, which explained away the
catastrophe as a result of the betrayal by the Latin West and forecast the
restoration of a Greek Empire with Constantinople as its capital (Hatzopoulos
201 l: 100).
If the past could help explain present decline, it could also offer hopes of
status reversal and regeneration. Particularly strong was the linkage of ethnic
consciousness to religion. Adrian Hastings (1997: Ch. 1) argued that the
Christian vernacularization of the Scriptures encouraged a popular selfr
identication as a New Israel, inspiring antirimperial revolts against contenr
porary Pharaohs (see also Waltzer 1985: Ch. 1). Anthony Smith has noted
the great signicance within the IudaeorChristian tradition of the idea of
a Covenant made between God and his people that endowed the latter with
a sense of chosenness, but with the obligation to obey His commandments
(Smith 2003). Although general within Christendom, the idea of being a
providential group, preserving Gods sacred values in a world of evil, appealed
especially to Protestant colonizing communities such as the Pilgrim Fathers,
Afrikaners, and Ulster Scots, for whom the biblical story of Exodus provided
a justication of their claims to their new lands and of their calling as
a redeemer people (Akenson 1992). This model, as we have noted in the
German case, could also explain military and social misfortune as a test of
the people's allegiance or as consequence of a betrayal of the Covenant by
rulers or people. It thereby provided a means ofcollective revival by a return
to religious authenticity. Religious prophecies could suggest history had
an eschatological signicance, accounting for its vicissitudes as well as
inspiring dreams of redemption not just for the chosen people but for
humanity at large.
Not all premodern myths were religious. Most societies recognized the
separate domain of the secular, and the warriorrherorking enjoyed a status
with codes of honour and lineages independent of the priest. Many rulers in
Europe claimed Trojan origins and the aura of descent from Rome, assuming
imperial titles (derived from Caesar) and iconography. Nonetheless, what we
call secularization inaugurated a revolution in the form of futureroriented
utopian political ideologies, including modern nationalism, in which individ
uals found immortality by identication with the collective mission of the nation.
The wars of modernity also provided their own materials, when interpreted
by historicist intellectuals inuenced by republicanism and romanticism, as
56 Nationalism and Wm

national as well as universal dramas. The French Revolution was sanctied by

notions of the people in arms who died for the construction of new nations of
citizens and universal liberties. Anthems such as the Marseillaise, national
llags, and iconography, and statues in public squares evoked the grandeur of
national sacrice. In the wars of this period there was an oscillation between
the cult of great men, of a Napoleon or a Nelson, as expressions of the genius
of the nation, and that of the democratic people. The revolutionary period
elicited an extraordinary efllorescence of legends and heroes, conveyed in
painting, from Davids Napoleon on the Saint Bernard Pass to Goyas
Third of May. Long after the events, novelists such as Tolstoy and composers
such Tchaikovsky and Prokoev mythologized Russia's struggle against
Napoleon as an elemental battle still in play between Western rationalism
and religious tradition.
Later in the century, with the rise of Social Darwinist and racist ideologies,
imperial wars were celebrated as expressions of elite civilizing missions.
Against this, a secular messianic tradition, articulated by Michelet, Mazzini,
and Mickiewicz, developed in a Europe periodically convulsed by social
dislocation, revolutions, and intensifying military competition that forecast a
great war which would result in the collapse of empires and a resurrection
of national peoples (Talmon 1960: 27071). Where later still nationalism was
combined with militantly atheist cosmologies such as Communism in China,
Vietnam, and Cuba, national liberation struggles were portrayed as key turnr
ing points in the revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism.
These new secular myths and eschatologies did not necessarily supplant
their religious predecessors. Many ethnorreligious myths were carried into the
modern period, underpinning the popular passions of secular nationalist
projects. Philiki Emireia, the neoclassical Hellenic secret society that spearr
headed the Greek rebellion against the Ottomans, presented their insurrection
to clergy and peasantry as a fullment of millenarian prophesies (Hatzopoulos
2011: 110). Similarly, the Irish war of independence (1919721) was fought
to establish a secular republic but acquired popular fervour from the idea
of Ireland as a martyred Catholic nation. After independence the Greek
Orthodox Church and the Irish Catholic Church achieved special status in
the new states.
We can note some characteristics of national myths. First, there was often a
time lag between the events and the myths as well as a discrepancy between
historical realities and their interpretation. The myths were subject to regular
reconstruction. The battle of Kosovo, in its time capable of being depicted as a
victory of an army of Balkan forces (Serbs, Albanians, Romanians, and
Bosnians) over the Ottomans, was transformed in the seventeenth century
into a tragic and glorious defeat of the Serbs, celebrated by chroniclers, priests,
and poets (Hastings 1997: 132). It was only in 1847 that Bishop Njegos
composed the epic The Mountain Wreath, which became the canonical
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 57

nationalist version of the myth. After the formal recognition of the Serbian
kingdom (1878782), preparations for the verhundredth anniversary of the
battle in 1889 enabled the appropriation of this myth for the cause of the state
(Vujacic' 2015: 136). Similarly, the Battle of Blood River (1838) became a
central myth for Afrikaners, decades after the event, and was nally commemr
orated by the completion of Voortrekker monument in 1948 (Thompson
1985: 18678).
Second, populations generally had several such myth structures, which
might be everlaid on each other. Although having a rich past enhanced the
survival of ethnic and national identities, as we shall see, this also provided
resources for intrargroup competition. Even within the same myth tradition,
there could be a struggle to control its meaning. In seventeenthrcentury
England the commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot was initially instituted
by James 1's government to strengthen the authority of the Stuart monarchy,
the status quo, and express joy at deliverance from Catholic tyranny. It was
later taken up as a call to action by dissident Puritan groups warning of the
dangers of creeping popery under Charles 1 (Cressy 1994: 6677).

War Experiences and Collective Self-Differentiation

As Anthony Smith (1981a and b) argues interstate wars may both extend a
sense of a territorial homeland and intens a sense of national difference. He
suggests two mechanisms by which this is done. First, when states through
military institutions repeatedly recruit individuals from different localities to
defend their territories, over time they can create a collective identication
with a homeland more extensive than the village. Second, such warfare serves
to elaborate and harden ethnic group selfrimages and group stereotypes as we/
they stereotypes are created by the competing propaganda of rival states,
thereby forming over time a common national consciousness. War, however,
may pose a threat to multinational states or sharply stratied societies. Smith
distinguishes between the wars of premodernity and modernity, which shape
the experiences of ethnic and nations respectively. Myths of origin, an attachr
ment to a territory, a sense of cultural distinctiveness are common to both, but,
in addition, nations possess a mass public culture and common rights and
duties. Smith, of course, is aware there are cases of a mass mobilization of
populations in the ancient and medieval periods, for example during the
Romanrlewish War from 66 to 72 (I. On the whole, before the eighteenth
century wars tended to be limited in their social effects, and their consequences
for later nation fomiation are indirect. The effects of modern warrmaking
are much more direct and extensive. Increasing state centralization, the
introduction of conscription in the nineteenth century, and development of
total wars during the twentieth century that integrated civilian and military
58 Nutiunalism and Wm

elds have engendered a mass national consciousness (Smith 1981a: 39077;

1981b: 7478).
Yet even before the modern period, protracted and recurrent dyadic cone
tlicts with neighbours (the Hundred Years War between the English and
French and the Eighty Years War between the Dutch and the Spanish Habsburgs)
helped construct a national consciousness versus an enduring Other'. In the
Middle Ages, written propaganda had a limited reach, but such wars, we
observed in Chapter 1, were given the status of crusades, with armies adopting
uniforms based on crusading imagery and ghting under the banner of
national saints. Later confessional wars, as we noted in the English Civil
War and the Dutch Revolt, had both a state and religiorcommunal character,
supported by extensive printed propaganda that pitted chosen peoples against
heretical others. In the Swediseranish wars of Lutheran states of the early
eighteenth century, Swedish images and ideals of martial manliness and
patriotic sacrice were counterposed to Danish atrocities, including rape
(Marklund 2013: 151, 15779).
Such polar images became part of an expressive repertoire of national
antagonisms, as a sense of national identity became elaborated and demotir
cized in the eighteenth century. In England images of France as the traditional
Catholic enemy were portrayed in popular media (including cartoons) as an
effete aristocratic society ruling a starving populace, in contrast to hale
Englishmen thriving on a wholesome diet of roast beef. The French retaliated
by portraying England as mercantile Carthage to Frances Rome. Older
stereotypes were married to new mutualized differences in the French Rev ,
lutionary Wars: thus Napoleon called for the extermination of a nation of
shopkeepers (Bell 2007: 23375). A huge range of opposing stock images7
ranging over sexual habits, diet, religious character, attitudes to liberty and
social order, pervaded the French and British printed media (Tombs and
Tombs 2007: 987107). At times of intense threat modern nationalists sought
to expand (and sometimes totalize) the sectors of life regulated by national
norms as a means of redirecting all energies to the defence of the collectivity
and insulating it from pollution and destruction. In England during the First
World War, even playing German classical music was taboo.
The rise of the popular press, allied to increasing literacy, enhanced this
process through their interpretation and transmission of the war experience,
affecting the capacities of governments to mobilize their population for
conict. Iournalists introduced a new immediacy to war when reporting the
experiences of the ghting fronts to the civilian populations, which could
either intensify or undermine support for war. Critical reports of the sufferings
of British troops in the Crimean War or in the twentieth century of US war
crimes in the Vietnam War could cause revulsion. On the other hand,
accounts from the front by the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch of the
Gallipoli campaign in 1915 helped create the national myth of the heroic
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 59

Anzac soldier, betrayed by British incompetence and callousness. Governments

have generally sought in wartime to control media coverage with the aim of
intensifying patriotic support for the war.
After the conict, the memories of the war experience, often romanticized
as a male Gemeinschaft of solidarity under suffering even among those critical
of the war, have often been institutionalized in the publications and organr
izations of military veterans from the period of the Napoleonic War onwards.
In the era of total war, heroism was located in the people itselfiwhen the
endurance of Russian civilians under German bombardment in Stalingrad and
Leningrad was celebrated.
Recurrent dyadic conicts with neighbouring others and consequent pro
longed contact may produce not just Manichean oppositions but also cultural
ambivalence, conveyed in the title of a recent book about the BritishrFrench
relationship, That Sweet Enemy (Tombs and Tombs 2007). As both sides
evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their Other, they may come to
admire aspects of their antagonists culture and institutions. Francophile
English aristocrats sought to emulate French taste and cultivation, while a
Voltaire admired English toleration and constitutional liberties. This process
of comparison itself contributes to a sense of difference. A historic sense of
rivalry can also survive the later emergence of more threatening enemies.
France and Britain were thrown into an alliance by the rise of Germany in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries against which they fought two World
Wars. Nonetheless, the historic sweet enmities have remained, if overladen
by fears of German power. In similar guise, the states of Western Europe,
Britain, France, and Germany have posed military as well as cultural threats to
Russia, but it is out of positive and invidious comparisons with such powers
that a modern Russian national identity has developed (Neumann 1996).
In short, the collisions of populations in war, as well as in religious conict
and economic competition, have played a large part in the formation of mass
national identities which are often historically laden with specic (though
often competing) concepts of homeland, geopolitics, friendrfoe relations,
cultural exclusiveness, and historical destiny.

War Mobilization, Collective Rituals, and Symbols

As I noted earlier, the Prussian reformer, Gneisenau in 1811 regarded the

French invasion as threatening not just the destruction of Prussian army but
the annihilation of the state. Sooner or later, he claimed, we should expect to
be removed from the ranks of independent peoples (Vo'lker)' (Hewitson 2013:
489). In war, populations facing death, captivity, or the overthrow of existing
social institutions are forced to confront ultimate questions about their idenr
tity and purposes. In these situations wars engender ritual practices that seek
60 Nutiunalism and War

to control overwhelming emotions and that form or reinforce powerful

collective identities.
Randall Collins, we have seen, argues the effervescence produced by colr
lective assemblies and sense of common fate may generate new symbols that
become stores of values, able to be evoked in subsequent crises (Collins 2012).
The experience of intense unity in modern societies was often associated with
a breaking down of status and class barriers and an experience of transcendr
ence that was later evoked with nostalgia. We also noted in Chapter 1 that in
the modernrperiod feelings of Gemeinscha could become associated with
radically different postrwar utopian political projects, from republican fraterr
nity to fascist corporativism.
Such rituals arise in the context of largerscale mobilization engendered by
polities or political movements. Ritualization and associated collective crysr
tallizations in war are not a modern phenomenon. There are many examples
in the ancient world, notably Pericles funeral oration commemorating Athenians
who sacriced themselves for the palis. Jacob Wright notes the nationrforming
effects of the mourning rituals of the king of Elam and his people, following
the destruction of their polity by Assyria. He also argues the codication of
the biblical texts and of unied calendars, festivals, music, laws, cults, and
language in the periods after the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in
722 BCE, and of Judah in 586 BCE, consolidated disparate groups and created
the bases of political unity (Wright 2009).
In addition to the national ceremonies already noted in early modern
Protestant countries such as Netherlands and England, from the early sevenr
teenth century a tradition of national humiliation days formed at times of war,
civil war, and disaster such as plague. These events were viewed as Gods
punishment of the Elect, who must regain his favour through collective
repentance. Here the idea of individual sin was transposed to the nation,
and accompanied by sermons, public prayers, and acts of fasting demanded
of the whole population. William Callahan (2006) argues these were natioir
alizing events in which populations at the local level were policed by churches,
parliaments, and monarchs, but they could also be occasions of popular
opposition to government, particularly to its vainglorious nationalism. In
England there were many such days during the civil wars of the midi
seventeenth century. Although the tradition declined after the midrnineteenth
century, there were popular calls for a national day of humiliation in response
to the setbacks of the Boer War. In the USA the tradition was vigorous,
coming to a peak during and after the Civil War, with a national day of
humility after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. President Woodrow
Wilson declared a national day on 30 May 30 1918. Indeed, the US Congress,
to mark the Iraqi invasion in 2003, summoned the president to proclaim a
national day of humility, prayer and fasting' that would secure divine protecr
tion for the people and soldiers of the USA (Callahan 2006: 40476).
 Warfare, Msmoriulization, and Nations 61

Successful national rituals of popular mobilization and propaganda then

predate the modern era. In the High Middle Ages the cult of soldierly
martyrdom in defence of the royal pama was conned to the nobility, but
this was changing. In the early eighteenthrcentury wars between Sweden and
Denmark, a more demotic cult of sacricial masculinity for the puma had
emerged, celebrated in popular broadsides and memorialized in contemporary
narratives (Marklund 2013). However, it was in the secular festivals of the
French Revolution that the people themselves took centre stage, when the
nation itself became deied and an object of worship, celebrated in anthems
(Marseillaise), iconography (Marianne in arms), and in the arts (Forrest 2003:
25730). In the ideology of republican nationalism the people have not only a
right but a duty to resist foreign oppression (Nabulsi 1999: Ch. 6). Although
the Icvse en masse was instituted by the French republic as a desperate device
to resist the invading armies of the ancien rgime and was by no means
universal in its scope, it soon became a symbol of the willed sacrice of the
whole nation. Indeed, a violent popular insurrection was viewed by some
nationalists as an essential rite of national resistance, an expression of collectr
ive authenticity, something I shall discuss in Chapter 5.
Wars of modern nation states have generated many rituals, designed to
promote solidarityithe popular assemblies to cheer the choreographed
marching of uniformed troops on their departure to the front or on their
homecoming, victory parades, and so forth. However, of greater longrterm
signicance are the great rituals that claim to carry the memories of war and
form identities long after the events. Central to nationalism have been public
commemorations of fallen soldiers and associated rituals and practices which
mark profound shifts in attitudes to death, time, and social status. Reinhart
Koselleck (200 289791) argues in premodern societies death meant an
individual transition into an otherworldly realm, and death was differentiated
by estate. Until the eighteenth century we nd great heroes depicted on
monuments rather than war memorials as such. In contrast, in the this
worldly and futureroriented ideology of nationalism the martial dead were
to be kept present in elaborate memorials as eternal custodians of national
values and sources of emulation. Their function was to give meaning to the
lives of survivors. This was accompanied by a democratization of sacrice,
in which memorialization was no longer reserved to the nobility but now
addressed all who had suffered for the nation.
A cult of the young male dead developed early in the great public festivals of
the French Revolution, where fallen soldiers became transformed into mare
tyrs and role models, worshipped not in churches but in monuments placed in
public squares and landscapes. This was replicated in German territories,
where the Free Corps of the war of liberation of 1813 assumed a comparable
status. Military veterans were to the fore as carriers of these cultsiin the
French case sustaining the legend of Napoleon, and in the German, active
62 Nutiunalism and War

in grassrroots nationalist festivals gathered around monuments to the dead

(Mosse 1990: Chs. 1 and 2).
Paul Connerton (1989) argues that public commemorations are the prey
eminent mechanism through which a common sense of the past is transmitted
into the future. It is through rituals involving performative bodily acts that
individual participants nd themselves transformed into a life held in come
mon. Such rituals represent themselves as eternal rerenactments of a master
narrative of the community, which gives meaning to the present. Rituals are
distinctive, since the acts are invariant, encoded in restricted bodily gestures
and vocabularies, and obligatory, interference with which is taboo. Their
power rests on a sense of habituation that is achieved through regular gestural
repetition of these performances. Hence, such ceremonies tend to be calenr
drical, enacted on specic national days'.
George Mosse (1990) and Anthony Smith (2003: Chs. 2, 9) have proposed
that nationalist commemorations fullled an important role for participants
and the families of the dead in eras marked by mass death. Through being
remembered forever for their ultimate sacrice to the nation, the dead achieved
immortality. In Durkheimian terms, commemorations of the dead constituted
a surrogate religion that bound the living in moral obligation to the dead
to sustain the nation against the attrition of individual egotism and class
divisions. States played a key role, by establishing national holidays that
supplanted in importance older religious and monarchical rituals, and by
implanting national memorials in the heart of their capital and major cities7
the Arc de Triomphe and the Madeleine in Paris, Trafalgar Square in London,
and the Kreuzberg Memorial in Berlin (Mosse 1990: 4678). In spite of
this, religion remained a potent social and political force. In revolutionary
France heroic cults had borrowed strongly from the images of Christian
martyrs, and despite the increasing secularization of civil society, death
and remembrance remain inextricably bound to the rituals and rhetoric of
religious belief (Clarke 2007). The alliance in German states between liberal,
Lutheran, and dynastic opponents of France enabled the construction of
secular nationalist ceremonials after the war in which the iconography come
bined a pagan (with emblems like oak leaves referring to a primordial
Teutonic past) and Christian symbolism and Lutheran ritual. In the course
of the nineteenth century, using older religious symbolism, nationalists both at
the state and the regional levels developed novel forms of iconography, liturgy,
sacred spaces, including military cemeteries, and of festivals that sought an
active participation of the people. As war memorials became a central part of
the national cult, so they became targets for destruction in wars to humiliate
the enemy or erode their capacity to carry their identity into the future
(Koselleck 2002: 325).
Young middlerclass romantic intellectuals were prominent in the creation
of nineteenthrcentury war cults, celebrating the camaraderie, manliness, and
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 63

heroic individuality of the war experience in contrast to the connes of

peacetime society (Mosse 1990: Ch. 4). The sacrice of the common soldier
was extolled, but even at the end of the nineteenth century many monuments
listed the dead by ranks. Although it was foreshadowed by the American
Civil War, the First World War was a turning point, as war became a
more technological, lethal, mass phenomenon, and marked by death on an
unprecedented scale. A cult of individual heroism gave way to the commenr
oration of demotic sacrice, embodied in cenotaphs to the Unknown
Soldier. Such mass rituals evoking the war experience as much as the fallen
soldier' both contributed to and registered the formation of a democratic
national community.

Long-Term Social and Political Missions

A fourth way that warfare is signicant for nation formation is through

outcomes that shaped the longrterm social and political goals of national
populations. Victory and defeat had very different effects. Ioep Leerssen
(2001: 214715), citing Nietzsche, distinguishes between monumental and
traumatic' memory. The rst is the attribute of successful great powers and
imperial nations which eternalize their civilizational achievements in impresr
sive urban structures, ofcial historiographies, monuments, and formal high
cultures. The second is the trait of the subjugated, who lack a high public
culture of their own and continuously return to the memories of their humilir
ation, perpetuated through oral and informal kinship structures. The notion of
trauma when applied to collecti es is problematic (as I shall discuss later),
and Leerssen is very aware that this distinction is idealrtypical. He has in
mind as exemplars of traumatic memory colonized and stateless peoples
(such as the prerindependence Irish) rather than nation states. In the latter
case, the effect of defeat is generally not a disabling preoccupation with past
injustice, for even small nation states tend to have experiences of victory as
well as of defeat.
Victory has tended to vindicate war leaders, often securing in power for
generations a specic cohort and their particular vision of the nation. This is
particularly the case of new nation states established by liberation or unicar
tion wars, where the leaders of an independent nation often become the
charismatic fathers of their country, Washington and Iefferson for the USA,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk for Turkey, and Castro for Cuba. Staterapproved
historiographies have created teleologies of collective progress that are inculr
cated in public educational systems. For the rst forty years of post
independence Ireland the leadership of the country was drawn from the
cohort who participated in the Easter Rising (1916) and the subsequent war
of independence, who advanced a Gaelic Catholic rural social model of the
64 Nutiunalism and Wm

nation (Hutchinson 1987: Ch.8). They were able to draw on memories of

struggle to mobilize support for their policies and also to immunize theme
selves from criticism, in spite of economic failures and a continuously decliir
ing population (Lee 1989: Ch. 8).
Arguably the experience of defeat generates more radical popular energies,
often directed against established elites. In the words of Nietzsche (cited in
Perica 2005: 134), If something is to be held in the memory it must be branded
there: only that which never stops hurting stays in the memory. There are
different experiences of defeatitemporary (losing battles before eventual
success), partial, denitive, and total (where the victors impose their norms
on the defeated states)7which shape future memorialization (see Home
2008). We shall explore some of these distinctions later. As Horne observes
(2008: 16717), the consequences of defeat in national wars were more intense,
not just because of the greater scale of war but because it could be seen as
moral failure of the people itself. Defeat can entail a sense of rupture with the
past and the necessity for a thorough purication of those elements of the
nation that were responsible. As we noted in Chapter 1, the shattering defeat
of Germany and Hungary after the First World War in which they lost
territory and population to neighbouring states inspired radical nationalist
programmes of regeneration and irredentism. These campaigns were spearr
headed by social groups, by exrsoldiers' organizations embittered at the loss of
military prestige, and by populations displaced from their former homelands,
such as Finnish Karelians, driven out as a result of war with the USSR.
Of course, both defeat and victory are part of the experience of many
nations and states (Mock 2012). Nationalists often play upon a contrast
between imperial (or greatrpower) greatness and current humiliation to actir
vate populations in programmes to regain their countrys place in the sun.
This was the case not just of postrVersailles Germany but of modern China.
Chinese nationalists from the early twentieth century employed the concept of
a century of humiliation inicted on the Middle Kingdom to heighten a
sense of bitterness at the loss of territories and the unjust treaties imposed by
European imperial powers and Iapan, dating from the Opium Wars (1839742,
1856760). This was directed initially against an impotent imperial regime, but
could be canalized by later governments. Thus, although ofcial commemorr
ations of humiliation' were played down after the victory of the Chinese
Communists and expulsion of the Iapanese in 1945, they were revived after
the Tiananmen Square massacres to unite the population around the Come
munist regimes ambitions to recover rst Hong Kong and then Taiwan
(Callahan 2004).
It is the perception as much as the reality of victory or defeat that is crucial.
Although Irish and Greeks took pride in winning their freedom from the
British and Ottoman Empires, these victories were also perceived as unnr
ished or as partial defeats by some nationalists, since part of the homeland was
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 65

still under occupation. After independence, successive Greek regimes galvanized

their societies in a long and disastrous irredentist quest to reconquer the lands
of the Byzantine Empire and unify Greeks, through repeated wars with the
Ottomans. Although in the process much of the population was nationalized,
this was at the expense of Greeces socioreconomic development (Pepelassis
1958). In such ways state actors, by identifying a common enemy who can
be internal as well as external, can nationalize large sections of populations
through educational indoctrination and military conscription.
This suggests the quasirreligious character of nationalism and its referent
the nation in the modern world. But how far it is plausible to view the nation
as a community of sacrice constructed around memory? We shall rst
consider objections to this analysis. The rst questions the neorDurkheimian
models underpinning this analysis and the empirical evidence of sacricial
actions. A second argues for more ofa political and instrumental interpretr
ation of myths as essentially malleable rather than as sources of meaning
in their own right. A third possible criticism points to cases where wars
appear to undermine nations. Finally, we have to account for instances of
pacic nations.

THE NATION AS COMMUNITY OF SACRIFICE

The unique capacity of the nation to elicit mass sacrice from its followers is
often cited to demonstrate its potency in the modern world. This is also linked
to its religious character, manifest in mass commemorative rituals that
allegedly form individuals into national communities. But how grounded are
such claims? After considering the theoretical objections, I will examine the
empirical evidence for the will to sacrice in war.

Commemoration and National Unity

As we saw, by the end of the nineteenth century in many European countries a

national commemorative cult had been elaborated, appropriating older relir
gious idioms. Several scholars, however, are sceptical of the importance of
public commemorative rituals in generating and sustaining national identities.
Does not their gradual formalization suggest they accompany rather than
cause the emergence of such identities?
Randall Collins (2012) makes a distinction between natural and formal
rituals. The former are signicant and emerge spontaneously at moments of
crisis that focus widespread attention and assemble crowds into mass inter
action rituals, in which new symbols and identities crystallize. But these
66 Nutiunalism and Wm

operate only in a three to six months time bubble, after which they dissipate.
Of formal rituals, he agrees with Jon Fox (2012), that there is much analysis of
the elite intentions in their production but little of their popular reception, and
that their effectiveness is too often assumed where it has to be demonstrated.
A more radical critique questions if nationalism can operate in the same
manner as religious in forming societies. Ieffrey Alexander (2006) rejects the
applicability of Durkheims analysis of the solidarityrforming power of rituals
in small tribal groups to nations. In the former, all the population participates,
but nations are largerscale, anonymous, imagined, and complex societies,
where the majority, unable to join directly in public rituals, at best engage
secondrhand as spectators through the mass media. In effect, only a minority
can experience the heightened emotion and effervescence of ritual practice.
The others function more as an audience of individuals witnessing a dramatic
production. Developing this point, Gordana Uzelac (2010) claims the criterion
of a successful ceremony becomes its authenticity' as performance in the
eyes of the audience. But authenticity is necessarily subjective and, even if
perceived, emotional fusion between audience and performers can only be
momentary. She is sceptical also about the power of nationalist rituals if
one agrees with Connerton that their effectivity depends on their xity, for
nationalist public rituals, unlike their religious equivalents, are subject to
continuous modication. On all these grounds there is doubt about the
cohesive effect of such ceremonies.
I agree that formal public commemorations cannot bear the weight that is
sometimes placed on them, but that when understood in a broader mnemonic
context they can have important cognitive functions and can mobilize collectr
ivities, particularly at times of crisis. The exibility of national ceremonies
compared to their religious equivalents is an advantage given the fast
changing character of the modern world. In any case, Paul Connerton
makes a useful distinction between rituals characterized by xed meanings
and myths, which operate much more uidly as reservoirs of meaning. As he
observes, although rituals and myths may share some content, formally they
are different, for to recite a myth is not to accept it and there is creative
variance in the telling of myths, as the Greek dramatists or, in our case,
nationalist artists demonstrate (Connerton 1989: 5677). It is in conjunction
with the historical mythrsymbol narratives diffused by low and high cultural
traditions and institutionalized in everyday life by states or social movements
that such public rituals take effect.
I made the point that national myths and their associated narratives were
embedded in social life when taken up by state actors and social movements to
give content to national institutions and mobilize populations around collectr
ive goals. Eviatar Zerubavel (2003: Ch. 2) gives examples of the many bridging
mechanisms at work whereby the past has been channelled into the present for
such purposes. Some of these have a ritual character such as ceremonies in the
 Warfare, Memorialization, and Nations 67

same places of sacrice such as the oathrtaking of Israeli soldiers at the

Masada, scene of Iewish resistance to the Roman Empire. There is also the
deliberate imitation and replication of heroes and martial traditions, used as
ofcial role models in schools. Others are more informal. Public gures may
make speeches or announce key policy decisions on the anniversaries of
battles, use historical analogies with traumatic episodes (for example, in
comparing 9/11 to the attack on Pearl Harbor). They make a discursive
continuity with the past, for example when an action, say, by the British
government, was depicted by Irish nationalists as part of a continuum of six
hundred years of English tyranny.
Perhaps of as great signicance is the taking up of such myths by a variety of
social actors who employ and consume them in making sense of everyday life
experiences. George Mosse (1990: 26677) speaks of the process of trivialization
whereby the horror of war experienced is controlled, if not transcended, by
making it familiar in the form of picture postcards, toys, and battleeld
tourism. In high culture the images of past wars are mined to throw light on
the present from Walter Scotts Waverley to Stendhal's Le Rouge and le Noiy, set
in postrRestoration France, one of whose characters selfrconsciously adopts
Napoleonic poses when he embarks into the sphere of erotic conquest. As new
public spaces emerged with urbanization, there were attempts to naturalize
the unfamiliar by naming streets and squares after national heroes and famous
battles, as well as constructing monuments. In a developing consumer society
marked by a private sphere, the charisma of heroes (such as Napoleon in France
and Nelson in England) was reproduced and consumed by the general popur
lation in legends, songs, novels, clothing, and domestic objects (Hazareesingh
2004: Ch. 3). Later in the nineteenth century, emerging genres of popular
ction and childrens comics, catering to the literate, provided images of
chivalrous manhood to civilize male youth through exotic tales of imperial
derringrdo (Paris 2000: Chs. 1 and 2). One of the traditions invented at this
time, popular sport, soon became suffused with nationalist images. Many
sporting activities, from Jahns gymnastic movement to the Gaelic Athletic
Association in Ireland, originated with militarist aims (to create a younger
generation of virile patriots) but as sports passed into the sphere of entertainr
ment, contests between international teams were often presented in the popur
lar press, sometimes ironically, as displaced forms of war.
The interweaving sets of myths and legends form what Billig (1995) calls a
banal nationalism' or what Ion Fox (2012) better describes as an everyday
nationalism. This provided a common set of idioms and reference points that
political elites use, often unselfconsciously, to communicate with a larger
audience. The study of how they furnish languages through which ordinary
individuals articulate their relationships and tastes is still to be explored, but
there is little doubt about the growing relevance of national myths to the
constitution of everyday social life.
68 Nutiunalism and War

It is the wide diffusion of myths into social life that provides the soil in
which formal public commemorations work. During periods of peace and
social harmony, the latter may be received with a polite boredom, but they
provide cognitive functions as important reminders of foundational moments
of the communities (whether of unity or discord). Although some public
ceremonies are calendrical, others such as national humility days are not
and were instituted at times of war or disaster. At this point they can become
important points of afrmation.
What evidence is there that the internalization of national values creates a
willingness to sacrice? 1 shall consider empirical objections to such a claim.
The rst focuses on evidence of popular insurrections which suggests only a
minority is involved, and often not for nationalist motives. The second,
although recognizing the reality of mass participation and tolerance of casr
ualties in interstate war particularly in the twentieth century, explains it by
factors such as coercion or smallrgroup solidarities.

Myths vs Realities of Popular Revolts

Of course, few people will unconditionally die for any cause. The issue is
whether or not we nd signicant numbers of individuals prepared to sacrice
themselves for the nation.
One of the central myths of nationalism is that of the autoremancipation of
the people. Many of the formative images of popular national insurrections
against foreign invasion or rule arise from the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Warsithe leve en masse in France of 1793, the volunteer mover
ment of 1813 in German territories, and the guerrilla war in Spain. The legend
is embraced by national liberation movements of the contemporary period, for
example in the struggles of Algerians and Vietnamese against French rule
(Lockhart 2003; Porch 2003). However, critics have argued that to construe
the uprisings of the French revolutionary period as nationalist is to engage in
retrospective mythrmaking. Popular mobilization was limited in scope and
inspired by a range of other factors, including by states' summons with the
threat of sanctions on the unpatriotic; a peasant hostility to foreign armies
that lived off the land enforcing levies, enlistments, and military reprisals; and
a traditionalist revulsion at foreign attacks on religious and monarchical
institutions (Moran and Waldron 2003; Gildea 1987: 53; Tone 2010: 258).
Later leaders of liberation movements, on the other hand, have depicted
their campaigns as spontaneous national uprisings, when in reality they are
an unrepresentative elite, in order to obtain international legitimacy and
undermine popular support in the West for the retention of European rule
(Waldron 2003a).
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 69

Karma Nabulsi has challenged these interpretations using campaign diaries

and memoirs of soldiers. Insurrections in Belgium 1798, Naples in 1799 and
1806, Spain in 1808, and Netherlands in 1811712 arose from below rather
than from intellectuals; there was a widespread inuence of nationalist ideas of
political liberty. Resistance was supported by a wide range of nonrviolent
measures (boycotts, withholding of provisions, and the sheltering of guerrillas)
by the general population that might provoke lethal punishment by the
military authorities. In Spain popular resistance was highly organized on a
regional basis by local juntas which were composed initially of peasants and
artisans rather than the educated classes. Some guerrilla bands were the size of
an army battalion (8,000 strong). Priests played a major role as instigators of
revolt here as in Germany, Russia, and Italy, but the traditional loyalties they
articulated were often fused with older ethnic visions and ideas of political
liberties. Ideas of national sovereignty were invoked in Spain and elsewhere
(Nabulsi 1999: Ch. 2).
Nabulsi portrays popular nationalism as much as an emergent phenomr
enon (provoked by the scale of the exactions of large national armies on
populations) as a cause of rebellion. She admits it was undercut by class
divisions and there was widespread collaboration with the enemy. Moreover,
effective popular resistance in Spain and Russia was sustained by supporting
conventional armies (by Wellington in Portugal and Spain). However, her
analysis reveals the establishment of a tradition of insurrectionary nationalism
and a developing repertoire of resistance that was rapidly disseminated rst
Europeanrwide then worldwide.
In these terms nationalism did inspire groups to selfrsacrice. Europe was
hit by waves of national as well as social revolts in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1848
which largely failed. It might be said revolutionary nationalists represented a
tiny minority of the general population whom they regarded frequently with
contempt and despair. But out of these failures came a tradition of martyrs in
countries such as Ireland, Poland, and Italy who embodied the willingness of
each generation to sacrice themselves for the nation, even for those who
looked upon such traditions with embarrassment. This mystique gave moral
authority to revolutionaries when the authority of the state was in question.
The apocalyptic world wars of the twentieth century, we shall see in Chapter 3,
resulted in a radical politicization of populations and a wave of revolutions led
by such nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe, following the collapse of
the Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires in 1918719, and in Asia and
Africa after 1945, after the defeat of the Imperial European powers.
Thus, nationalist armed groups and guerrilla campaigns were conducted by
minorities, but were dependent on broader support in the community for
food, shelter, and intelligence, when confronted by state forces. Part of their
strategies was to trigger reprisals from government forces that would fall on
the broader population to polarize the struggle between occupying force and
7U Nationalism and War

the nation. In Maos terms, the sh had to swim in a sea. We see this strategy
in Ireland, where the revolutionary leaders staged the Easter Rising of 1916 in
a time of European war in order to incite the British government to overreacr
tions. In the subsequent guerilla war of independence nationalist atrocities
provoked state reprisals in a spiral of violence that led to the delegitimation
of British authority. Similar strategies were at work in the Algerian and
Vietnamese struggles against the (French) colonial power.

Nationalism, Interstate War, and Collective Sacrice

If liberation movements are dependent on the strategies and determination of

nationalist elites, surely the ferocity of wars of modern nation states leaves
little doubt about the national commitment of their populations. As Benedict
Anderson states, the wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the
scale in which they permitted people to kill as in the colossal numbers
persuaded to lay down their lives (Anderson 1991: 144). But this is what is
denied by recent revisionists who argue that the lethal nature of modern
technological war means that the overcoming of fear is the main factor in
sustaining conict, and, as a motivating tool, nationalism plays little part.
This goes beyond discounting the motives of volunteers, which are often
mixed. Although many may thirst for adventure, they do not necessarily have a
desire for sacrice (Mosse 1990: Ch. 4). After the initial wave ofenthusiasm, in
situations of largerscale war nation states have had to resort to forms of
compulsory enlistment. Even in the French armies under the Republic and
Napoleon, desertion was a problem, and what kept men ghting was a sense of
loyalty to their comrades and draconian penalties (Forrest 2002: 8, 177780). By
the midrnineteenth century, French military theorists expressed concern that
nationalism was insufcient to motivate conscripts: combat units would have
to be sustained by discipline and drill (Strachan 2014). Michael Mann maiir
tains that a desire to prove ones manliness rather than nationalism lay behind
the initial enthusiasm for enlisting in First World War Britain (1994: 56). Mann
(2013), like SiniSa MaleSevic (2010) and Randall Collins (2013), argues that as
war became ever more largerscale and more deadly, what kept soldiers ghting
was not nationalist sentiment but a series of organizational innovations which
maintained morale and selfrdiscipline. These included drilling, the offensive
bayonet charge, and the deployment of soldiers into small units which funcr
tioned as quasirkinship solidarities. These scholars maintain that studies of
soldiers during the First and Second World Wars demonstrate that what
sustained soldiers was loyalty to comrades rather than to the nationalist
ideology of politicians, which was often viewed with contempt.
These criticisms have at rst sight some plausibility. But the critique is
much narrower than it seems since it focuses only on the alleged irrelevance of
 Warfare, Memoriolization, and Nations 71

nationalist sentiment in motivating the endurance of troops. It thus fails to

acknowledge the broader role that nationalist ideology plays in making warfare
possible, in (to appropriate Iohn Breuillys concepts) the legitimation, mobile
ization, and coordination of the war effort (Breuilly 1993: 381790).
Sacrice to the nation is rarely unconditional. In the absence of good
leadership, clear objectives, effective organization, and a possibility of success,
few will be prepared to risk death for this or any other primary unit of loyalty.
Almost all wars in the modern age have to be legitimized as in the interest of
the nation. As Marvin and Ingle argue, politicians in modern states almost
invariably justify a war both to their domestic population and to the inter
national community as one of defence against a dire threat to the nations
existence (1999: 78782). Even irredentist wars can be so justied as defending
the interests of ethnic kindred. A direct danger to the national territory will
engage more support than a farroff foreign adventure when costs mount up.
Secondly, populations have to be mobilized for a war effort, and this includes
the use of older ethnic werthey' stereotypes in propaganda that inspire a will
to ght and sacrice selfrinterest for the collective good. Thirdly, images of the
nation as a super family, including all elements of the nation (labour and
capital, old and young, men and women), are used to inculcate social wordy
imztion and cooperation. In twentiethrcentury wars the increasing interr
dependence of society makes crucial a congruence of interests between
home and ghting fronts.
Although important, small group solidarities could be never be a sufcient
motivating force over an entire war, especially when such units were often
disrupted. Omer Bartov demonstrates that German armies on the Eastern
Front between 1941 and 1945 maintained cohesion in spite of huge casualties
that continuously destabilized smallrscale units and eliminated their leaders
(NCOs and ofcers). The Wehrmacht was a highly motivated nationalist
institution (Bartov 2001: Ch. 1). He argues that Nazi ideology played a key
role in sustaining morale and the brutality of a war of annihilation, and this
support was sought in the form of religious and Nazi literature by the soldiers
themselves as the situation became desperate. The ideological content fed off
older historical ethnorracial stereotypes and invoked parallels with the Thirty
Years War to portray the conict as existential and a form of religious crusade
(Bartov 2001: 3, 88793; see also King 2013: 8678).
Anthony King (2013: 7475) observes that while primary groups might be
essential for combat performance, these bonds could as easily become a basis
of opposition to military organizational goals (leading possibly to mutinies).
What is also needed is an overarching commitment to the political goals of the
mission. This was the case in the First World War, often cited as demonstrate
ing the motivating force of the comradeship of the trenches rather than of
nationalist ideology. A recent study of the diaries and reading habits of British
and German soldiers across all classes concludes that the concept of national
72 Nutiunalism and Wm

sacrice and a belief in the justice of the war remained resonant for most
soldiers, in motivating enlistment and encouraging endurance amidst great
suffering. Indeed, the survivors were motivated by such ideologies to ght on
out of a duty to the fallen. This was compatible with a detestation of ofcial
jingoism (Watson and Porter 2010). The disillusionment portrayed in the later
publication of soldiers' novels and autobiographies was primarily a product of
postwar disappointments, when the war was regarded as the source of all the
subsequent ills (Watson 2007).
For French troops ghting to defend and liberate their homeland, the duty
to ght was selfrevident (Kramer 2007: 238). When sections of the French
army mutinied in 1917, alienated by a disastrous policy of offensives, the
problem was resolved not though harsh discipline but by a renegotiation of
authority through which military tactics were changed, and by a reafrmation
of the nationalist ideal of the soldierrcitizen that justied the change (Smith
1997: 15579). This is not to deny the importance of male smallrunit solidar
rities, but it is a mistake to view them as in zerorsum relationship to national
loyalties that invested death with a broader meaning.
Finally, critics overlook the key role of the homeland population in Sustainr
ing war. Mann rightly points to the role of masculinist values. The duty of
young males to protect the motherland (and womenandchildren, as femi sts
put it) is a recurring motif in nationalist wars. What is striking is the fortitude
not only of soldiers but of peoples faced with starvation or bombing when the
homeland is under threat. Wars may end not just through military defeat but
also when they lose legitimacy at home, as in the case of First World War
Germany and Russia. In the latter case, Russian troops in spite of poor
supplies and huge losses maintained a ghting spirit up to 1917, requesting
more supplies from the provisional government. Resistance, however, collapsed
after the Bolshevik Revolution (Kramer 2007: 240).

MYTH CONSTRUCTION, IDENTITY, AND POLITICS

Myths and rituals then are important in giving direction and mobilizing
populations in crisis. But what of the production and selection of the myths
themselves? There is generally a discrepancy between the experiences and the
myths of warfare. To generate a charisma, revolutionaries have occasionally
selconsciously staged rebellions that supposedly rerenact archetypes of
redemptive sacrice, as in the case of Irish revolutionaries in 1916. Myth
creation is also a recurring process, and there can be a considerable time gap
between the end of a war and the crystallization of a hegemonic narrative, in
which episodes of cowardice, internal conicts, and collaboration are forgotr
ten or reinterpreted. Arguably, then, the myths of wars in the long term
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 73

are more signicant for national identity creation than the experiences
themselves. In modern China the phrase a Century of National Humiliation
(at Chinas subjection to foreign powers) that initiated a discourse embraced
by Kuomintang and Communists alike was popularized only in 1915,
seventyrve years after the originating event of 1840, the Opium War
(Callahan 2004: 4950).
Who develops and selects the myths and memories of war and why? Under
what circumstances are populations mobilized for collective action and with
what effects?
Jay Winter (2006: 58) identies a wave of public myth construction in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when in France (after the defeat
of 1871), Germany, and Italy new political regimes sought a historical ground
ing in a glorious past, and when South American republics celebrated centenr
aries of independence. Eric Hobsbawm (1983) uses the term the invention of
tradition to portray such events. In France Maurice Agulhon (1981) dubbed
as statuermania the mass construction of Mariannes, which symbolized the
Roman republican origins of the French Third Republic. For this reason, many
scholars adopt a constructivist position regarding national myths, taking their
cue from Ernest Renan, for whom national identity was a product of forgetting
as well as remembering. According to them, the relative novelty of public
commemoration indicates that such rituals represent not continuity but rather
a break with the past, and that they are a phenomenon of mass democratic
politics. Memory, they rightly claim, is not an objective datum but a selective
process, remembrance, and each act of recalling is shaped by the context in
which it occurs (see Winter and Sivan 1999). Duncan Bell rejects the concept
of collective memory (transmitted across the generations) as an explanation of
the power of national identities, for collectivities, unlike individuals, cannot
remember. The construction and transmission of ideas and sentiments about
a purported past nation have to be explained by specic mechanisms (Bell
2006: 73). The past has no intrinsic hold on populations; rather, memory' is
constructed and reconstructed by specic agents engaged in social interaction.
From this perspective warfare may supply raw material and experiences, but
the question that needs to be asked is who controls what is recorded and
celebrated. John Gillis argues thus that what was publicly memorialized has
been selected by those with power, which reected the interests of the ofcial
elites, of men rather than women, and of dominant rather than minority
groups (Gillis 1994: Introduction). Others have claimed that military interests
in alliance with state establishments lie behind such commemoration: war
must be gloried to camouage the horric realities so that the state will
forever have a ready supply of young male recruits (see, for example, Danilova
2015: 5879).
Although many myths have political origins, instrumental interpretations
of national myths as elite inventions fail to recognize the spontaneity and
74 Nutiunalism and Wm

plurality of myth production, their different purposes, and they also neglect
the question of popular resonance. The initiative in commemorating military
sacrice in national terms was often taken from below by a variety of social
groups. The postrNapoleonic British monarchical state, dominated by an
aristocratic oligarchy and suspicious of popular mobilization, did little to
commemorate national heroes. The sponsorship of the Nelson cult came
from below by middlerclass patriots in burgeoning regional cities and was
itself an expression of a developing British nationalism. In Glasgow, Edinburgh,
and elsewhere, many port cities, dependent on the navys control of the
seas, competed to construct monuments to Nelson (MacKenzie 2005).
Exrservicemens organizations, such as Napoleon's veterans, have been to
the fore in many countries in promoting and defending ceremonies and
monuments honouring the dead (Hazareesingh 2004: Ch. 9).
Ofcial elites have often sought to coropt war memories and transform and
institutionalize them in state schools, public ceremonies, and museums. Under
Wilhelm I and II militarist nationalist festivals such as Sedan Day were
instituted and gargantuan monuments built, commemorating both ancient
and more recent battles in an attempt to extol a Prussianr, Junkerr, and
Lutheranrdominated state. But the federal character of the state allowed
alternative views of the German past based on class, region, religion, and
gender (Koshar 1998: 2073). As Zimmer (2003b: 4677) argues, Sedan Day
celebrations were conducted according to the historical tastes and traditions of
local communities and instigated a contestation about German nationhood.
Although I have spoken about the national appropriation of religious
symbols, there were limits to this. While national rituals gradually assumed
a greater public prominence, they never supplanted religious rites in the
private sphere, and most nationalists accommodated ecclesiastical institutions
at the state level. As in the case of national humiliation days in England, in
many countries religious and national sentiments were long intertwined, and
this persisted well into the modern period. Where nationalists attempted to
displace religion, they could provoke civil war. In France traditionalist revolts
led by the clergy erupted in the Vende'e against the early republican regime,
even as foreign armies were on French soil (Gildea 1994: 26731), The battle
between secular nationalists and Catholics in France continued throughout
the nineteenth century, and even the dead were enlisted in this cultural war.
Christian competed with republican representations of the dead (in the form
of angelic vs neoclassical gures) in cemeteries (Prost 1996).
What is the effect of such divisions and exclusions? Such contentions may
enhance rather than undermine a sense of nationality. France was an extreme
case of the split between secular nationalism and religion, and even here this
was a war of minorities, whereas large masses of the population found no
problem in combining Catholic and republican ideals. In practice, wars
generally deepened an attachment of individuals to religion in the face of
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 75

death and calamity, and in time of war churches have traditionally mobilized
in defence of the nation. In France the cult of loan of Arc strengthened
amongst republicans and Catholic traditionalists after the humiliation of
France in 1871 at the hands of the (Protestant) Prussians, and during the
First World War both sides invoked loan in the defence of French soil. In this
period there was a profound nationalrreligious revival in which the secular
republic, separated from the Catholic Church since 1905, buried its dead
under a symbol (the cross) that was prohibited on all other public monuments
(Becker 1998: 117).
Such recurring debates about the nationiabout the meaning of particular
wars or heroes and the contribution of specic groups and territories to the
national projectill out a sense of the past and take on the character of a
family quarrel to which only insiders have access. The fact that different
groups struggled to claim a privileged place in the national story only
reinforces the prestige of the nation, and the struggle offers options
to societies that may be of use when established notions are in crisis
(Hutchinson 2005: 1035).
These debates then are never simply about power but about alternative
conceptions of the nation. Political interpretations insufciently recognize the
more fundamental issues of meaning at stake in the turn to history, the
importance of religious institutions, and the plurality of actors involved in
mythrmaking. First, war myths could be of different kinds, whether of origins,
temporal and spatial, of a golden age to inspire pride and emulation, of
degeneration and revival. They were often evoked to explain contingency,
provide consolation, express hope, and offer direction at times of crisis. The
appeal to the past was made through the idiom of collective memory so as
to create a sense of continuity with an immemorial community that had
survived countless challenges.
Second, although there was a general shift from more religious to secular
historicist frameworks, religious institutions were also active in memory
politics, capable of challenging secular nationalists and explaining military
disasters through the framework of divine justice and humiliation. This was
not conned to the ProtestantrCovenantal tradition. Defeat in the Francor
Prussian War of 187071 was claimed by the French Catholic Church as a
judgement upon the nation for its secular pretensions (Becker 1998: Ch. 3).
Third, myths are created by all participants as an attempt to make sense of
major crises, for example the anguish of mass death. While military establishr
ments, concerned to valorize the status of their professional vocation and
secure a ow of recruits, may encourage the public glorication of war, they
have been only one of many participants in the politics of memory. As we have
seen, in the First World War soldiers were active in constructing myths of the
comradeships of the trenches and of national sacrice in the face of extreme
suffering: they and their families later redeemed the war as the war to end all
76 Nutiunalism and Wm

wars (Mosse 1990: 374). Although the British prime minister Lloyd George
proposed the Cenotaph after the war, it was popular pressure that made it
permanent, with the government taken aback by the huge response to the
ceremonies. In the week following its unveiling in 1920, over one million
people visited it and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Edkins 2003: 60771).
Local communities were to the fore in remembrance: some 39,000 monuments
were built in interwar France, with scarcely a township without one (Zimmer
2003b14374).
This question of personal suffering raises questions about how far comr
memorative rituals and myths should be viewed as national. They might
simply express a personal mourning that was delayed or displaced and for
which the only available expression was public. During the First World War
there was a breach of normal mourning rituals when families lacked the bodies
of the military dead who were buried where they fell (Capdevila and Voldman
2006: Ch. 5). We nd in Britain and also in France families pitted against the
nation state after the war, when requesting the return of bodies from military
cemeteries in France. Remembrance might mean many different things. Even
when memorials and rituals were public, when placed in village squares, was
the loss perceived to be to the national or the local community? Is there often
not a contradiction between the sense of loss and the commemoration of the
nation, particularly if there is doubt about the worth of the war? Remembrance
was compatible with the existence of strong pacist sentiments in Britain and
France during the 1920s and 1930s.
This indicates the complexity of interpreting public commemorations. In
spite of this, one can argue that the willingness of large numbers of people to
come together to mourn and support permanent monuments to the war dead
in the very centre of the capital inevitably implied that the suffering was
national rather than simply individual or sectional. This was reinforced by
intense public debates in Parliament and elsewhere about how and where the
dead were to be buried. Moreover, the fact that in a period of mass death the
state alone could develop techniques for nding, identifying, and organizing
the disposal of the dead, and was best suited to maintain cemeteries and
coordinate ceremonies, tended to result in a gradual appropriation of the
dead for the nation state. Participating in recurring collective rituals over
time tended to give an overarching meaning to otherwise random deaths, recall
the dead to life, and restore agency to those who otherwise feel as victims.

OLD AND NEW MYTHS

The above discussion could support a modernist interpretation of national

myths as a response to novel circumstances, whether they are means to
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 77

legitimize or dene new political establishments or respond to the pain of

mass death. Koselleck maintained that war memorialization was an approprir
ation of the dead for the purposes of the living. He also tied the political and
expressive power of First World War memories to the lifespan of its survivors,
arguing the political cult was now (lying, although the memorials might be
preserved for historical reasons (Koselleck 2002: 32475). This, however, is not
the whole story. Once instituted, some commemorations remain prereminent
long after the memory of the events themselves has become history. The
remembrance ceremonies, instituted after the First World War, remain central
to the commemoration of the dead in many participant countries nearly a
century later, in spite of being followed by several largerscale wars. Why do
some myths emerge as prereminent and persist? And why do apparently
supplanted myths revive7
One answer is that it is the enormity of the experiences themselves associr
ated with events such as the First World War that creates a rupture with
existing understandings of the world. This renders old forms of memorializar
tion irrelevant and requires the emergence of new repertoires. This, of course,
does not explain their persistence. In defence of Koselleck, one might reply
that survivors may last quite some time. Ian Assmann (2008) distinguishes
between communicative and cultural memory. The former refers to a social
group (like First World War survivors) dened by unstructured common
memories of personal interaction maintained through oral communication,
and this can have a time span of eighty to a hundred years. Communicative is
differentiated from cultural memory, which is formalized in texts, rites, images,
and buildings, and designed to recall the event and stabilize a societys self
image. Although a useful distinction, this seems too static, for relatively early on
the First World War took on the quality of a framing myth, and, as we shall
see, older textual myths could take on dynamic properties as agents of change.
The evocation of the First World War offered an interpretation for subser
quent events in Britain and France, while retaining a powerful emotional
charge. Jay Winter and Alain Prost (2005: Ch. 8) describe how the process
of framing developed soon after the event itself and involved multifarious
actors and artefacts, including the memoirs of war politicians, accounts of
journalists, the published letters and diaries of soldiers, school textbooks,
tourist and pilgrimage literatures of the war zones, and the works of the
war poets. This was followed by the publications of successive generations of
historians. In the 1920s and 1930s memorialization took on contested meanr
ings in different countries. In Britain and France it contributed to a mood of
pacism, and the popular mood was never again, whereas in Germany it was
a source of division between left and right, with the latter, in viewing defeat
through the prism of betrayal and an unjust treaty, wishing military revenge.
The meaning (regularly contested) has also evolved in the light of subser
quent eventsiin its perceived consequences in the Bolshevik Revolution, the
78 Nutiunalism and Wm

Versailles Treaty, the rise of mass democracy, the Great Depression, the rise of
Fascism, and the outbreak of the Second World War. Used by poets, novelists,
composers, and lmrmakers as a backdrop, it became lodged in popular and
high culture as the beginning of a new master narrative, one reinforced by later
conicts. It could be seen as a central reference point in European modernity
not just for the enormous loss of life, but because it supposedly marked the
collapse of an optimistic liberal civilization. Others might see it as the rst of
the globalrindustrial wars and having import for the present, if we include the
Cold War, which at various times threatened to become hot'. It has been
signicant that the remembrance ceremonies of the First World War in several
participating countries (in Britain, France, and Australia) became an umbrella
for mourning the dead of all subsequent wars.
If myths once created take on a life of their own, becoming part of a
(multiple) meaning repertoire which is used to interpret future events, it is
also the case that new myths often overlay rather than replace older reperr
toires. Even the First World War was understood through older national
idioms, for example, the Christian symbolism in memorials used to mourn
the dead and the threnodies for a vanished national past, depicted in literary
images of an innocent prerwar rural England. In other cases, we nd older
repertoires resurface to appropriate the later.
In modern Ireland, Gaelic nationalists, hoping to create an independent,
secular, republican, Irishrspeaking nation, selfrconsciously staged in Easter
1916 a revolt against the British state that they knew almost certainly would
fail and lead to their execution. They presented themselves as heirs to an
anticlerical revolutionary tradition (in a continuum with the revolt of the
United Irishmen in 1798, Young Ireland in 1848, and the Fenians in 1867).
Several leaders presented this in mythic terms as a blood sacrice to save the
nation in the hope it would excite a general national insurrection. Their
execution by the British set off a chain of events that sparked a successful
war of independence, and the Easter Rising became the founding myth of the
new state. However, the dreams of a secular Irishrspeaking republic were only
partially achieved. In part this was because the secular Irishrspeaking ideals
belonged to a relatively small nationalist social stratum of educated middle
class and lowerrmiddlerclass youth. More fundamentally, such was the power
of older Catholic tradition that the key authors of the rising were gripped by its
assumptions when presenting themselves in poetry as a fusion of Christ and
Cuchulain (a mythic pagan hero) who would lead to their nations resurrecr
tion. During the war of independence, the rebels evoked traditional Catholic
images of Ireland as a martyred nation. Crucial to the success of the revolur
tionary campaign was the effective if unofcial support of the Catholic
Church. Moreover, as the hopes (economic, cultural, as well as territorial)
were only partly met after independence, there was increasing identication of
national identity in religious terms (see Hutchinson 2005: 7172).
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 79

In short, myths and rituals are signicant because they address not just the
needs of the present but also the concerns of future, as well as making
connections with the past. The interaction with established myth structures
is complex and at times unpredictable. The emergence of new mythrsymbol
structures indicates an insufciency of established myths, at least for some
sections of the community, but they can also lack a broader resonance. But
why, then, the persistence of ancient myths? One reason is that the stories they
articulate continue to throw light on present predicaments. They present their
societies with a repertoire of heroes and villains as well as moral norms. They
have been embedded by a diverse set of institutions and actors, religious,
artistic, historical, and political, and over time through recurring reformulations
acquired multiple meanings. Those myths that accumulate plural meanings
are more likely to survive.
Even so, it might be argued that while many ancient memories of war may
persist as reference points, they remain largely inactive until appropriated by
political agents to serve current needs. As well as reconstructing such meme
ories, nationalists might also resurrect largely forgotten or relatively marginal
episodes in the past such as the Masada for Jews (Zerubavel 1994).
Does this not support an invention of tradition' perspective? Was not
Zionism successful only because the experience of the Holocaust indicated
to Jews that their survival in an uncertain world required the establishment of
a state of their own? In this context, the Masada myth emerged because it
provided such a martial state, embattled by enemies, with a legitimizing
forbear. One reason for the revival of ancient war myths is the unpredictability
of the modern world. As I argued in Chapter 1, many peoples and states have
been periodically subject to threats of invasion, or territorial contractions or
expansions, that open up questions about their fundamental values and lead
them to consider the whole of their heritage. More signicant, however, than
the Masada for the founding and legitimation of Israel was the story of Exodus
and messianic ideas ofthe destined ingathering oerws in the Promised Land.
Given the increasing persecutions of Iews in the gentile world in both Eastern
and Western Europe during the later nineteenth century, an existential threat
from the Nazis in Germany, and successive wars of survival, it is easy to see
how nationalist Iews would draw inspiration from biblical myths, albeit
casting them in secular forms.
One reason for the revival and redevelopment of older cultural repertoires is
that populations are periodically faced with similar geopolitical challenges to
their physical and symbolic survival. Repeated periods of warfare with neighr
bouring powers, particularly for frontier populations (Germans, Poles) settled
across major trade routes or in shatter zones between contesting empires,
create languages of sacrice to inspire successive generations of combatants.
We have noted the recurring memories of the Thirty Years War for German
nationalists and periodic fears of encirclement and dismemberment by
80 Nutiunalism and Wm

surrounding powers. The English, as an island people who have periodically

been threatened with invasion, have nurtured myths of a continuum of naval
challenges and heroes from Drake to Nelson. A further example is the revival
as a national symbol from relative obscurity of loan of Arc in nineteenth
century France, heroine of the Hundred Years War against the English. There
was, however, nothing arbitrary in this selection of a heroine from Frances
medieval golden age (when it was a prereminent force in European Christian
ity, culture, and politics) as a reference point for the French. loan became
increasingly potent as an inspirational symbol in a century that saw France
occupied wholly or in part by foreign powers several times, in 1814, in 1870
(with the loss of Alsace and Lorraine), and in the First and Second World
Wars. The cult of loan enabled different French traditions to link past and
present in order to articulate hopes for the future.
This is an illustration not ofthe arbitrariness ofmemory' but rather ofthe
capacity of memory, once formed, to take on a life of its own. Myths
generated out of experiences signicant for the history of a population become
part of a memory repertoire that can be accessed at times of crisis and guide
collective action. Without such a stock of memories, a society lacks the means
by which to renew itself.

DENATlONALlZlNG WARS?

So far the discussion has given the impression that all warsidefeats or
victoriesiresult in an intensication of national identities, even if they may
threaten the existence of states. This is clearly not so. A selective amnesia is
evident in many countries which repress memories of discreditable military
episodes in their pastifor example, in Britain the imperial Opium Wars with
China. Great victories, where they seem to threaten the national character of
the state, can lead to periods of reection at least among the educated elite.
The success of Edward Gibbonss Decline and Full during the eighteenth
century was a gauge of forebodings of Whig thinkers such as Edward Burke
about the threat to parliamentary institutions and political virtue from the
expansion of empire and the corruptions of great colonial wealth. Although
one might expect the victory of Indian armies over Pakistan since independr
ence to be commemorated as a powerful founding myth of the new state, it has
been downplayed because it could be destabilizing for a country marked by
periodic HindurMuslim communal violence.
However, defeat is the more obvious threat to the nation. There are many
different types of defeat (see Horne 2008), some of which I have argued
may galvanize popular energies around the nation. Temporary defeat (or
the appearance thereof) before eventual victory may inspire a national
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 81

reorganization. Defeat followed by eventual victory has offered material for

subsequent mythologization. In Tolstoys Way and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov, on
Napoleons capture of Moscow, resolved to stay in the city and assassinate
him, thus exemplifying the Russian will to victory (Home 2008: 12). Home
claims that the most nationally demoralizing defeats are denitive and total,
the distinction being that the latter involve the victor restructuring the instir
tutions of the vanquished. Some of these issues will be taken up in Chapter 4.
However, even in the case of nations which have been comprehensively
defeated, there is not necessarily a repudiation of the nation (as opposed to
the nation state). Much depends on the preexisting conception of the nation.
Anthony Smith (1981a) argues that defeat is more threatening to the
collective identities of populations who identify national honour with the
greatness of the state than to peoples who dene their national identity in
relation to a moral (often religious) mission. In the case of the former, the
sense of nationality is narrowly based (at least initially) on an ofcial class,
whereas, in the latter, the identity is more embedded in the community. Those
identifying with a religious mission are more capable of surviving defeat, able
to reinterpret it as a divine message to return to authentic ethnorreligious
traditions. Many small nations claim a moral mission to humanity, and their
answer to disaster is an attempt at moral regeneration, believing that defeat is
just a test of their willingness to endure or a sign of moral imperfections to be
overcome. But even in the case of great nations, more vulnerable to collapse
because they identify their status with power, populations construct myths by
which to explain away defeat. As we noted, denitive defeat is particularly
problematic in an era of nationalism, where this must involve a judgement on
the character of the people themselves rather than just the failings of a
particular regime (Home 2008: 16). One might add that, in the era of nation
alism, territory was not simply real estate but homeland. Loss of territory, thus,
was not merely a physical but a spiritual loss. Defeat can result, therefore, in
prolonged internal reection. Even so, there can be a denial of the legitimacy
of defeat, as a ght against overwhelming odds (Schivelbusch 2004: Introduce
tion). Scapegoats can still include regime corruption, but there is as well a
search for enemies within (especially pariah ethnic minorities). At its worst
this can lead to ethnic cleansing or genocide, in the case of the Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire and the Iews in Germany.
National cohesion is eroded when the war not only is disastrous but appears
to threaten the core values of the nation as conveyed in older myths, or where
it is socially polarizing. The obvious case is that of post71945 Germans,
disabled not just by the scale of their countrys defeat in the Second World
War, but also by an awareness that, through their complicity in the Holocaust, they
had betrayed their countrys heritage as a leading centre of European Christian
and Enlightenment values. In much of the contempomry period, Germans
have sought to come to terms with what Charles Maier dubbed the unmasterable
82 Nutiunalism and Wm

past, seeking redemption in rejecting an explicit nationalism in favour of a

European identity (Giesen 2004; Maier 1986).
A second example is France after its defeat in 187071, which was particularly
demoralizing for several reasons. Whereas in 1815 France had been brought
down by a European coalition, its defeat by a single nation, Germany, threatened
its status as the preeminent European power. It also exploded several nationalist
mythsithe splendour of the First Empire was subverted by the routing of
Napoleon III, and the legend of the nation in amis of 1793 was tarnished by
the failure of Gambettas summons of a leve en masse (Varley 2008: 76). This did
not prevent the establishment ofthe Third Republic and programmes of military
and educational reconstruction, but the period 187171914 was also one of social
and political polarizations and a sense of vulnerability.
As Home suggests, civil wars can create longrterm cleavages in national
societies, even where one side appears to achieve a denitive victory. Examples
are the American Civil War, in which the North attempted a total defeat of the
South through Reconstruction, and the Spanish Civil War, which ended with
a Francoist regime attempting an extirpation of its enemies on the left.
Reconstruction failed, and reintegration of the South was partially achieved
through a myth that depicted the conict as a tragic story of brothers whose
Americanness was demonstrated by their willingness to die for the constitur
tion over whose meaning they divided (Grant 2004). American renewed unity
was demonstrated in the willingness of Northerners and Southerner to join in
common sacrice in the SpanishrAmerican and First World Wars. In contrast,
the Spanish civil wars have remained unresolved. Here we see a problem in the
idea of denitive victory, since after the Second World War both Francos
Spain and Salazars Portugal had a pariah status in large parts of Europe,
giving hope to the left and the Spanish exiles. The triumph of democratic
forces after the death of Franco was accompanied by a pact of mutual amnesia
to forestall the revival of conllict between embittered Francoists and the
triumphant left, indicating an inability to resolve deeprseated divisions
about the nature of Spain (Aguilar 1999). Insecurity also bedevilled the
Weimar Republic, which emerged amidst a near civil conict between right
and left, deeply divided about the meaning of the war. This lack of consensus
was exemplied in the failure to agree on common national memorials to the
military dead, in contrast to Britain and France.

PACIFIC AND MARTIAL NATIONS

To what extent is national cohesion tied to powerful myths of war? Is it

possible to nd stable nations and nation states that possess pacic sources
of identity? Is the whole cult of war a largely European phenomenon?
 Warfare, Memoriulization, and Nations 83

Miguel Centeno questions the relevance of the European martial experience

to the countries of Latin America. Most have a bellicose founding myth, born
out of independence struggles in the early nineteenth century against Spain.
But Centeno maintains, when compared with Europe, there were few interr
state conicts with mass armies, apart from a few exceptions (e.g. the wars of
Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru). Most wars have been smallrscale and intrastate
against the indigenous peoples. Examining the military publications of Latin
American states, he nds little concern with defending borders against neighr
bours, and warrrelated themes are not prominent in national days, monur
ments and street names, and postage stamps (Centeno 2002: Ch. 4). In
contradiction, Matthias vom Hau (2013) argues that an examination of school
textbooks and school ceremonies provides a better indicator of attitudes rather
than silent monuments. In twentiethrcentury Mexico, Argentina, and Peru
these demonstrate the salience of commemorations of signicant ci 1 and
international wars. However, even if vom Haus analysis qualies rather than
refutes that of Centeno, the latters arguments are doubleredged, since one of
his ndings is the lack ofnational solidarity in Latin America compared to Europe.
As I stated earlier, there has to be a prior sense of distinctiveness before a
war experience can be interpreted in national terms. This means that war
myths are but one part of the national experience that includes religious,
scientic, artistic, and political achievements. National days are normally
separate from occasions remembering the fallen'. National days such as
4 Iuly in the USA or 26 January in Australia (celebrating the arrival of the
British First Fleet settling the continent) are days of popular festivity rather
than of moral reection. In many states, the establishment of a constitution,
national independence, or liberation is the focus (Elgenius 2011: 100), whereas
in Spain, Ireland, and Portugal the day has a religious centre, based around the
Virgin Mary or a saint like St Patrick. Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) argues that
most national days have religious origins.
So far from glorifying war, populations may differentiate themselves from
greatrpower neighbours, claiming to be moral exemplars and missionaries of
peace. The recent Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper attempted to
reconstruct Canada as a military nation, but Canadians, in dening thenr
selves against their neighbouring American superpower, have traditionally
asserted an identity in advancing social and economic progress in the
underdeveloped world. The Swiss have taken pride in their states neutralism
and in hosting organizations such as the Red Cross, and the Norwegian state,
home of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been active as a peace mediator in
conict situations.
Does this mean that we can nd cohesive nations without signicant
martial myths? To emphasize a pacic mission may be to acknowledge
militarism as the norm in the international system of states. There are
countries such as Switzerland and Sweden that have not participated in
84 Nutiunalism and Wm

interstate wars in the modern period which therefore lack an ofcial cult of
the dead. However, the founding myth of Switzerland is that of confederr
ation forged in war against the Habsburgs led by legendary heroes such as
William Tell and the oath takers of Rutli. During the Middle Ages this myth
ofa golden age contributed to a sense ofthe Swiss as a chosen people, and in
the modern period it created a framework through which competing conr
ceptions of Swiss identity were articulated at critical points (Zimmer 2002:
32376). Nationalists asserted Switzerlands distinctiveness as a republic
uniting Italian, French, and German linguistic cultures in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, in responding to the military rivalry of French and
German nationalist neighbours which appeared to threaten Swiss cohesion
and independence. Here it would seem that provided that an already
strong sense of national identity exists, there is little need for a cult of the
fallen soldier.
The cases ofthe USA and Australia are instructive. The USA was born in a
successful colonial war against the British and united by a subsequent
constitution that established a federation of states. The Revolutionary War,
however, was fought as a coalition of states, and the decision to establish a
federal government was contentious. Many Americans worried the new state
lacked a sufciently strong national identity for which citizens were prepared
to die. SusanrMary Grant argues it was ironically the Civil War of the 1860s
(which she views as a war oftwo nationalisms) that resolved these doubts by
demonstrating the willingness of millions to sacrice for their conception of
the constitution (Grant 1998; 2004). In similar terms, after independence
was voluntarily granted to Australia by the British in 1901, many Australians
agonized over whether a population that had not won its freedom in blood
could be considered a nation. For Australians the death and wounding
of over 26,000 young Australians during the Gallipoli campaign in 1917
(defending the British Empire) marked the birth of the nation, with the event
enshrined in the ANZAC memorial in Canberra and commemorated each
year on 25 April.
These comments are exploratory and certainly not conclusive. The analysis
suggests that a recent war experience is less signicant than the existence of
myths of war, myths that have been woven into social and political experience,
and that are reinforced by recurring geopolitical threats. Moreover, where
myth memories are so embedded, societies can persist without an ofcial cult
of the fallen, especially if they have strong sense of common identity, supplied,
for example, by a sense of religious distinctiveness. However, this may not be
true for new nation states that lack a strong sense of the collective. Michael
Howard has suggested that without a war of independence such states lack an
essential rite of passage. A further issue to be explored is the relevance of this
analysis for populations outside the IudaeorChristian religion. The examples
in this chapter are drawn largely from European countries that have been
 Warfare, Memorializahon, and Nations 85

shaped by largerscale secularization. To what extent can a commemorative

cult of the dead take on similar signicance in societies where noanhristian
religions remain signicant? There are also issues about the markedly
different character of contemporary wars. These issues will be taken up in
succeeding chapters.
 Warfare, Imperial Collapse,
and the Mass Creation of Nation States

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the role of warfare (in conjunction with nationalism) in
a seismic shiftifrom a world historically dominated by empires to one of
nation states. If in Western Europe the contours of nation states had been
hammered out on the anvil of interstate war over centuries, the majority of
the worlds nation states came into being through a different route in the
twentieth century, suddenly and in successive waves, via imperial dissolution
in total war or geopolitical exhaustion. We will explore here the causes of
imperial collapse, and the consequences of sudden dissolution on nationrstate
development and on the subsequent new international order.
It is customary to think of nationalism as the dominant political project
of the nineteenth century. Yet up to 1914 landrbased empires still ruled
over most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, the Middle East, and
East Asia, just as the overseas empires of the European nation states
commanded South Asia and Africa (Rieber 2014). European empires then
controlled 84 per cent of the worlds land mass and continued to expand
thereafter.
This largely European imperial world order disintegrated in three waves of
war'. At the end of the First World War the disintegration of historic Eurasian
land empiresiottoman, Habsburg, and Romanov ushered in nine nation
states or national confederations in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe,
and, to regulate the new order, the League of Nations (1920). After the Second
World War three dozen new states formed between 1945 and 1960, presided
over by the United Nations (1945), when the European overseas empires
dissolved, rst in Asia and the Middle East, and then in Africa. A third wave
was triggered by the collapse of the USSR, when fteen new states emerged in
Eastern and Central Europe and in Central Asia. The members of the inter
state order over the modern period increased from twentyrthree in 1816 to
181 by 1995 (Sarkees et a1. 2003: 64).
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 87

The great transition, such as it was, was not linear. An early wave had
occurred in the Americas before the era of modern nationalism. The struggle
for global dominance between Britain and France provided the setting for the
revolt of the thirteen colonies which formed the USA in 1776, and Napoleons
overthrow of the Spanish Bourbons in 1808 inspired Creole leaders in Spanish
America to rebel. Yet the Romanov Empire continued to expand throughout
the nineteenth century, as did the overseas empires of nation statesiBritain,
France, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Belgium, and Japan. Moreover,
although some empires collapsed in the twentieth century, others arose or
reremerged on new lines. The disintegration of the Romanov Empire after
1917 was largely reversed by the establishment of the Soviet Union. In the
1930s Hitler planned to construct a German Mittelemopa, just as Japan
continued its drive for an Asian Empire. The Soviet Union was solidied by
its victory over Germany in 1945 and gained a ring of puppet states in Eastern
and Central Europe. Although the European maritime empires dissolved in
the decades after 1945, scholars have spoken of a continuation of informal
empire' in which former colonial territories were subjected to global institur
tions dominated by the USA and its Western allies.
In analysing the struggle between the national and the imperial principles in
the modern period, I shall explore four main questions:
. How far were nationalist transformations in warfare responsible for
imperial breakdown in the twentieth century?
. When did imperial breakdown result in the creation of nation states
rather than the reformation of empire?
. What were the consequences for the new nation states and the interstate
system created under such conditions?
- Given the periodic attempts at redmperialization, can we say that the era
of empire is at an end?

As before, war is used as an umbrella term that includes not just military
conict but also war preparation. We shall nd that military factors alone can
never explain the collapse of empire or the rise of nation states. The term
empire is much contested, and has been applied to many different political
formations. Before the modern period the term (imperium) was a simply a
signier of sovereignty over multiple and diffuse political societies (Beissinger
2005: 2273). For our purposes, Dominic Lieven offers a minimalist denition
of empire as a polity with a clearly demarcated territory exercising sovereignty
over its subjects who are, to varying degrees, under its direct administrative
supervision (Lieven 2000: 9). Empire, however, may encompass not just
formal but informal processes. Iohn Darwin speaks of informal empire as
the highest form of imperialism' (Darwin 2008: 493). In his denition, empires
are systems of inuence or rule in which ethnic, cultural or ecological
88 Nutiunalism and Wm

boundaries were overlapped or ignored (ibid.: 491). In the modern world the
strongest systems of inuence may be economic. In principle, empires contrast
with modern nation states which in formal terms are politically independent,
culturally distinctive, and territorially bounded societies that have a unied
public culture and integrate their members through a common citizenship. In
reality, nation states themselves vary enormously (and in some cases assume
imperial characteristics). This, we shall see, makes the notion of a shift from a
world of empire to one of nation states problematic.
My focus shall be on three imperial forms. The rst comprises the historic
landrbased agrarian Romanov, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires, which over
centuries had absorbed a variety of territories, including previously independ
ent kingdoms. Since the seventeenth century they had fought periodic wars in
their contested borderlands, creating in the process shatterzones of ethnically
intermingled populations (Rieber 2014). These were patchworks of direct
and indirect rule, with some territories having representative institutions.
Although dissimilar in many respects, they were legitimated by dynastic and
religious principles, though over the course of the nineteenth century they
sought to accommodate in various ways to nationalist sentiments.
The second is the overseas empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Although dynastic and religious principles played some part in their leg my
ation, they were above all nationrstate empires. Unlike the rst, these were
maritime, relatively recent, and governed largely noanuropean and now
Chri an populations. Although European intervention in the Americas and
Asia began in the fteenth century and a political economy based on the
African slave trade crystallized in the eighteenth century, largerscale expanr
sion was propelled by the huge industrial and communications revolutions of
the nineteenth century (Setoanatson 1977: 261). In Africa proper the
scramble for empire began in the late nineteenth century. By the end of the
century even the Chinese Empire was threatened with partition by a concert of
European states and Japan, also beginning its drive for empire.
The USSR is different againia strange hybrid, dubbed an afrmative
action empire (Martin 2001), established by Communist revolutionaries on
boundaries of the Romanov Empire, minus Finland, and Baltic and Polish
territories. Formally, it was a federation of equal national republics committed
to a universalistic socialist commonwealth and the construction of a new
Soviet man, but it operated through the Russian culture and demos of the
former empire. In practice, the central institutions of the state (including the
army and security services) were dominated by Russians. After the Second
World War its power extended into Eastern and Central Europe, although the
Communist states founded there were nominally independent.
The combination of military and nationalist challenges to each of these
empires was different, reecting the characteristics of the polities in question
as well as the diverse contexts of time and place. However, there are certain
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 89

commonalities. Imperial stability was based on a combination of ideological

legitimation, and the conquest, coercion, and coroption of minority national
elites. Common strategies of control were indirect rule through collaborators
that included dividerandrrule strategies. These included a differentiation in
the military whereby certain ethnic groups or sections of the population were
selected as martial races' and also a demographic politics whereby colonizar
tion from the dominant ethnicity as well as other ethnicities of the empire was
used to control the indigenous population.
We shall examine how the nationalist military revolutions undermined
these behemoths.

GEOPOLITICAL POWER VS NAllONALlSl

IDEOLOGY

Whether nationalism has been a cause or product of imperial collapse is still a

matter of scholarly debate. On one pole, Randall Collins (1986; 1999: Ch. 3)
views nationalism and nation state formation as largely an effect of geopolitr
ical conict and imperial disintegration, which may be followed by attempts at
rerimperialization. On the other, Andreas Wimmer (Wimmer and Min 200 ;
Wimmer 2013) argues that nationalist ideology is a direct cause of imperial
dissolution, and nationalism has supplanted the imperial principle in the
modern world. In spite of their powerful insights, both insufciently emphm
size the destructive impact of nationalist military revolutions on authoritarian,
ethnically heterogeneous polities. We shall see there are other factors to be
considered, including economics and cosmopolitan political ideologies.
For Collins war is central to the legitimacy of states, and geopolitical
principles govern the ethnic absorption or fragmentation of states. States are
mobile geographical entities engaged in military competition with each other.
Other things being equal, those states with size and resource advantages over
their rivals will tend to expand territorially as do polities with georpositional or
marchland advantage. But with expansion, marchland states become interior
and overextended, suffering resource strain and threatened with fragmenta
tion because they generate multiple enemies on their frontiers. Moreover, the
cumulative processes of rival imperial expansion bring periodic simplication
with massive arms races and showdown wars that generate the highest levels
of ferocity.
Collins views ethnicity as a geopolitical construct. Geopolitical separation
creates ethnic somatypes (skin colour, hair, etc.) around which develop lair
guages, and geopolitical dominance gives meaning to somatic and linguistic
markers as signs of social superiority or inferiority (Collins 1999: 74). States
are based on dominant ethnicities but there are different types of state that
9U Nutiunalism and Wm

vary in their capacity to penetrate and assimilate their populations. The

layered tribute state of imperial conquest with its systems of indirect rule is
weakest in this regard, whereas the modern nation state is most penetrative,
and its capacity to impose the culture of the dominant group though its public
institutions, including education, produces either assimilation or minority
ethnic counter mobilization to achieve a separate state (Collins 1999: 8174).
Collins argues in Weberian terms that, historically, the legitimacy of the
state and its capacity to bind populations to the dominant group are related to
its external success in war when they are united in a common fate. When the
prestige of the state is high, above all when it is expanding, it is more able to
absorb minority etlmicities into a standard public culture. In geopolitically
weak or overextended states, the legitimacy of the dominant group or ethnicity
declines, and in a crisis such a state is threatened by administrative and scal
failure combined with intrarelite conict that, if sufciently intense, can lead
to state breakdown and fragmentation on ethnic lines (dubbed Balkanization).
He suggests a threerstage model of the rise of new national groups striving for
freedom as Balkanization proceeds: rst, a long, slow period (of centuries or
decades) in which the balances between states change; second, several years of
strain caused by war; and nally a phase of mobilization during which the
feelings of possibility created by a perceived crisis of the governing order
generate intense emotions and new symbols and conceptions of identity
(Collins 1999: 65; see also Collins 2012).
By contrast, Andreas Wimmer (2013; see also Hiers and Wimmer 2013)
argues that nationalist mobilization is the driving force in all cases of imperial
collapse, and that nationalist movements have been central to the reshaping of
the international system over the past two hundred years. The argument rests
in part on statistical evidence which Hiers and Wimmer combine with a more
nergrained historical analysis. With some exceptions, nationalist organiza
tions (dened as formal institutions claiming to represent the population, or a
segment thereof, of a territory) preceded and were responsible for both
imperial breakdown and the transition to national sovereignty (Wimmer
2013: 175, 9273). The strength of nationalist movements is directly correlated
with the transition from empire to nation state. Nationalist liberation wars
fought in other parts of the empire (the diffusion of the nationalism effect)
increased the probability of nationrstate creation, and the more territories
that succeed in seceding to me] nation states, the more likely that the
remaining territories would go the same route (Wimmer 2013: Ch. 3). Other
relevant factors are the weak international standing of the imperial centre,
the previous creation of nation states in the neighbourhood but outside
the imperial territories, and, nally, greatrpower wars fought in the empire
itself. This last factor, Hiers and Wimmer admit, is important particularly
for the Ottoman and Habsburg empires in the First World War, but it
is secondary.
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 91

In this analysis war and geopolitical forces increased the likelihood of the
transition to nationhood, notably in the case of the Habsburg and Ottoman
Empires, and geopolitical rivalry stands in the front of the causal chain leading
to the Soviet collapse and also contributed to the willingness of the British and
French to cede African independence (Hiers and Wimmer 2013: 249750). But
war or geopolitics by itself cannot create nationalism; at best it triggered,
accelerated, or delayed the triumph of a new principle of political legitimacy.
Wimmer is correct about the importance of an emerging nationalist ideolr
ogy in eroding imperial loyalties in subordinate groups, politically activating
them, and framing how a new order should be constructed. But this mobile
ization came quite late in the day, and Collins is right to identify a longer
process of imperial overextensions and geopolitical conicts as crucial to the
rise of nation states. The major wars fought in Europe and Asia between
imperial powers from 1815 to the midrtwentieth century, out of which
multiple nation states formed, were part of a struggle for control over imperial
borderlands that dates back to the sixteenth century. Failure in such struggles had
regularly provoked revolts against the imperial centre, particularly by the leaders
of populations with memories of independent statehood (Rieber 2014: 1).
Both Collins and Wimmer are at fault in failing to recognize sufciently
how geopolitics itself was transformed by nationalism during the nineteenth
century and how nationalism radicalized imperialrminority relations. Imperial
overstretch could result from power transformations in ones geopolitical
rivals arising from nationalist military revolutions. Nationalism enabled
existing states to mobilize much larger segments of their population in highly
motivated and technologically advanced mass conscription armies. German
unication, in particular, created a powerful new state in the middle of Europe,
changing the balance of power between nation states and empires. Awareness
of the power of the national model led empires to attempt to coropt natiorr
alism, leading to internal contradictions and conicts, including a legitimation
crisis at the centre between nationalists and empire loyalists. Collins and
Wimmer also fail to highlight that empires, so far from being assimilative,
were based on forms of ethnic subordination and forms of decentralization,
including divide and rule. This meant that their attempts to modernize from
above excited resistance from groups in the borderlands, seeking to preserve
traditional autonomies, who were also being radicalized by new nationalist
ideologies. Moreover, with the gradual nationalization of the interstate system,
the excitation of nationalist discontents in ones enemy became a weapon of
war. This came to a peak in periods oftotal war which, by putting a premium
on the deployment of ever greater sections of the population, exposed ethnic
fault lines. Finally, principles of nationalism came to transform not just the
waging of war but also the design of the peace settlements after war.
Both frameworks are also weak in explaining why imperial collapse led to
natiowstate formation, and why the successor states themselves were so
92 Nutiunalism and Wm

fragile, creating international insecurities. The dominant nation states were

themselves empires, and there were attempts at rerimperialization in each
period, some of which obtained a measure of success at the time. The character
of successor states varied greatly according to their imperial experience, the
degree to which they possessed an ethnohistorical heritage, and the geopolitical
and economic context that they faced. There is, then, a need to explore the
conditions under which empire may coexist or compete with national projects
and how the process of imperial formation and dissolution shaped the
consequent national projects. There are great variations in the strength and
success of nationalizing projects. A nal question is whether the weakness
of some of the successor nation states makes a return to empire in some form
a viable possibility.
I shall examine four issues in turn: the role of a national military revolution
in imperial collapse; the factors which result in the replacement of empires by
nation states rather than by reconstituted empires; the nature of nation states
that arise from imperial collapse; and nally the efcacy of imperial versus
national principles in a world increasingly dominated by scale, and in which
power hierarchies remain a constituent element. In considering them, we shall
recognize the different forms of empire in the modern world, and how they
operate visrarvis nationalism.

WAR, NAIIONALISM, AND THE IMPERIAL

DISSOLUTION

Fall of Dynastic Continental Empires

Several of these factors are relevant to the breakup of dynastic empires. First,
we shall see the superior military performance of countries like Britain, France,
and later Germany and Japan, when harnessing nationalism to introduce
universal conscription, general education, meritocracy, industrialization, and
speedy communications, combined with efcient administrations and the
growth of a middlerclass spirit of improvement. In the mid to late nineteenth
century there were technological advances such as the machine gun, an
enhanced artillery, the armoured dreadnought, railways that could swiftly
deploy huge numbers of troops, and specialized education institutions sup
porting general staff command systems.
This created military problems for dynastic agrarian empires based on
indirect rule. Whereas in the national model the army exemplied the unitary
people mobilized by a common patriotism, empires employed ethnic differ
entialist strategies. These restricted the ofcer corps to traditional social strata
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 93

and dominant ethnic groups and drafted only the most loyal and effective
sections of the population for combat, together with selected minorities
groomed as martial guardians of empire (Enloe 1980).
To combat the military power of nation states, imperial elites oscillated
between repressing and coropting national loyalties, while seeking to centralr
ize and modernize their administrations and legal systems. This generated
conflicts between conservatives and reformers, and the unevenness of mod
ernization created nationalist discontents between minorities and the dominr
ant nation in the imperial state, including in the military.
With the ascendancy of nation states in Europe, nationalist principles
became institutionalized in the interstate system. Such principles were resisted
up to the midrnineteenth century by the imperial powers, but the Congress of
Berlin (1878) represented a turning point, when the principle of ethnicity was
used by the great powers to determine the apportionment ofterritories between
states after the RussiarrOttoman War (Reynolds 2011: Ch. 1). Nationalism was
also increasingly deployed by states to foment discord among the minority
populations of their imperial rivals. Discontented minorities could then view
war as a means of enhancing their status within empire or as an opportunity to
break free from their imperial overlords. The outbreak of war came to heighten
the expectations of minorities and security fears of the dominant elites.
Finally, all these factors, together with an intensied struggle of states for
global supremacy, culminated in a total war that exposed the ssures of the
major continental empires, leading to their dissolution.
The rst major nationalist challenge arose from the French Revolution and
Napoleon, when French mass armies defeated the professional armies of the
imperial dynasties and awakened' nationalist dreams amongst Poles, Italians,
and Germans. However, in alliance with the leading maritime and economic
power, Britain, the dynastic empires combined to defeat the French. The
Russian Empire, in particular, was able to adopt military advances while
mobilizing vast numbers of troops, motivated by dynastic and religious
loyalties during the Russian campaigns of 1812714 (Lieven 2010; 2013: 199).
Under the Congress of Vienna (1814715) the uncien re'gime was restored,
and the victorious great powers (Britain, Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and
Prussia) allied to avoid a future European war that might unleash revolutionary
nationalism. There was no Europeanrwide war until 1914, and nationalist
insurrections in 1848 were quashed. By the mid to late nineteenth century,
however, nationalism was posing an increasing threat to the three great
dynastic empires, externally, when the nationalization of the state enhanced
the military capacities of rival powers such as Britain, France, and Prussia (and
later Germany), and internally, as such powers were willing to support
nationalist movements within the empires.
A series of limited wars demonstrating the military backwardness of
empires provoked attempts at imperial reform that backred and intensied
94 Nutiunalism and Wm

internal nationalist threats. First, there was the humiliating defeat in 185376 of
the Russian armies in the Crimea at the hands of Britain, France, and the
Ottoman Empire, which was followed by a Polish revolt in 1861. This showed
the inferiority of Russian armies in the modern use of trench warfare, artillery,
and railways, as well as the motivational weakness of an army of serfs (Rieber
2014: 206), Second, Napoleon III, reviving his uncle's policy of extending
French power in Europe through support for its nationalities, intervened in
1859 against the Habsburgs in support of Italian nationalists, thereby assisting
the establishing of an Italian nation state in 1861. Third, Prussia crushed
Habsburg Austria in 1865 and destroyed the armies of Napoleon III in
187071, unifying the German states in a nation state. The Prussian army
had pioneered a general staff which developed war strategy and organized
logistics and communications. This was combined with a draft whereby every
Prussian male of ghting capability could be conscripted in war, with the effect
that the German armies outnumbered their adversary in spite of the larger
French population. The efcient use of railways and superior artillery were
also decisive factors (Howard 1976: 997101; Murray 2005: 24475). The French
responseithe introduction of universal male conscription and free universal
primary education in 1881 to create a patriotic citizenry, and the rapid
development of a national rail networkireinforced a national template. By
the late nineteenth century the possession of an effective state, an educated
citizenry, and heavy industries to provide advanced military technology and
communications were regarded as necessary for greatrpower status.
In the Russian and Habsburg empires there were attempts at state modernr
ization combined with a coroption of nationalism. Alexander II sought to create
a scal system with a Europeanrstyle budget, abolished serfdom, introduced
military and educational reforms (in 1874) to create a conscript army, led by a
trained ofcer corps, with modern weaponry, and began the construction of
strategic railroads. This raised the largest army in Europe, but was nancially
handicapped by an unproductive agrarian economy, in spite of a drive to
industrialize from the 1880s. In practice, universal military service was under
mined by an unwillingness to recruit from populations deemed to be suspect, in
the European borderlands and Central Asia (Von Hagen 2003: 16175). Heavy
taxation on the peasantry and working classes was a recruiting ground for
opposition ideologies, including socialism. The reforms stimulated an ethnic
selfrconsciousness among educated sections of minorities in the most socior
economically advanced regions (the western borderlands) and conservative
resistance from traditional elites threatened with displacement from their posir
tions in the armed forces. In response, the regime turned to paanlav nationalr
ism to buttress state legitimacy, and Russia fought successful wars in 1877/8
against the Ottomans. Attempts to centralize imperial power against provincial
autonomies (e.g. in Finland) were combined with a linguistic and religious
Russication that reected a rising Russian nationalism in the political elites
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 95

(Sanborn 2014: 12714). This provoked further populist nationalist opposition in

Finland, the Baltic provinces, Poland, and the Ukraine, often with a class basis,
though it lacked a mass character (Sanborn 2014: Introduction). Defeat against
the rising power of Japan in 1905 triggered class revolutions in Russia and
nationalist revolts in the borderlands which forced the Tsar to concede semir
constitutional rule, on which he reneged (Von Hagen 1997: 6074).
Although the Habsburg lands were the most economically developed of the
traditional empires, its army was the most ethnically diverse, and defeats
against France and Prussia were marked by desertions among Hungarian
troops. Whereas Russians were sizeable enough demographically for an
assimilative Russication to seem an option, Germans were too few even to
nationalize the Austrian lands (Hall and Malesevic 2013: 18). The military
defeat in 1867 resulted in a shift to dual monarchy to prevent a Hungarian
secession and in a massrconscription imperial army, but this was neither
organized on national lines nor subject to imperial Germanization. Its general
staff was dominated by (Austrian) Germans, but there were different regir
mental languages and also a national militia. Rieber argues it was designed
more to maintain a balance within the empire than to ght a major war, and
its defence budget lagged behind other states (Rieber 2014: 18073). The new
political settlement was accompanied by a linguistic Germanization of the Austrian
lands, and in the Hungarian territories, a similar process of Magyarization,
creating a reactive nationalism among Slovaks and Croats. By the early
twentieth century Habsburg institutions were all but paralysed by nationalist
and social unrest. Hungarian demands for a separate army were fended off by
the emperors threat to introduce universal suffrage, which would empower
the nonrHungarian minorities. This was a reversion to methods of divide and
rule. Loyalty to an aged emperor and to the army were the two institutions
holding the empire together before the war (Wank 1997: 46).
Finally, the Ottoman Empire, already under pressure, had to concede Creek
(1832) and Serbian de jure independence (1830). The Tanzimat reforms
(1839777) followed the failure of earlier quasirnational proposals for a militia
organized on the model of the Prussian Landwehr and recruited from the
Muslim Turkish population. Tanzimat reformers and their European advisers
aimed to create an Ottoman citizenship recognizing the equal rights of all, a
modern imperial army founded on these principles, and a centralized admiir
istration. The use of indels provoked resistance in the army and from the
alarm, who opposed equality being granted to nowMuslims. Attempts to
centralize faced the problem of resistant Christian populations concentrated
on the borderlands. The reformed army fought well (187778) against a Russia
supporting Slavic nations, but the empire was forced to grant full independ
ence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro and establish Bulgaria as a full
principality within the empire. Military and scal problems continued.
The largely peasant army was much smaller than its imperial rivals, since
96 Nutiunalism and Wm

Christians were exempted from military service until 1909. There were difr
culties in funding the reforms because of the weak Ottoman economy, whose
commerce was dominated by Western merchants (Rieber 2014 58764). The
coup by the Young Turk in 1908 led to further political and military reform
accompanied by Turkication. Their attempts to modernize and Ottomanize
the Empire, by abolishing the rights and privileges of Christian subjects,
triggered in 1912 the Balkan Wars, in which Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece
and Montenegro seized Macedonia and Thrace. These were conicts marked
by largerscale ethnic cleansings.
The continental empires were thus beset by nationalism, exacerbated by the
mutual use of nationalist propaganda against imperial rivals, and by class
divisions. Russia posed as the protectors of the Slavic peoples in wars against
the Ottomans and supported Serbian aspirations against the Habsburgs, provokr
ing in the latter fears of imperial disintegration from South Slavism. In response,
the Ottomans incited the Armenians, Crimean Tatars, and the Cossacks against
Russia (Reynolds 2011: Ch. 3). Russian statesmen viewed the Habsburg fomentr
ing of Ukrainian nationalist grievances as threatening the greatrpower status of
their empire. The Ukrai ian provinces produced onerthird of its wheat, 70 per
cent of its coal, and the majority of its cast iron and steel (Lieven 2015: 5276).
Even if nationalism within the Empire remained largely conned to edur
cated minorities, perceptions of a threat played an important role in the
outbreak of the First World War. Fears of Serbian irredentism provoked the
Habsburg government to use the ass nation of Archduke Ferdinand as
justication for a preemptive war on Serbia. It was supported by Germany,
concerned that the collapse of AustriarHungary could lead to its strategic
encirclement by France and Russia (Darwin 2008: 372). Military humiliation
and fears of AnglorFrench inuences among its Arab subjects led the Young
Turks into an alliance with Germany, with the goal of using the war to cleanse
its territory of minority ethnicities and establish an ethnonational Turkish
state (Rieber 2014: 508).
However, the great dynastic empires collapsed only in the course of the
unprecedented total war of 1914718 that tested the fundamental legitimacy
and organizational capacity of their regimes. Although initially there was no
substantial nationalist opposition to the war, a war of peoples meant that the
stresses became intolerable for the great empires, which cracked militarily and
socially on ethnic lines, with its effects felt strongly in their borderlands.
First, the demands of industrial war revealed the technological and organ
izational backwardness of the empires, which led to huge losses. The Habsburg
state was unable to produce munitions in adequate quantities for its armies.
Although it raised an army similar in size to that of Germany, it was only by
high mobilization rates (67 per cent of men aged between 18 and 50 were in the
armed forces by 1918) that undemiined its economy (Kramer 2007: 156). Russia
had insuicient general staff ofcers, NCOs, and inefcient radio systems. It
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 97

lacked adequate rail communications to supply the front and transport food and
fuel to the civilian population, as well an industrial base to support its huge
armies (Darwin 2008: 376). The Russian response to the 1905 defeat had been an
attempt to build a nationalrimperial amry, but it excluded from the draft entire
ethnic groups for fear ofdisloyalty or incapacity (Sanborn 2003: Chs. 1, 2). When
because of great losses, it tried to enlist its Central Asian populations in 1916, it
provoked Kazakh uprisings in Turkestan. Lieven argues the amry reforms, by
destroying the prew'ous regimental loyalties that sustained soldiers' morale,
relied on a sense of national sentiment and citizenship that was absent in the
Russian peasantry, at least when ghting outside Russian territories (Lieven
2013: 207). As the crisis deepened in 1917, there was a shift to nationally
based military units, which paved the way for disintegration. These problems
were compounded by Habsburg, Tsarist, and Ottoman generals treating their
soldiers as innite and expendable resources. Whereas on the Western front
most casualties were inicted by enemy re, in the East they came from
incompetence and the callousness of ones own side to enlisted men. (Kramer
2007: 156).
Second, allrout conict produced a radicalization of war aims in which
nationalism was employed explicitly as a weapon of war, with devastating
consequences in the imperial borderlands (Reynolds 2011: Chs. 4, 5). The
British and French justied the war as a defence of the rights of small nations,
and although this meant only self determination for existing nation states (e.g.
Belgium), it was difcult to limit the principle. In the East the empires planned
the total breakup of their rivals, fomenting minority national discontents in
borderlands. This fostered a rising nationalism within the dominant natiorr
alities and a growing paranoia about minorities, who became scapegoats for
defeats and subject to savage punishments (Lohr 2003). A succession of rival
imperial occupation regimes in the shifting fronts in Poland, Galicia, and
Eastern Anatolia fanned paanerman, pairSlav, and paanurk sentiments
with the aim of organizing national military units against their imperial foes
(Von Hagen 1997: 6475). By 1915 the Tsarist Empire had lost its western
borderlands, and it drove eastwards those populations it viewed as potential
supporters of the enemyilews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Germans. The ferr
ocious extraction of resources, forced labour, ethnic cleansing, and displacer
ments shattered loyalties to empires (Sanborn 2014: Chs. 2, 3). The Germans
in Belgium and France engaged in mass deportations and collective punishr
ments. In the East they acted like a colonial power to Poles and Lithuanians
and employed scorched earth policies when retreating, rst in 1917 and 1918
(Kramer 2007: 4879). In the Ottoman sphere the Young Turks used the night
and fog of war to genocidal effect against the Armenians.
Third, the war exacerbated ethnic cleavages on the front line and in borne
territories. For the rst two years of the war the Habsburg nationalities
fought loyally for empire, but after suffering huge losses in 1916, there were
98 Nutiunalism and Wm

signicant ethnic desenions (Cornwall 1997). By 1917 an increasing subservience

of the army to the German High Command and the Germanization of the
Habsburg state called its legitimacy into question. But it was the intolerable
pressures of war on civilians that initiated military collapse and the recourse to
national independence as a solution to the crisis. Imperial ineffectiveness
produced breakdowns of communications, agricultural productivity declined
because of enlistment, and the diversion of food to the troops gave rise to
famines. Resentments in Hungary, the granary of the empire, caused the
blocking of food to Austria. By 1917 disaffection on home front and in the
army resulted in an unwillingness of Slavs to obey orders from Austrianr
German and Hungarian ofcers (Kramer 2007: 27677). After military defeat
riots erupted in Hungary, Bohemia, and even Vienna, and German counter
mobilization fanned further nationalist mobilization of minorities. Attempts
to save the empire by promising equal rights for nationalities were too late,
and by the time the emperor signed the armistice Czechoslovakia had declared
independence and the empire had gone.
Russian defeats against the Germans created oods of refugees (over
6 million) with which the Russian state struggled to cope. Huge Russian
troop losses and famine led to the two revolutions in February and October
and the defeat of the Russian army, whose soldiers were disillusioned by the
privations of their families in the famine winter of 1917. With the collapse of
authority, troops from the Ukrainian provinces led a more general demand by
nonrRussian nationalities for autonomy and national military units to protect
their homelands from German invasions (Von Hagen 2003: 172). The negotiations
with Germany over the BrestrLitovsk Treaty (March 1918) were accompanied by
nationalist revolts and revolution.
The Ottoman Empire was already disintegrating before 1914, torn by
Kurdish, Druse, and Arab rebellions that were suppressed, but with its
administration and army in a parlous condition (Kramer 2007: 144). The
main Ottoman focus was on the Caucasian front with Russia, but by 1917 it
had suffered huge losses and, in supporting the Habsburg army, had exhausted
its military reserves and its economic resources. The empire was temporarily
saved by the collapse of Russia, after which it sought to create buffer states in
the Caucasus and retake Baghdad and Palestine from the British. However,
in the former aim it was frustrated by its German ally, and its forces were unable
to resist British armies. After the occupation of Istanbul by British and French
troops in November 1918, the Ottoman government collapsed completely.

The Dissolution of the European Nation-State Overseas Empires

The dissolution of the European maritime empires followed a different pattern

because the colonies were separate geographically and civilizationally from the
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 99

metropole, the empires had put down shallower roots, and had different
systems of rule. The global expansion of these empires in the nineteenth
century occurred because they combined military power with a capitalist
penetration of indigenous social systems, and up to 1914 they operated
effectively in concert. A key role in their breakdown was played by military
factors. In the rst place, the rise of Meiji Japan as a martial nation state
offered a successful noanestern model to Asian political leaders that in the
Second World War militarily humbled the European empires in Asia. Second,
the huge enlistment of men and extraction of resources from colonies by the
imperial powers to sustain a conict fought substantially in Europe exposed
nowEuropeans to new ideologies and, in causing great hardship, politicized
previously passive populations. Third, the conict between European states
in two world wars devastated their power and prestige and offered opportuir
ities for Asian and African nationalists. Finally, the global dissemination
of techniques of insurgency shifted the power balance between colonized
and colonizers.
Much overseas expansion had been driven initially by private rather than
staterled in' iatives. Although Europeans conquered by virtue of considerable
military superiority, their rule was more fragile because of the distance of
colonies from the metropole, the size of the territories, and the huge popula
tions with radically different cultures. It was impossible to rule through the
relatively small cohorts of European ofcials and armies, though in some
cases European settlements comprised an important power base. For long,
European penetration of Asia was conned to coastal regions until the come
munications revolution of the nineteenth century. In Africa the lack of
resources and high disease rates (especially in West Africa) meant there was
little incentive to penetrate and develop the colonies outside Southern Africa
(Darwin 2008: 316).
The dominance of Europeans was sustained by a mystique of racial and
civilizational superiority and by their ability to coropt collaborators, politicalr
administrative and military, from native populations (Herbst 2000: Ch.1).
Indirect rule was the norm, initially via traditional chiefs, but, as colonial
administrations developed the local economies in the interests of the metror
pole, they educated in colonial or religious schools a native bilingual intellir
gentsia. This educated stratum not only staffed the administration but was also
able to mediate between ruler and ruled (Bayly 1996: Chs. 9, 10). To enforce
security Europeans used the traditional martial races strategy, recruiting
warlike minority groups, ofcered by Europeans, to coerce the native majority,
often with great brutality. The French employed Berbers to police the Algerians
and Moroccans; the British, Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Muslims to control the
Hindu majority; and the Dutch in Indonesia, Eurasians and peoples from
the outer islands rather than the majority Iavanese (Enloe 1980: Ch. 2).
Colonial armies were deployed outside their territories to enforce order in
IUU Nutiunalism and War

the empire. The Indian army, dubbed the re brigade of the British Empire,
quelled revolts in Africa such as the Ashanti rebellion in the Gold Coast
(Barkawi 2006: 79780).
In the late nineteenth century European visionaries advocated empire as
part of a universal civilizing mission (whether AnglorSaxon, Teutonic, Slavic,
or French) linked to beliefs that the future lay in large economic blocs. This
proved attractive not just to white settler colonies but to indigenous elites
exposed to European culture in colonial and religious schools. But this native
educated stratum was radicalized by the contradictions between these ideals
and the realities of racial exclusion, which led in many cases to a rejection of
the West and a turn to nationalism. From their exposure to Western culture
they encountered ideas of constitutional government, heroic narratives of the
winning of national freedom, as well as liberal criticism of empire in the
metropole.
With some exceptions, these nationalist elites were small as a proportion of
the population and the impact of nationalist ideas limited to urban areas
during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, a nationalist intelligentsia of
lawyers, ofcials, and journalists came to have a power out of proportion
to their numbers with respect to the colonial state because they uniquely
combined a mastery of the languages and techniques of modernity (often
within state administrations) with an ability to deploy the traditional
discourses and networks of their indigenous societies. Global cultural and
economic linkages generated by imperial expansion, sometimes mediated by
regional circuits, allowed the development of transnational networks of none
European intellectuals in European capitals such as Paris, where they come
bined nationalism with the liberal or socialist revolutionary ideas. They could
also nd powerful allies in native religious reform and neortraditionalist
movements which, reacting against aggressive Christian evangelism, made comr
mon cause against European colonialism. Through them, they could reach the
rural masses.
War played an important role in undermining European prestige, exposing
the weaknesses and contradictions of empire, and also giving opportunities to
nationalist elites to demand new freedoms. Japans defeat of the Russian
empire in 1904/5 shattered the myth of European invincibility and gave
heart to nationalists, especially in Asia, who looked to Iapan to inspire a
pairAsian revolt against the West (Aydin 2007). Nationalists, including
Chinese and Indian intellectuals, drew inspiration from techniques of popular
insurrection (including the Icve en masse) and from the contemporary inder
pendence struggles of the Boers and the Irish against the British (Karl 2002).
Iust as state militaries became increasingly sophisticated, so too over time did
insurgent movements, led often by professionals (doctors, engineers, journalr
ists, exrmilitary ofcers), which developed specialist political, military, and
propaganda wings.
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 101

The major catalysts of change were the two world wars in nationalizing and
politicizing colonial populations. First, the outbreak of war in 1914 aroused
expectations of increased selfrrule in some colonies as a reward for collective
sacrice. This was reinforced in the course of the war by allied propaganda,
proclaiming the rights of small nations and promising greater participation
in colonial institutions. The Indian National Congress were enthusiastic
recruiters, aspiring to gain equal status with the White Dominions (Gerwarth
and Manela 2014: 78879). Second, in the First World War, large numbers were
mobilized (for example, from Indochina by France) to serve in Europe either as
soldiers or as factory workers, where they became aware of the technological
and social backwardness of their traditional society compared with Europe
(Lockhart 2003: 214). India alone supplied nearly 200,000 troops to the British
army ghting on the Western Front (Barkawi 2006: 65). Isolated from home
and subject to racial discrimination, many developed a sense of community
and identied with a colonized homeland. With largerscale recruitment, in the
case of India, the army lost its minority ethnic character to become more
representative of the general population, in short to become more national.
Third, the mystique of European civilizational superiority was shaken by the
mechanized brutality of the war experienced by recruits, who also observed the
reduction of Europeans to a state of squalid savagery in the trenches (Adas
2004: 4274). Fourth, the centralizing drive by imperial administrations to
recruit men and agricultural and industrial resources for the war effort created
in the colonial territories a greater common territorial consciousness. This was
also informed by a sense of exploitation, and intensied by shortages of basic
commodities that in India led to famines.
In 1918 Wilson's Fourteen Points excited representations from Egyptian,
Indian, and Korean nationalists, many of whom were exrsoldiers (Manela
2007). Not only were these principles not applied to the overseas colonies, but
the British and French extended their imperial sway in the Middle East,
betraying the hopes of nationalists for an Arab nation. They partitioned
Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq to create imperial mandates and constructed a
dependent Egyptian state (Darwin 2008: 38075). Disappointment triggered
riots in Egypt, and although these were crushed, the British were compelled to
grant a limited independence in 1922. High unemployment and rising taxes
sparked nationalist disturbances, particularly in the Punjab, a main recruiting
base for the Indian army. The British response, the Amritsar massacre,
provoked mass nationalist campaigns of nonrcooperation.
The Allied conduct of the war had angered Muslims obliged to ght the
Ottoman Caliphate (Darwin 2008: 39279). In the interwar period antir
imperial Muslim movements sprang up in the Middle East and Indonesia.
In India, Gandhi mobilized Muslims and Hindus into a mass movement of
civil disobedience in 193072. Such discontents gained traction during the
Depression, which led to further imperial exploitation of the colonies. The
102 Nutiunalism and Wm

Indian Congress movement declared in 1930 its goal as full independence for
India and demanded an indigenization ofthe ofcer corps. By 1935 the British
devolved authority to Indian politicians at state level and more limited
responsibilities at ministerial level. Although they maintained ultimate
power, the writing seemed to be on the wall in India. The French brutally
crushed a series of risings against their ruleithe Rif war (192576), Syrian
revolts (1925730), KongorWara rebellion in Equatorial Africa (1928733), and
the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina (193073) (Gerwanh and Manela 2014: 795).
It was, however, the Second World War that was decisive. The empires
mobilized colonial populations on a new scale and aroused new expectations
of political autonomy, while the war offered opportunities for disgruntled
groups. Colonial administrations centralized power to extract resources, cone
scripting many into agriculture and industry, which fostered an increasing
territorial consciousness. The Indian army expanded to 2.25 million, which
required a general enlistment (rather than of selected ethnic groups) under
many more Indian ofcers, recruited from the middle and upper classes,
which accelerated the Indianization of the armed forces. Over 370,000 Africans
served in the military (Barkawi 2006: 89; Jeffery 1999: 312).
The triumphs ofthe Japanese nation state in search ofan Asian empire were
central to the downfall of European empires in Asia. Already engaged in a
territorial conquest of China from 1931, Japan through its victories over the
British, Dutch, and French destroyed the myth of European superiority. After
the fall of Singapore, the British proclaimed a new partnership with the
colonial peoples, but the contrast between Allied war aims and the realities
of colonial subjection, heightened by famines and hardships, created discoir
tents. British refusal to guarantee postrwar independence led Indian natioir
alist leaders to declare their neutrality, or to resist the war effort by supporting
the formation of an independent Indian army (Jeffery 1999: 32677).
The Japanese occupation of IndorChina, Malaya, Burma, Borneo, the Philr
ippines, and the Dutch East Indies provided space for nationalists to obtain
political power (as administrators) under Japanese authority, or to form
autonomous military organizations in resistance (Sidel 2013: 477). Sukarno,
imprisoned by the Dutch, was released by the Japanese and became prominent
in Indonesian public life. When Japan invaded Burma, the nationalist leaders
(Thakins) rst agreed an alliance, creating a Burmese army to ght the British,
but then asembled a secret antirfascist front, that swung their army to support
the British when the war turned. The Japanese occupation of Indochina
provoked resistance from Kuomintang and (more effective) V iet Minh come
munist movements led by Ho Chi Minh, supported by Vichy France. After the
Japanese surrender the rebels seized their weaponry (Lockhart 2003). The
returning colonial powers, weakened by war and lacking their former collabr
orator networks, found themselves faced with powerful nationalist opponents
who had developed sophisticated guerrilla techniques, sometimes acquired in
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 103

alliance with British armies. In much of Asia there was a fairly rapid shift of
political or military power to the indigenous populations: in India (1947),
Burma and Ceylon (1948), Indonesia (1949), Malaya (1957), and, in spite of
French resistance, IndorChina (1954) (Darwin 2008: 434, 45072).
In contrast, the situation in Africa and the Middle East was very different. In
the Middle East, the British willingness to allow largerscale immigration of
European Iews into Palestinian lands resulted in the establishment of the state
of Israel. This radicalized Arab nationalists, who overthrew the Iraqi and
Egyptian monarchies and aimed to establish a panrArab polity. With the
exception of Ethiopia, no battles were fought on African soil, and the natiow
alist movements that colonial regimes faced were relatively smallrscale. However,
there were guerrilla resistance movements, and from the 1960s decolonization
accelerated in Africa.

The Collapse of the USSR

The Soviet collapse seems at rst to be very different, since it fell in peacetime.
But, again, intensifying geopolitical competition from a powerful nation state,
the USA, as leader of a NATO alliance, was crucial, this time in generating a
resource overstretch of the USSR that triggered its dissolution.
Although the Romanov Empire had disintegrated in defeat, in the subse
quent civil war (1918721) against the Whites, Lenin overcame nationalist
republics in the Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia. His techniques were a
mixture of military coercion (with largely Russian armies), a class appeal to
the peasantry, and elite coroption, when he offered the major nationalities self
determination (Smith 1990: 475). Aware of the force of nationalism, he
decided on a federal constitution based on the principle of nationality, fearing
that a centralized Communist state would be captured by the demographically
dominant Russians and provoke an antirRussian nationalism of the minor
ities. He granted the major nonrRussian nationalities their own republics
where they would have ofcial recognition of their languages, symbols, and
culture, limited economic powers, and a privileged status in local public
institutions. In exchange, they would implement the Communist project to
create a heavy industry and a proletariat (Kagedan 1990). Alone of the
nationalities, the Russians in their republic were denied separate administra
tive and party institutions: they could express their identity only as members
of the union. Martin (2001) has called the USSR in its early years an afrmar
tive action empire that sought to transform cultural groups into nationalities
and through education to create an indigenous intelligentsia. The Bolsheviks
theorized that, through establishing a socialist economy equalizing social
conditions, a general proletarian consciousness would occur, resulting in the
104 Nutiunalism and Wm

spontaneous merging of the nationalities into a Soviet people (Connor 1984:

Chs. 2, 3).
War and military competition played a vital role in both the constitution
and the collapse of a Communist state that from another perspective could be
seen as reimposition of empire, as the nationalities were incorporated into a
Russied totalitarian state. Although the Bolshevik elite was initially drawn
from many nationalities, including Iews, Poles, and Latvians, the central
institutions of the USSR were dominated by the Russians. They constituted
close to half of the population, and their language and culture formed the
lingua franca of the state. Russians tended to occupy key security roles in
the national republics, and Russian colonists/migrants, as under the Tsarist
regime, 'ere used to develop strategic areas of the empire and keep other
nationaliti in check. After an early period in the 1920s when the republics
sought to bargain for greater autonomies, Stalin, Lenins successor, attempted
to crush national autonomist tendencies during the 1930s. Afrmative
action policies continued in quieter fashion, but from 1934 Stalin increasingly
emphasized the civilizing role of Russians as the elder brother of the natioir
alities (Martin 2001: 81). He purged the old, more cosmopolitan Bolshevik
elite and Russied an expanding centre by recruiting heavily from the Russian
and Ukrainian peasantry (Shanin 1989: 416720).
This centralizing ethos was combined with a military imperative to achieve
agricultural collectivization and a largerscale promotion of heavy industry,
even at the cost of largerscale famines in the Ukraine. Stalin aimed to rapidly
develop the Soviet Union, which he saw as at war with the capitalist powers
(Zaslavsky 1997: 7679). The experience of the First World War made the
Soviet generals aware of Russias backwardness, organizational and technor
logical, and the need to improve the motivation of their soldiers.
The Bolsheviks oscillated between a military model that sought to integrate
the hundred or so ethnicities and one that recognized separate ethnic units. In
the 1920s many ethnic regiments were formed, but from the midr1930s the
emphasis was on a professionally trained Soviet army that transformed raw
peasantries into committed Soviet socialist citizens. By 1938 earlier experir
ments of national militias had been abandoned in favour of a universal model
of military service and an army in which the language of command was
Russian. Stalin now invoked the civilizing role of Imperial Russia and the
Russians as the elder brother whom the other nationalities must follow (von
Hagen 2003: 18377).
The German invasion in 1941 came close to destroying the USSR, when
aggrieved nationalities seized the chance to revolt, forming military units in
the recently annexed Baltic republics, the Ukraine, and Turkic areas. Stalin in
desperation revived a Russian Orthodox nationalism to rally the Russian
masses against the invader, drawing parallels with the Patriotic War of
1812 against Napoleon. He combined this with a willingness to form national
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 105

units and partisan brigades (Enloe 1980: 6576). Indiscriminate German savagery
in the conquered territories may have saved the USSR by limiting antirSoviet
revolts. Indeed, as many as 8 million of the 34 million Soviet army were now
Slavic minority soldiers, with around 45 divisions formed from national
minorities serving from 1941 to 1943 (Glantz 2005: 60072). After the German
defeat at Stalingrad reduced the threat to the regime, there was a reversion to
old centralized controls.
Victory in the Great Patriotic War strengthened the regime and extended
Soviet power into Central Europe, where it exercised control over puppet
regimes. Through the NazirSoviet pact in 1939, Stalin had already absorbed
the Baltic republics in the USSR. The USSRs acquisition of nuclear weapons
made it a superpower, one engaged after 1945 in a Cold War with the USA and
supporting radical regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In this period
there was a ruthless suppression in Eastern Europe of popularrnational revolts
in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1967).
However, as Collins (1986) argued, the subsequent expansion into Central
Europe and Asia (with the advance into Manchuria) multiplied the USSRs
enemies (USA, Western Europe, Japan, and China), thereby creating the
conditions for geopolitical overstretch. Under Khrushchev there was a limited
liberalization and a new emphasis on a peaceful competition between rival
economic and social systems. A fourfold increase between 1959 and 1981 in
nowRussians obtaining a college or vocational training raised expectations of
occupational advancement (Simon 1991: 266). Khrushchevs failed confronr
tation in 1962 with the USA over the stationing of nuclear missiles in Cuba led
to his overthrow, and Brezhnev and his successors intensied military come
petition with the USA. There was also a return to repression, mitigated by
allowing national republics greater de facto autonomies, which led to endemic
ethnic clientelist corruption. However, from the late 1970s the economy
stagnated, while military expenditures by the 1980s consumed 25 per cent of
GDP and 33 per cent of state expenditures (Westad 2007: 336, 402). The
consequence was extreme nancial strain from competing pressuresifrom
the armed forces to match the military power of the USA, from industry and
agriculture to overcome declining productivity, and from consumers with
expectations of higher living standards.
By the 1960s and 1970s there was increased nationalist political agitation
by leaders of the richer republics (Ukraine, Latvia, Azerbaijan, Armenia,
and Georgia) for greater scal autonomy to provide opportunities for their
cornationals (Roeder 1991: 219724). A sense of crisis gripped the regime,
headed by a succession of ailing leaders, faced with growing unrest in Poland
and Eastern Europe and the costs of an unpopular war in Afghanistan. This
was accompanied by fears of Russian (and Slavic) demographic decline vis rvis
Central Asian Muslim populations. In the 1980s Reagan's huge expansion
in military expenditures to nance a military revolution in computerized
106 Nutiunalism and Wm

precision weapons, including satellite Star Wars' technology, put further

pressures on an already faltering regime.
A new leader, Gorbachev, came to power in 1985, determined to fundar
mentally reform the centralized system and wind down the Cold War with the
West. Gorbachev hoped to combine a Sovietrlevel reform at home through
policies of perestroika (restructuring from the centre) and glasnost (openness)
with a normalization of international relations. He only succeeded in raising
the lid on nationalist forces, bringing the system to an end.
A combination of geopolitical factors, the rising strength of institutionalized
nationalism in the republics, economic disorder, and splits in the military are
salient. Central to Gorbachev's goals of establishing a prosperous democratic
Communism with a human face was the normalization of relations with the
West and the scaling down of the arms race. As Beissinger argues (2009),
Gorbachevs opening of the system to criticism and his move to political
liberalization had the effect of unleashing waves of mass nationalism, motivr
ated by antirimperial demands for the recognition of historical injustice,
including wartime persecutions, famines, and ecological grievances. Gorbachev
was for long oblivious to nationalist threats. Attempts to shift the economy
from a command to a more market basis produced only severe disruptions,
and the Soviet system was further discredited by revelations of corruption
and inefciencies that accompanied the Chernobyl disaster (1986) and the
Armenian earthquake (1988). In driving through multicandidate elections to
the national Congress, he broke the Communist Partys monopoly on power.
Responses to this varied, but at the level of the republics, party elites, threatr
ened by intervention from the centre and criticized from below as corrupt
collaborators, were tempted to ride the tiger of national autonomism with
mixed results. The strength of such sentiments was uneven: whereas there
were by 1988 mass nationalist popular fronts in the Baltic republics, Armenia,
and Georgia, the Ukrainian leadership until its overthrow in 1989 kept a lid on
popular nationalism, and in Central Asia Communist elites repressed with
ease weak oppositions.
A key factor in the collapse was Gorbachevs overriding desire to end the
Cold War, which made possible a destructive interaction between national
opposition movements in the Warsaw Pact countries (notably in Poland) and
nationalists in the USSR. The spectacle of liberalization within the USSR
encouraged the former to demand freedoms, and Gorbachevs refusal to
militarily intervene led to Eastern Europeans declaring their independence.
The overturning in Europe of the postwar settlement, previously unthinkable,
produced a chain reaction. Baltic nationalists who viewed their annexation
as analogous to that of Eastern Europe began in 1989 to demand not just
autonomy but political sovereignty, further emboldening nationalists in the
Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Multiparty elections in many
republics led to the coming to power of nationalist oppositions, so that over
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 107

much of the Soviet Union there was an increasing struggle for legitimacy
between the centre and the national republics.
Meanwhile, a Russian separatism was growing, led by Yeltsin. Attempts by
Gorbachevs Communist opponents to stage a counterrrevolution failed when
Yeltsin won over the armed forces, leading to the unravelling of the USSR
along national lines, led by the dominant Russian republic.

Concluding Remarks

From this we see that military factors, allied to nationalism, played a dynamic
role in imperial collapse in several ways.
First, as embodied in nation states, nationalism enabled the economic,
political, and m' itary revolutions that changed the balances of power in
world politics. This compelled dynastic empires to engage in strategies of
competitive modernization that generated conicts between subordinate and
dominant nationalities, creating increasing instability before the outbreak of
war. With the overseas empires of nation states, the roots of imperial power
were thinner, because of the tyrannies of distance and cultural difference. This
meant a greater reliance on collaborator networks, which in Asia were swept
away by the Iapanese conquest. In the Soviet Union national principles
coexisted throughout in tension with an autocratic socialism that failed to
deliver promises in part because of the burdens of maintaining military
budgets, leading former collaborators in the national republics to defect in
the face of popular hostility.
Second, wars and geopolitical stresses that triggered the collapse of empires
were themselves indirectly driven by nationalism: in 1914 by Habsburg fears
of South Slav nationalism; in 1939 by German desires to overthrow the
Versailles Treaty, as well as a Japanese drive to achieve an empire in As ;
and in the postrl945 period by a nationalist USA and embittered nationalist
resistance in Eastern Europe (notably, the Polish Solidarity movement).
Third, the wars brought out the contradictory values within empires that
claimed to stand for universal values, including the rights of nations, but
which operated in the interests of their dominant nationality in their policies
of ethnic discrimination and refusal to grant national representation to color
nial peoples. They aroused expectations among their more assimilated popur
lations of equality or national recognition which were belied by their military
and political practices.
Fourth, total wars exposed the organizational weaknesses of imperial milr
tary systems based on patterns of ethnic differentiation, heightened cleavages
within multinational empires from the uneven burdens of war, nationalized
colonized populations through common experiences of suffering, and created
opportunities for nationalist movements with the defeat of imperial armies.
108 Nutiunalism and Wm

Finally, we shall also see next the cumulative effect of wars. As the number
of states dening themselves as nation states entered interstate organizations
such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, so the existence of
empires became more problematic.

WHY THE SHIFT FROM EMPIRE TO NATION STATES?

To what extent did imperial defeat in war entail nationrstate formation? It is

tempting to assume the gathering momentum of nationalism made such
outcomes inevitable. But, as empires dissolved, they could be replaced by
new imperial structures. The geopolitical outcomes of war were crucial.
These included not just the decisions of the winners who framed the principles
of peace treaties, but also the subsequent conguration of international power.
Much depended on the subsequent capacities (including the economic resilience)
of the imperial polities and the commitment of their dominant nationalities
to them, as well as the strength of antirimperial nationalist movements.
These were sometimes transformed by wartime experiences, including the
breakdown of collaborator networks, new military skills developed by the
colonized, and the radicalizing effects of mass suffering. All this varied greatly.
The entities that emerged were often far from the ideal of a nation state, and
some could be viewed as qua mperial entities. Indeed, the peace settlements
by themselves were not capable of imposing or resisting national realities (pace
Tilly 1992), and this itself generated conllict which could encourage projects of
rerimperialization.
Although the principles of national selfrdetermination were invoked by all
parties during the conicts and the peace settlements, the major actors were
empires. These viewed the retention of their colonies as integral to their claims
to a universal mission and to their geopolitical and economic security in an
increasingly globalized world (Lieven 2015: Ch. 1). After the First World War
Lenin succeeded in rerestablishing much of the Russian Empire on new lines,
using class discontents to undermine nationalist movements. The Bolsheviks
supported the principle of national selfrdetermination, but rolled back nationr
alist coups in the Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, forcibly incorporating
them within a federal structure. The Bolsheviks could hope to build their state
on a Slavic core (of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians) which constituted
tworthirds of the Soviet population (Mazower 1998: 45). The principle of self
determination was domesticated within an imperial structure.
Elsewhere the shift to nation states was heavily qualied in the Paris Peace
settlements. All sides had espoused as a war aim the rights of free nations
against their imperial opponents, and for President Wilson one of the prime
causes of the war was the great game of the balance of power, which disregarded
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 109

the rights of small nations. But invoking the principles of selfrdetermination

was largely tactical, arising out of pressures of war. The main concerns of the
British and French were to punish the Central Powers and to reestablish a
new framework that would permanently weaken them. Until well into 1918
even Wilson did not commit to the destruction of the Habsburg Empire
(Sharp 1996: 10, 18).
However, the Entente powers were driven by events. Dissident politicians
and journalists of the national minorities, either in exile or in their homelands,
had developed plans early in the conict for a political deconstruction of
empire (Rieber 2014: 575 The traumatic war experiences of forced move
ments, communal violence, and conscription had radicalized and deepened
nationalist sentiments among the minorities of the empires. The nal years of
the war were of class and national revolution as the Romanov, Habsburg,
and Ottoman Empires disintegrated into armed nationalist bands, often
formed out of the defeated imperial armies. The various national committees
of the Habsburg Empire assumed power with token resistance from the
imperial authority (Dea'k 1997: 130). Whereas demography could enable the
reconstitution of empire in Russia, the major two (and contending) nationalr
ities of the Habsburg Empire together comprised less than half of the imperial
population.
The need to neutralize the revolutionary social and national ferment
aroused by the Bolsheviks, together with the growing material and moral
ascendancy of the USA under President Woodrow Wilson, transformed the
situation. Initially, Wilsons goals were articulated in reformist democratic
terms as government with consent of the governed, but, concerned about the
degenerating political situation, he appropriated the Leninist phrase of self
determination to support his conviction that the map of Europe he reordered
on antirimperial lines to secure the peace. Selfrdetermination, however, cre
ated no criterion for how the culturally intermingled populations were to be
separated into territorially distinct nation states and excited innumerable
expectations. As Wilsons Secretary of State asked, what area did he have in
mind: a race, a territory, or a community? (Sharp 1996: 14).
The nation states that emerged were often ad hoc products of the desire of
the winners to permanently constrain the losers and of the nationalist ambir
tions of imperial minorities for maximum power and security. The Allies were
determined to prevent the resurgence of their enemies as a military threat by a
reduction of their territories, populations, and resources, combined with the
creation of new buffer states. Austria was reduced to a small Central European
state and the territories of Germany and Hungary were truncated, losing key
resources (mines, industries, and populations). At the same time, the Allies
encouraged the leaders of smaller nationalities to form federal or composite
polities, such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, that would be economically
and militarily viable with defensible boundaries.
IIU Nutiunalism and War

The Paris Peace settlement, however, was only partly determined by the
great powers. It was driven by the need to combat the Bolshevik threat, which
led to Allied military intervention in the Russian civil war and a need to
accommodate allies (e.g. Poles at war with the Bolsheviks). There were
divisions between the victorious powers and popular pressure at home to
quickly demobilize their troops. In practice, as the great powers withdrew,
the boundaries of the new states were established through multiple conicts
between their armed units in the context of continuous revolutionary
upheaval, class conicts, and ethnic displacements. Over 4 million died in
the violent aftermath of the First World War between 1918 and 1923
(Gerwarth and Manela 2014: 792). Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians clashed
in Galicia; Romanians and Ukrainians in Bukovina; Slovenes and Austrians
in the Alps; Czechs and Poles in Teschen. The outcome of these struggles was
largely conrmed in the two peace treaties in 1919 and 1920 (Deak 1997:
13072; Rieber 2014: Ch. 6). Allied plans to dismember the Ottoman Empire
were thwarted by the Kemalist military revolution, which established an
independent Turkish republic recognized in the subsequent Treaty of
Lausanne (1923).
The employment of the principles of selfrdetermination elsewhere was also
qualied. They were applied only to the territories of the losing side. The Allies
rejected claims of their own national minorities (such as the Irish) and of the
noanuropean peoples of their overseas empires. Instead the British and
French saw their victory as an opportunity to absorb German African colonies
and Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, ruling Syria and Iraq under a
mandate system.
With respect to the Second World War we again see diverging patterns. In
some areas empire strengthened. The war not only reinforced the power of the
Soviet state over its rebellious nationalities but extended it into Eastern and
Central Europe, whose governing elites were all but destroyed by successive
German and Soviet occupations. Chinese Communists, after defeating the
Kuomintang in the aftermath of the Iapanese departure, extended an imperial
sway over Tibet and Manchuria. In parts of Asia and the Middle East,
however, there was a relatively quick liquidation (though in places contested)
of empires. In contrast there was an initial rerintensication of European
empires in Africa before a wave of decolonization in the 1960s.
Several factors linked to war and its consequences account for a shift to
nation states. First, the war had all but bankrupted European states, bringing
to power political parties focused on domestic socioreconomic reconstruction
and on combating the growing Soviet threat, for which they were dependent
on US supportinancial (via the Marshall Plan) and military. By the 1950s
the solution was sought in building a European Community. This limited the
military capacities of states and the willingness of their peoples to resist antir
colonialist pressures.
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 111

Second, war had exposed the thin roots of the European overseas empires in
Asia. Where they were unable to deploy coercion, dissolution was swift. Here
in 1945 European states, exhausted economically and militarily by the war,
were psychologically weakened by the military humiliations inicted by
Japanese armies in Asia (and by Germans in the Middle East), and their
collaborative networks were eroded. They were confronted by nationalists
who had studied the doctrines and techniques of peoples wars in Europe
and who, in alliance with or in opposition to the Iapanese, had acquired
military experience as well as political capacities (Waldron 2003b). They
also had the inspiration of Maos success (however mythical) in China
against the Iapanese. Britain in 1942 had effectively conceded to India future
independence and more representative government to its colonies, and elected
in 1945 a Labour government, many of whose supporters before the war had
favoured colonial independence. The British, faced with a hostile Indian
Congress agitating for independence and an Indian army that was effectively
nationalized by the war, decided the game was up. The loss of the Indian
colonial army to the empire was considerable. The British were quickly forced
out in Burma (confronted by armed nationalists), Sri Lanka, and, after crushr
ing an armed (largely Chinese) Communist insurgency, handed power to
Malay nationalists. Britain moved to replace the empire by a commonwealth.
Third, European empires were marginalized by the twin super-power victors
of the war, normatively hostile to empire and to which local nationalists
looked for support. The Soviet Union, checked by the USA's defence of
Europe, followed Leninist doctrine by seeking to outank its capitalist
enemy by exporting socialist revolutionary models to Africa, Latin America,
and Asia. The USA, confronted by Soviet and later Chinese revolutionary
challenges in Asia and Africa, oscillated in its preferences. After the outbreak
of the Korean War fears of Communist subversion might lead it to ally with
empiresiwith the French in Vietnam and British in Malaya. At times it used
its economic power to support what it saw as compliant nationalis The
Dutch were driven out of Indonesia after the US decided Sukarno was a useful
ally against Communists and threatened in 1949 to exclude the Netherlands
from the Marshall Plan. The British and French had to abort attempts to seize
the Suez Canal from Nasser when the US refused to support their currencies.
Fourth, newly independent Asian and Middle Eastern states formed a bloc
of states, dedicated to the overthrow of European colonialism, which exerted
increasing inuence internationally, including on the superpowers. In 1945
there were ftyrone member states in the United Nations, but, as the post
colonial states joined the organization, by 1970 membership had swelled to
127 (Darwin 2008: 44375). These new member states were nonrwhite, with
developing economies, facing internal problems arising from their colonial
past, which sometimes put them at odds with European countries and made
them suspicious of European governmental structures, political ideas, and
112 Nutiunalism and Wm

economic institutions. A key moment was a gathering of AsianrAfrican

representatives from more than twentyrve states and colonies led by China,
India, and Egypt at Bandong (Indonesia) in 1955. Claiming to speak for
1.5 billion people, they formed a Third World' group dedicated to neutrality
between the capitalist and Communist blocs (Westad 2007: 997105). Influenr
tial in the UN Assembly on issues of selfrgovernance and decolonization, they
passed resolutions supporting independence for colonial states and established
a special committee on colonialism, creating a sense that the colonial era was
ending. European national political elites inuenced by their public opinions
might resist or accommodate themselves to nationalist colonial movements,
but ultimately felt overpowered by geopolitical and economic realities.
Britain, as one of the victorious powers and retaining prestige as a great
power through its alliance with the USA, was less resistant to concessions than
other European empires. The French (and at rst the Dutch) considered the
restoration of formal empire as essential to their recovery of greatrpower
status after the shame of occupation and foreign liberation (Smith 1982:
9577). They unsuccessfully fought bloody wars against national liberation
movements in Indochina that were aided by the Soviet and Chinese from
1945 to 1954 and also against Algerian nationalists from 1954 to 1962.
In the Middle East, a major cockpit of conllict, where French and British
protectorates and colonies had been also subject to or threatened with occur
pation, the disruptions of the war acted as a nationalizing force. The British
and French sought to maintain control of the region and its oil reserves by
alliances with dynastic rulers and through their protectorates in Egypt, Syria,
and Iraq. Nationalism, however, had developed strongly among native polity
ical elites who were divided between territorial and panrArab loyalties. The
French at rst resisted terrorist violence in Tunisia and Morocco, but had to
concede independence to nationalists who were encouraged by the French loss
of Indochina and the outbreak of the Algerian War. As in Asia, external
inlluence from a major power (the USA) was a major factor in the nationalists
success here and in the Suez adventure (Hiers and Wimmer 2013: 23073).
In contrast, although British and French war extractions had caused hardr
ship in African colonies and Allied propaganda excited hopes of selfrgovemment,
nationalism was conned largely to educated elites and small middle and
working classes in urban centres. Far from the front line (except in Ethiopia),
nationalists during the war could not look for support from an external
ally. After 1945 there was at rst a reconsolidation of empire, through formal
and informal economic and cultural ties. European powers, seeking compeir
sation for their losses elsewhere and in desperate need of hard currencies,
sought to transform a nightwatchman into a developmental state in order to
exploit colonial primary resources and raw materials for the benet of the
homeland. A centralizing colonial state holding down wages, regulating prices,
and seeking to modernize agricultural practices provoked territoryrwide
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 113

nationalist movements which viewed this intrusiveness as a second colonial

occupation (Darwin 2008: 465; Berman and Lonsdale 2013: 315).
Although such nationalism at rst was not threatening, the fears of Soviet
inuences on students, trade unionists, and workers in the expanding African
urban areas encouraged the British and French to seek an accommodation
with more moderate nationalists, in the hope of sustaining the status quo
under new auspices. Where this was blocked by white settlers in Kenya,
violence ared in the Mau Mau campaigns (Darwin 2008: 46476). Straitened
states, lacking large colonial armies, were reluctant to deploy sufcient milk
tary forces to intimidate nationalist insurgents for relatively little economic
gain, while public opinion was unsettled by violent repressions. The British,
for whom the informal (economic) ties of their colonies to the metropole were
tighter, advanced decolonization more than the French. A key moment was
the eruption in 1960 of civil war in the Belgian Congo in which the super
powers became involved, bringing the fear of contagion, which accelerated the
decolonization drive in the 1970s (Darwin 2008: 46677).
Why, when the USSR collapsed, was it replaced by nation states dened by
Soviet republican boundaries instead of a new empire or a political confederr
ation or of polities formed on ethnic lines? Some scholars (Hale 2011)
have argued that this outcome was by no means inevitable. In April 1990
Gorbachev persuaded nine out of the fteen republics after a referendum to
complete negotiations over the formation of a confederation, a Union of
Sovereign States. Reforming the USSR as a democratic confederation, how
ever, would have been problematic because of the inevitable demographic
dominance of the Russians and the historical resentments released under
Gorbachev. This option was destroyed by the leaders of the putsch of August
1991 who sought to restore the old Soviet imperial system and whose failure
was the nal blow to the USSR.
The attempt at an imperial restoration itself failed because of a secession of
a centre by the leaders of the dominant Russian nationality, who had accepted
a discourse that made armed intervention against minority nationalities
illegitimate. Hale underplays the signicance of what Roman Sporluk (2000)
dubbed a derSovietization of Russia, provoked by the scapegoating of Russian
by other nationalities in their attacks on the Soviet system and by Russian
resentment of the nancial transfers to poorer republics. Yeltsin, in his comper
tition with Gorbachev, exploited Russian liberal demands for political and
cultural selfrgovernment (Sasse 2011). Liberals transposed the sovereignty
and antircolonialist frames of the nowRussians to Russia itself, allying with
nowRussian nationalists against the regime (Beissinger 2002: 389). Such
frames developed resonance because they fed off older ideas of the Russian
nation as imprisoned by an autocratic (imperial) state (Vujac 015: Ch.1).
This created a schism of the centre, revealed in the divisions within the largely
Russianrled armed forces at the time of the coup. Yeltsin opted for an alliance
114 Nutiunalism and War

with the West and an economic westernization as the salvation of Russia after
the failed experiment with Communism This meant letting the empire go.
International factors also help explain the shape of the new order. The
Western powers, in particular the USA, fearing the potential security dangers
of the breakup of a nuclear superpower, had favoured a reformation rather
than a dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, the defeat of the Communist
old guard and Yeltsins effective abolition of the union transformed the
situation. The republics had under the constitution a formal right to self
determination. The successor states could thus be recognized as new sovereign
members of the international community under the principle of uh pussidetis.
This privileged the selfrdetermination of existing territorial units rather than a
breakup on etlmonational lines (though, as we shall see, this is still an
unsettled issue). Rather than join the Russianrled Commonwealth of Inder
pendent States, nationalists in the Eastern European states and in the Baltic
republics were also driven by aspirations to abandon a failed socialist experir
ment and to join the West, in the form of the European Community, as the
royal road to modernity (Szporluk I998).

IMPERIAL LEGACIES AND NATION-STATE

FORMATION

What then were the consequences of these waves of imperial dissolution for
subsequent nationrstate formation and the interstate order? In general, the
mass creation of wouldrbe nation states was destabilizing, bringing into the
international arena many fragile polities and a politics of victimhood and
grievance. What Aviel Roshwald (2001) argues with respect to the First World
War applies more generally: war catapulted nationalist movements into posi
tions of authority before the necessary cultural and institutional framework
was able to develop. The process of breaking away was usually disorderly, and
the political units that formed were characterized by external insecurities,
intense internal ethnic disputes, economic imbalances and class conicts,
and resentments about victimization that could lead to further interstate or
intrastate conllict, including ethnic cleansing and genocide. There were vari
ations to this story. Successor political units were shaped by the kind of empire
from which they emerged and the nature of their emergence in conict or
otherwise. The three imperial types we have examined differed considerably in
the extent to which they furnished administrative structures, systems of
communications, and economic institutions that enabled populations to comr
pete in the modern world. The new states also varied in their ethnographic
legacies and in the geopolitical and economic environment into which they
were thrown.
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 115

Karen Barkey distinguishes between rump imperial nation states and

peripheral states (Barkey 1997: 10477). The former, however truncated, inherited
effective governing institutions, a high culture, urban commercial centres, and
communication networks. With respect to the postrFirst World War states,
the Ottoman Empire left a strong bureaucratic state legacy to Turkey but an
ineffectual one to its Arab territories, which also lacked representative instir
tutions. The Habsburg Empire after 1867 was much more decentralized, while
relying on monarchical and ecclesiastical paternalism for stability rather than
democratic legitimacy. Most successor states inherited a landlordrdominated
agrarian economy with large peasantries and underdeveloped towns, and the
main social issues were of land redistribution (Barkey 1997: 101). She further
argues that the rump imperial states, Turkey, Austria, and Hungary though
shrunken, were relatively ethnically homogeneous, and this allowed them to
adopt more civic assimilationist models of nationality. By contrast, the politics
of the peripheral states were with some exceptions (Czechoslovakia) much
more ethnic, having often no recent state history on which to build, while
having the problem of establishing a new national identity when having within
their new territories large numbers of often resentful minorities.
This latter claim, however, is dubious. With strategic and commercial
interests largely trumping ethnic criteria unless it favoured the Entente
powers, few of the subsequent states could be conventionally called national,
and a major problem for all states was ethnordemographic. Austria sought, but
was denied, a union with Germany, whereas the latter was diminished by
transfers of populations and territory to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France.
Hungary lost threerfths of its population and 3 million ethnic Hungarians
to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. All suffered devastating reduce
tions of resourcesimines, industries, and rail communications (Zimmer
2003b: 97).
Several of the new states and peoples (Hungarians, Poles, and Czechs) could
build on memories and myths of independent statehood on which to form a
new national identity. The war also supplied heroic founding myths (of the
Czech Legion in Russia, and Pilsudski's Polish First Brigade), but the new
states were multinational and (ironically) semirimperial, with borderlands
inhabited by minorities and new shatterzones thanks to the horrors of forced
population movements (Rieber 2014: 533). Poland and Romania had substair
tial minorities (33 per cent and 28 per cent respectively), including formerly
dominant Germans and Hungarians (Dea'k 1997: 133). From the beginning
the politics of new states was coloured by irredentist and secessionist tensions
and class cleavages that erupted in Hungary and Finland into civil war. Antir
Semitism was pervasive.
An international institution, the League of Nations, had been established to
guarantee the settlement and ensure that new states would respect minority
rights. But the new states resented it as neorimperial, since the League ignored
116 Nutiunalism and Wm

minority issues in Western Europe. It was weakened by the refusal of the USA
to join and by the reversion of Britain and France to traditional balance of
power strategies. Much of Central and Eastern Europe displayed the triadic
tensions identied by Rogers Brubaker (1996: Ch. 4) of nutiunalizing periph
eral states, often evoking older memories of persecution and conquest
in constructing authentic identities for the new polity, aggrieved or fearful
Mariana! minunties, sometimes from dominant imperial stock, looking for
protection to embittered former imperial homeland states.
Since both rump imperial and peripheral states arose from the chaos of war,
it is not surprising that many of the leaders were military ofcers: Manner
heim in Finland, Pilsudski in Poland, Horthy in Hungary, and Kemal Ataturk
in Turkey. In the 1920s and 1930s Fascist or authoritarian military nationalist
regimes and movements emerged throughout Eastern and Central Europe,
motivated by the politics of ethnic hatred, class tensions, and fear of Bolshevism.
In Italy, Germany, and Hungary the principles of selfrdetermination were
cited to justify irredentist claims. The weakness of the League of Nations led to
war as Hitler turned on Czechoslovakia and Poland in support of German
minorities. The Second World War revealed the fault lines of composite states
in which ethnic resentments pervaded every aspect of public policy (Rieber
2014: 613714, 617). Germany exploited the grievances of Slovakian junior
partners in Czechoslovakia and their Croatian equivalents in Yugoslavia. Most
new polities lost their freedom in the late 1930s and 1940s as they were
absorbed into the Nazi and Soviet empires. The Baltic States were incorporr
ated into the USSR in 1939, and after the Allied victory many of the rest,
although nominally independent states, became part of the Soviet bloc.
The victorious powers after 1945 sought to counter the destabilizing effects
of the principle of selfdetermination by forbidding under the United Nations
Charter the use of force to change the boundaries of states. The changes to
territorial boundaries they sanctioned, together with population transfers,
produced a greater correspondence between ethnographic and political
boundaries. Some 20 million people moved to permanently settle in new
homelands, including 12 million Germans (Krejci and Velimsky 1981: 64).
A legacy of the war, however, was the heightening of ethnic tensions, a
hatred of Soviet Communism, and bitterness at the betrayal of the East by
the West, which under the Yalta and Potsdam agreements ceded Eastern
Europe to Soviet control. When, after the Soviet collapse, independent states
reremerged in Eastern and Central Europe, the return to older national
identities was accompanied by a revival of interwar tensions between majority
and minority nations, and by new animosities arising from substantial Russian
settlements in the Baltic States. The lack of experience of the populations with
representative political institutions meant nationalism was likely to focus on
ethnohistorical issues in spite of their huge economic problems. Many sucr
cessor states have sought accession to the European Union and NATO as a
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 117

solution to their economic and security problems (Harris 2012: 339740).

Although the EU required a formal commitment to civic rather than ethnic
policies at the state level, a glut of economic problems facing the new states has
encouraged nationalizing elites to focus on unnished ethnic business, generr
ating difculties between Hungary and Romania over the status of ethnic
Hungarians in Transylvania.
This applies also to the successor nation states ofthe former USSR, formed
suddenly in 1991 along republican boundaries and often containing signicant
minorities with their own political institutions and grievances. These prob
lems were exacerbated by dislocations generated by the transition from an
authoritarian socialist system to a democratic politics and a competitive
capitalist economy. Even before the downfall of Gorbachev, Armenia had
begun an irredentist war against Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of
NagornorKarabakh. Nationalizing pol' ies by the titular nationality of the new
states generated conicts: Georgia was faced by secessionist movements in
Abkhazia and Ossetia, and Russia by Chechen movements embittered by their
mass displacement in the Second World War. Initially, under Yeltsin, the
Russian state, rejecting the Soviet imperial past and seeking integration into
Western democratic capitalism, seemed to have little interest in the substantial
Russian minorities in the Baltic territories, Ukraine, and Central Asian repubr
lics. However, under Putin, the Brubaker triad has sprung back into life,
manifested in Putins claim of the right to intervene in the Ukraine to protect
the rights of Russians and in the Russian annexation of the Crimea.
The legacy of empire was also profound for the cores and colonies of the
former overseas empires. The loss of empire created a crisis of identity in
France and Britain and the search for alternative roles in the emerging
European Union. They also sought a leadership role over the new states,
Britain by transforming empire into the British Commonwealth, France in
guiding Francophone states in Africa and beyond. A sense of connection
combined with demographic decline in Europe also encouraged largerscale
immigration from former colonies to the metropolitan states, transforming
their larger urban centres and leading to multicultural societies and ethnic
tensions.
The legacy varied greatly, especially for the colonies. In Asia, a sense of
collective and (some would argue) national identity had emerged in several
regionsisiam, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Koreaibefore the modern period
which could be exploited by nationalist elites (Lieberman 2003: 4174). The
length and depth of European penetration was also a factor: the long presence
of a British administration in the Indian subcontinent had resulted in the
growth of Western educated secular stratum. Allied to urban merchants and
religious revivalist movements rejecting missionary Christianity, they were
able to use the Hindu civilizational heritage as a tacit basis of establishing a
separate Indian nation state. We saw how such identities were reinforced as a
118 Nutiunalism and Wm

result of the experiences and vicissitudes of the two world wars. The military
struggle of the Viet elites against, rst the French, and then the Americans,
helped construct a mass national identity.
British policies of divide and rule and willingness to quickly jettison empire
intensied hostilities between ethnic groups on the Indian subcontinent. India
and Pakistan were quickly partitioned, creating vast population movements
and massacres, while in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese sought to overturn what
they perceived as Tamil privileges existing under the British. So, too, earlier
imperial population policies, supporting the movement of ethnic populations
to colonial territories to serve economic niches, Indians in Fiji and Chinese in
Malaysia, led to ethnic conict after independence. It also encouraged policies
of economic nationalism.
In the Middle East the arbitrary territorial lines drawn by the British and
French after the First World War to construct Syrian and Iraqi states led to the
corralling of disparate Shia and Sunni and Christian populations, producing
longrterm instability. British acquiescence in largerscale Iewish immigration
into Palestine enabled the construction of an Israeli state and the dispossession
of Arab populations, leading to a series of wars. After 1945 Western states
continued to interfere in the region, for example, installing the Pahlavi dynasty
in Iran. Rich in oil, the Middle East was regarded as crucial for Western
economies and of strategic military signicance in the Cold War. Attempts
supported by more powerful Arab states, such as Egypt, to create a panrArab
political unity to counteract this Western inuence foundered on the rivalries
of the newly created states, and the failure of pan and territorial state
nationalisms has paved the way for the rise of political Islam in this region.
Even less can the polities emerging from rapid African decolonization be
described as substantive nation states. In spite of the postwar strengthening of
the colonial state, African nationalists possessed few implements of effective
rule. The period of European empire was relatively brief and, after the threat of
military rivalry between the powers was largely removed by the Berlin agree
ment of 1885, there were few incentives for Europeans to develop an adminr
istrative apparatus of control or good communications over large territories
with low population densities (Herbst 2000: Chs. 1, 9). Imperial authority was
maintained by indirect rule through agreements with customary chiefs and by
dividerandrrule strategies that selected specic etlmicities to control the popur
lation at large. This mode of politics continued after independence, with leaders
allying with particular ethnic groups rather than building state power. They
inherited a largely undeveloped agriculture and industries dependent on
relations with the former colonial powers. Many of the new states were
landlocked and onerthird of Africa's capital cities were situated close to a
state border (Nugent 2013: 44576).
The new states lacked a collective identity in inheriting colonial boundaries
incongruent with their ethnic population. Nationalist organizations were
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 119

among the few territoryrwide institutions, but rapid decolonization meant that
in many cases nationalists came to power without a broadrbased liberation
struggle that could unite otherwise disparate populations. They thereby lacked
a crucial rite of passage' and founding myths for the new state (Howard 2002:
9879). In spite of this fragility, international conventions since 1945 making
existing state boundaries sacrosanct has meant there have been no military
pressures on their leaders to construct efcient administrative and taxi
collecting structures (Herbst 2000).
Postcolonial politics has focused on building often unstable ethnic coalir
tions. PaerfliCan unity against the heritage and continued power of European
imperialism has had some cohesive force. This has not prevented many of the
successor states being plunged into internal political violence as ethnic groups
have competed to control a state viewed as a mere resource. With democrar
tization, minorities given preference by colonial authorities (Tutsi in Rwanda)
were exposed to ethnic cleansing and even genocide. Colonial practices of
importing external ethnic groups in substantial numbers to sustain imperial
commerce (e.g. Indian traders in Uganda) also added further points of con
icts. The problems of African state legitimacy were for a time masked by
diverting internal discontents against the continuing presence of white mir
nority regimes in Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. After
their downfall, internal ethnic conicts have proliferated, abetted by interferr
ence from the rival superpowers. This has made it difcult for states to
negotiate favourable terms of trade, in spite of panrAfrican ideologies that
aspired to maximize solidarities and overcome neocolonialist' attempts by
former imperial powers to maintain vested interests.
In conclusion, the military dissolution of empires has been transformative.
It brought into being an international order, dominated by noanuropean
hegemons, and a mass of postcolonial states that dene themselves against
older European hierarchies of power. Although the intense experiences of total
wars (the interventionist pressures of imperial states, starvations, and ethnic
cleansings) could result in mass nationalization, the collapse of empires
catapulted populations into independence before they had developed repre
sentative institutions or a modern economy, and within boundaries that
contained aggrieved ethnic minorities. To police this new order the victorious
powers established the League of Nations and the United Nations, institution
alizing new principles in international law that dened selfrdetermination,
territorial sovereignty, and the rules of war. However, the order that emerged,
contrary to Tilly (1992), was only partially the result of treaties of the victorir
ous powers. These conated competing principles (of selfrdetermination
with state sovereignty). They sanctioned realities on the ground established
by local agents after the formal end of hostilities between the great powers,
whether we consider the military struggles of nationalist units after 1918 or the
forced migrations of populations at the end of the Second World War. Such
I2U Nutiunalism and Wm

outcomes demonstrate that claims that interstate warfare necessarily leads to

national homogenization are highly questionable. Indeed, the memories of
their sometimes bloody origins and the mismatch between political and
ethnographical boundaries of fragile states have been a source of instability
in the contemporary period.

EMPIRE AND SECURITY IN A WORLD

OF NATION STATES

Have we seen with the end of Soviet Union the nal triumph of the national
over the imperial principle? Mark Beissinger thinks not. The USSR was, rather,
the rst of a new kind of empire which denied its imperial quality and used
the corner stones of the modern nationrstate systemithe norms of state
sovereignty and national selfrdetermination to maintain nonrconsensual
control over culturally distinct populations (Beissinger 2005: 17).
In practice, distinctions between nation states and empires can be hard to
maintain. The rise of many early European nation states was accompanied by
imperial expansion, through both the colonization of immediate neighbours
and the conquest of faraway territories. Although liberal varieties of nationalism
might later reject empire, racial nationalists asserted the rights of elite nations
to rule over others. These latter extolled empire as integral to national prestige
and as justifying claims of a civilizing mission. As revolutions in industry,
communications, and trade demonstrated the global interdependence of states,
so by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imperialist nationalists
dreamed ofcreating panrnatlonal or racial blocs (AnglorSaxon, Slavic, Gemianic,
Asian) in the belief that only units of near continental scale could provide
geopolitical and economic security (Lieven 2015: Ch. 1).
If great powers blurred the distinctions between national and imperial
states, few of the new postrimperial states of the twentieth century can be
described substantively as sovereign nation states. Each imperial dissolution
resulted in the hasty and unplanned mass creation of states with signicant
minorities and boundaries that generated security problems in strategic
borderlands. To these minorities the new states had an imperial character,
and their security problems encouraged projects to reabsorb them into new
imperial units that proclaimed some kind ofglobal mission, whether nationalist,
Communist, or Fascist.
We see a continuous dialectic between nationrstate emergence and imperial
formation conditioned by the weakness or absence of neutral authoritative
international institutions. When dynastic empires collapsed in 1918, their
noanuropean colonies were incorporated into natiowstate empires of the
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 121

victors under a mandate. In the interwar period, Britain and France, beset by
economic instabilities, abandoned free trade and tried to create mercantile
units from their imperial possessions.
In Eastern Europe the Bolsheviks, confronted by their White opponents and
an Allied intervention to overthrow the revolution, reconstituted much of the
Tsarist Empire without the Western borderlands (of Poland, Finland, and the
Baltic states). By promising recognition of their rights to selfrdetermination
Bolsheviks coropted minority nationalists, threatened either by the Whites
plans to establish an imperial Russian domination or by external neighbours,
such as a resurgent Turkey which claimed Armenian and Georgian territories.
Rule by a more distant imperial centre granting degrees of autonomy was less
intimidating than that of a menacing neighbour.
Italian anger at the Allies rejection of their irredentist ambitions fuelled a
Fascist drive for empire in Africa. In Germany resentment at the Versailles
truncation of the Reich gave impetus to Nazi dreams of a racial empire in the
East that would reunite Germans in a homeland and provide Lebensmum for
its population. The Nazi (and Fascist) drive for empire was assisted by the
weakness of international institutions (the League of Nations), the political
instabilities of the new states, the breakdown of a liberal international economic
order in the l930s, and opportunistic use of the principles of national self
determination. Intellectuals, of both the right and left, proclaimed that the era
of liberal nation states was over and the future lay with large blocs pursuing
autarchic collectivist policies (Carr 1939). The Soviets constructed a closed
economic area and a collectivist war economy, while the Nazis revived older
German dreams of Mitteleumpa. Japan in the I930s created the East Asian
CorProsperity Area, invading Korea, seizing Manchuria, and occupying large
parts of China.
The following world war led to the destruction of the Axis projects and the
crumbling of European overseas empires, rst in Asia and the Middle East,
and then in Africa. The United Nations Charter (1945) appeared to guarantee
the independence of nation states by forbidding external interference in the
territorial sovereignty of existing states. However, the European battle for
global supremacy was succeeded by ideological and military struggles
between the two quasirimperial powers, the USA and the USSR. The latter,
as we saw, had attempted to defang nationalism by granting elements of self
determination, formal sovereignty, and cultural autonomy to its nationalist
minorities. It similarly secured its external domination in Eastern Europe by
giving formal independence to its new territories, thereby creating a buffer
zone of states, recognized juridically by the international system, but which
were subject to covert controls (Beissinger 2005: 28732). The USA used
economic power to enforce obedience on its allie . on the Dutch to withdraw
from Indonesia and on the British and French over Suez. Both powers carved
spheres of inuence in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle
122 Nutiunalism and Wm

East, where there was prolonged military instability, and supported client
states in playgrounds in which they fought out their differences, often interr
vening after invitations' to support rival ideological factions. In the Korean
peninsula, the USA and China were drawn into direct confrontations, and in
IndorChina, after the French failure, the USA fought against Vietnamese
national liberation' forces indirectly supported by the Soviet Union and
China. In the Middle East, the Cold War protagonists intervened to support
their favoured side, the USA occasionally supporting military coups (e.g. in
Iran) just as it did in Latin America against instances of what it feared as
Communist subversion. Decolonization, particularly in Africa, has been
dubbed a new kind of imperialism, as a formal transfer of authority masked
the continued incorporation of the new states into a world political and
capitalist economic system in which the rules of the game were determined
by the West (Darwin 1999).
After the demise of the Soviet Union, the USA became a global hegemon: a
military giant with a web of 132 foreign military bases, the dynamo of the
world capitalism with its reserve currency (the dollar), control of international
economic institutions and multinational companies, and the cultural leader as
English (or American) became the world language of commerce, science, and
the humanities (Mann 2004b: 22). It remains the world's policeman, driven by
its own sense of mission or pressed into service by regional actors, usually by
forming coalitions of states in areas of insecurity. At times it seems to be
operating (even if temporarily) as an oldrfashioned territorial empirei
temporary in the sense that its goals have been to intervene in strategic areas
that pose a threat (of terrorism or of weapons of mass destruction) in order to
establish friendly regimes.
Overt imperialism, however, produces internal opposition in the metropole
by those who interpret it as a potential threat to their distinctive traditions and
liberties. America, after all, prides itself as the rst modern democratic repubr
lic. The spread of nationalist ideologies has also made the costs of establishing
new empires unaffordable (Mann 2003; 2004b). Previous empires rested on
collaborators who are now rendered illegitimate by the spread of nationalist
ideologies. A new empire would have to rely almost solely on overwhelming
military force but, while the USA has technological superiority sufcient to
win wars, in possessing a professional rather than a mass conscription army it
lacks the numbers to control territory.
Daniel Moran (2006: 3275), like Mann, suggests that developments in
guerrilla war undermine territorial imperialisms in two important respects.
Through contact with the West the noanuropean world has absorbed
organizational techniques, mass communications, and ideologies (such as
nationalism) that provide two new strategies of resistance. The rst is an
ability to appeal to the sympathies of international outsiders. Resistance
movements have developed expertise in obtaining diplomatic support and
 Imperial Collapse and Nation States 123

economic and military aid, often from their diasporas overseas. The mass
media has made the world a global village, making war unpalatable by
bringing its horrors into living rooms, and capable of making unpopular
wars like the Vietnam conflict all but unsustainable. Insurgents deploy tactics
to appeal to global public opinion as well as to undermine the legitimacy of the
conict in the intervening state, in which the heritage of colonialism has
produced a moral ambivalence about military action. Algerian revolutionaries
who styled themselves ironically as Maquis (a French Resistance term) used
French military tactics, including torture and reprisals against the Algerian
civilian population, to erode public support for Frances campaign against the
guerilla struggle for independence, which in turn undermined the morale of
the military. Such military practices threatened to pollute the legitimating
myth of postwar France (of the Resistance's heroism against the brutalities of
Nazi occupation), by appearing to place France in the role of the Nazi regime
and the Algerians in that ofthe French Resistance (Moran 2006: 31, 11771 -
Prost 1999). What one might call spectacle terrorism is also used to intim
date, and the use of the symbolism of the levee en masse as well atrocity stories
has weakened the legitimacy of imperial forces. Military authorities, aware of
the corrosive effect of media images, have sought to domesticate journalists by
embedding them into military units.
The second is a new capacity to bear the burdens of protracted war. With
the spread of nationalism, mobilization is no longer local and haphazard, but
sustained and coordinated across larger territories. With an understanding of
Western public opinion, new military methods employ time as a weapon.
Against opponents with superior organization and technology, traditional
methods of resistance by guerrillas (asymmetric war) have evolved so that
the strategy is to avoid decisive battles in favour of a gradual exhaustion of the
enemy forces and of their public support.
Against this one might argue that the states in which the USA intervenes are
unstable because of profound social divisions, which makes it possible to nd
collaborative allies, even if this is unlikely to produce longrterm stability.
Moreover, Iohn Darwin argues that while formal empires are ideologically
problematic in an age of nationalism, the highest forms of empire are inforr
mal. Just as British predominance in the nineteenth century rested not just on
its navy but on its vast economic and nancial power and the prestige of
its liberal ideas and rational culture, so too this is now the case of the
USA. Michael Mann, however, has also questioned the latters capacity to
act as an economic hegemon.
US predominance has produced nationalist reactions from other power
centres (China, Iran, and Russia), but these themselves act as quasirimperial
powers in their drive to control strategically sensitive and economically crucial
territories (Russia in Eurasia, China in Inner Asia) that results in the suborr
dination of neighbouring nations or ethnic populations. Vladimir Putins policies,
124 Nutiunalism and Wm

although subject to nationalist pressures, are currently inuenced by a vision of

Russia as a great Orthodox European civilizationia new Byzantiumithat will
lead a multinational bloc ofEurasian peoples in defence oftraditional conservative
Christian values against the corrosive global liberal economic policies and human
rights agendas advanced by the West (Laruelle 2016). There are equivalent
reactions in Europe, where France and Germany built a European political and
economic community as a place of stability and economic security to counter
both Sowet and US power. Iust as alliances with the USA have been sought by
states with powerful neighbours (Iapan and Korea fearing China), so too many
postrSoviet states have rushed to join the EU, even at the cost of surrendering
sovereignty to an organization dominated by France and Germany, to achiewe
security against a possible revival of Russian imperialism.
As we noted, very few states, including postrimperial states, are truly
national. Many of them have an imperial character with respect to their
historic national territorial minorities (for example, Spain with respect to
Catalans and Basques). In an era where national selfrdetermination is the
dominant ideology, overt empire is now illegitimate. But Beissinger (2005: 33)
maintains that in the contemporary world empire can be redened to refer to
illegitimate relationships of control by one national political society over
another. Citing Ian Clark (2001: 250), he further argues that the norms of
state sovereignty and restrictions of selfrdetermination to state territorial units
constitute a form of imperial rule by established states, which render illegitr
imate the claims of stateless nations.
War, then, historically has not produced a world of substantive nation states
but new forms of political multirethnicities of a hierarchical character which
generate new problems of legitimacy and disorder. We shall explore the
implications of this for warrmaking and nation formation in Chapter 4.
 4

Contemporary Warfare and the

End of Heroic Nationalism?

INTRODUCTION

In an illuminating essay Ioep Leerssen draws on Friedrich Nietzsche and

Ernest Renan to distinguish between monumental and traumatic modes of
remembrance. The rst belongs to triumphal states and their governing elites,
and it is marked by a strong collective consensus about the nation that
canonizes the acts of individuals as part of a heroic and progressive talus
which is objectied in stone, ofcial histories, and a high public culture. By this
recognition of achievements, grief, loss, and a sense of transience are over
come. The second is the submerged culture of the subaltern that, without
access to a public sphere, is perpetuated by iterative performances and through
familial, kinship, or informal networks that return endlessly to longrcherished
humiliations (Leerssen 2001: 209715). Leerssen observes that Ernest Renan
predicted that with the progress of the historical sciences, the unsavoury
facts previously purged from the ofcial records would be revealed, triggering
resentments among longrmarginalized groups and threatening the solidarity
of nation states. This has come to pass, and historical investigation has turned
from victors and glory to the victimized and defeatedito ethnic and other
minorities and colonized peoples (Leerssen 2001: 217718). Even the monuments
of dominant groups have incorporated traumatic experiences into their history,
exemplied in the Vietnam Wall in Washington, which opts for a funereal
register of mourning rather than one of celebration (Leerssen 2001: 219).
How far is this true, and to what extent have the generally positive connecr
tions made in the nineteenth century between war and nation formation been
broken? In Chapter} we charted how the world wars brought into being a
mass of fragile and conicted nation states, often illrequipped to compete in a
global world dominated by superpowers claiming universal missions. More
over, in the latter stages of the conict new technologies of mass destruction
were created that made the prospect of future wars deeply unpalatable. In this
chapter I will assess ve different perspectives that suggest that this legacy and
126 Nutiunalism and Wm

changes in the character of war since 1945 are moving us into a postnational
era. In the rst part of this chapter I will examine:
. the destructive impact of the two world wars that have demonstrated the
dangers and impotence of nation states and resulted in the establishment
of global and regional institutions to govern relations between states;
. the impact of transnational military revolutions that have produced a
shift from mass conscription to professional militaries and a civilianizar
tion of society in the developed West;
. the shift of the West to riskrtransfer wars in foreign conict zones that are
justied by universal rather than national mandates;
- the proliferation of intrastate new wars in postcolonial countries, orir
ginating in global processes, that fragment collective identities and re
quire cosmopolitan solutions;
- in a postrimperial world, the growing suspicion of the military narratives
of Western nation states and an awareness of the victims of war, which
erode the heroic ethos on which collective sacrice for the nation depends.
Underpinning these positions is the assumption that such changes are part of
a transition to a global interdependent world where universal norms are
invoked to justify action. There are, allegedly, multiple factors and processes
at play. They include, we shall see, the establishment of the UN and inter
national legal conventions, supported by a transnational civil society of NGOs
and pressure groups. These restrict the rights of national states to go to war
and establish universal principles that justify international interventions in
sovereign states to prevent crimes against humanity. Globalization (in the
form of neorliberal economics) has undermined the capacity of already weak
ened postcolonial states to control their populations. The proliferation of a
transnational arms trade has enabled the privatization of war and, in combine
ation with the new reach of diaspora communities, may threaten weaker states
in the South. Longrrange mass migration has transformed the character of
Western national states and may threaten their cohesion when militarily
intervening in former colonies.
In the second half of the chapter I will argue that these perspectives are
WestrEurocentric, and that while national identity and state formation are
undoubtedly being transformed in much of the world, there is little evidence
that military changes (broadly conceived) and global processes are fundameir
tally eroding them. In some regions the rise of political Islamist movements
does point to the fragility of nationrstate models. On the whole, however, there
is instead a mutation rather than a supersession of nationalism, as these
developments have generated new debates about the meaning of the nation
and sacrice in a world whose increasing interdependence may produce
unpredictability and sometimes new conllicts.
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 127

WAR AND THE TRANSITION TO POSTNATIONALISM?

The Second Thirty Years War: From Martial Heroism

to the Politics of Restitution

In many countries the commemorative rituals of the First and Second World
Wars are the frame through which the sacrices of all subsequent wars are
recognized. From another perspective, the wars laid the basis of a postnational
world, creating rst in 1920 the League of Nations, then in 1945 the United
Nations, organizations that sought to establish universal norms to regulate
disputes between nation states. Can the world wars be regarded together as a
Second Thirty Years War' that in the European heartland of the nation state
has eroded a belief in national identities and enabled the rise of a global and
regional identities, in which the politics of reconciliation and restitution is
replacing that of martial realpolitik?
To speak of a Second Thirty Years War is to make analogies with the
confessional conicts that devastated Central Europe in the seventeenth
century. The memory of this catastrophe haunted German nationalist thinkers
from the nineteenth century to the existential conicts of the two world wars
(Cramer 2008). Figures such as General de Gaulle and Winston Churchill
recalled this period in trying to make sense of the upheavals of their time (Bell
1986: 15). Historians have assessed the parallel, querying if the two world wars
should be viewed as a single interrupted struggle between the great powers for
European dominance or as separate conicts (see Howard 1993). There are
suggestive parallels between the seventeenth and twentiethrcentury conicts.
They were European in their scale, during which the great powers fought
for continental hegemony. The German territories were at their centre and
ideological differences were a driving forceireligious in the seventeenth
century and nationalist in the twentieth century. They were psychologically
and physically disastrous, resulting in huge loss of life, through a combination
of war, starvation, and disease and were economically impoverishin
My purpose here is not to enter into a detailed discussion of this historical
debate. Rather, I will examine if the world wars had a functional equivalence to
their predecessor. The fanaticism, huge loss of life, and threat to political and
social order during the Thirty Years War are often regarded as generating a
moral and political revulsion against religious claims, reected in the VVesL
phalian settlement that subordinated confessional to state imperatives, in the
subsequent formulation of Grotian international laws of war to civilize milir
tary conduct, and later in the Enlightenment project of establishing a civil
society and polity founded on rational principles (Mayall 1990: Ch. 2). Have
the twentiethrcentury wars between the European states produced a similar
shiftito more cosmopolitan or at least transnational forms of identity? If so,
how are national identities affected by this?
128 Nutiunalism and War

I argued in Chapter2 that nationalism has been the surrogate religion of

modernity, and one of its central cults has been that of the fallen hero, who by
(lying in battle for the nation achieves immortality by being remembered
forever. For many nationalists the nation is a terminal community, which
is attested by acts of mass sacrice. Some young wouldrbe nation states have
viewed largerscale sacrice in war as an essential rite of passage, in offering
proof of the reality of the nation as a site of ultimate loyalty. Australians
viewed thus the costly Gallipoli campaign during the First World War
(Beaumont 2014).
However, George Mosse, after observing the martial enthusiasm of Euror
pean populations in 1914, contended that the cumulative effect of the two
world wars of the twentieth century reversed the positive relationship between
war and nation formation. These were total wars that, so far from revitalizing
nations, threatened to destroy their populations and elicited not a sense of
heroism but anonymous victimhood. In 1914 war became a mass technologicr
al phenomenon, dominated by static defence lines, anonymous and alienating
except for the camaraderie of the trenches, and it resulted death on an
unprecedented scale. The Second World War completed the destruction of
the romantic myth, by blurring the vital distinction between ghters and
civilians, notably in the aerial devastation of cities and the introduction of
(nuclear) armaments that indicated that future wars might entail the annihir
lation of nations (Mosse 1990: 201, 2234). These two wars witnessed largerscale
ethnic cleansing, culminating in the attempted genocide of the Armenians by
Young Turkish nationalists (1915) and in the Holocaust. Martin Shaw
has argued that the wars of industrial states tend to degenerate to kill
populations indiscriminately, since civilians are participants in the vast
chain of economic production and distribution now integral to the war effort
(Shaw 2003: 2376). From this it is easy to move to genocidal war where the
civilians are notjust collateral damage but the intended victims (Shaw 2003:
Ch. 2). As the century has progressed, there has been a remarkable shift in
the proportions of nonrcombatant deaths in war. Paul Bartrop (2002: S29)
claims that only 5 per cent of total deaths in the First World War were
civilians; by the Second World War this was 66 per cent and heading to 80
per cent in the 1980s.
W. H. McNeill has argued that the world wars represent the end of the
European nation state as a sovereign actor. The economic coordination and
partial integration of military commands of the Allied Powers (Britain, France,
and the USA) in the later stages of the First World War was a precursor of
the transnational forms of military organization achieved in its successor
(McNeill 1984: 34374). The wars threw up, as hegemons, global superpowers
of continental scale, the USA and the USSR, proponents of rival universalist
ideologies that seemed to presage the obsolescence of nationalism. In short,
since 1945 there has been a profound revulsion in much of Europe against
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 129

nationalism, now blamed for the origins and excesses of these wars, and a
scepticism about the viability of nation states.
One outcome was the founding of the United Nations in 1945, which
under its charter outlawed war between states, except under special circumr
stances. Following the Nuremberg Trials the UN established conventions in
1948 that obliged its members to advance principles of human rights and
prevent crimes against humanity (Levy and Sznaider 2004: 147750). A key
role was played by the universalization of the memory of the Holocaust.
This was transformed from an epochal moment in the JewishrGentile
historical relationship during the 1960s. From the 1990s it provided moral
foundations for the transition from a world of national sovereignty toward a
more global civil society, of which the recent proliferation of human rights
regimes is the manifestation (Levy and Sznaider 2004: 155). There is also a
new attention paid to the victims of war. After the Rwanda massacres the
UN formulated in 2005 the Responsibility to Protect principles. Although
not legally binding, these asserted that sovereignty is not a right, but a
responsibility, one which should be enforced by the international commur
nity through sanctions and, in the last resort, military intervention in cases
of genocide.
A second expression was the emergence of the European Union as a
supranational project to resolve the rivalries of the great nation states, now
perceived as threatening the very existence of national peaples. Inspired by
liberal democratic ideals, the pioneers of the EU, many involved in the
resistance movements against Nazism, have dreamed of transcending the
nation state and converting the continent into a zone of peace and democratic
progress (dAppolonia 2002). One of the justications of this project has been
economic and social: the restoration and construction of Europe as a site of
economic prosperity and social democracy. Even more central are foundar
tional myths, negative and positive, linked to the two world wars. These wars
(viewed as a European civil war), it has been said, are the other against which
Europeanists dene themselves (Wellings and Power 2016). The negative
myth is the periodic recalling of the horrors of European fratricide at points
of crisis, for example when there is nationalist resistance to the expansion of
EU powers at the expense of the states. More positively, adherents claim the
EU as a realization of a new international politics of reconciliation, begun by
the agreement of two historic rivals, France and (West) Germany, to cooperate
in building a new Europe. Together, these powers have been the drivers of the
European integration project. An essential factor was West Germanys willy
ingness to acknowledge the sins of the Nazi period (notably in its educational
system), and make material and symbolic reparations to the victims of the war
(Olick and Demetriou 2006). A key moment was the public contrition of Willy
Brandt in 1970, expressed in his kneeling before the Warsaw Memorial to the
Jewish heroes of the ghetto uprising in 1943 (Rauer 2006).
130 Nutiunalism and War

The memory of the Holocaust has also played an increasingly important

role in the validation of the European project. Although the need for atoner
ment was felt most intensely in Germany, after the end ofthe Cold War public
trials of eerazis in many European countries, including France and Austria,
compelled a public acknowledgement of extensive collaboration in sustaining
the German war effort and the removal and killing of Jews. This extended even
to supposedly neutral nation states like Switzerland and Sweden, which under
pressure of revelations by transnational bodies like the World Iewish Congress
had to admit their complicity and to reform their educational curricula (Beker
2010). Bernhard Giesen proposes that trauma has become the basis of a new
European identity, and that Europes means of mastering its violent past by
rituals of apology and restitution provides a model for overcoming historic
conicts worldwide. Such restitutive models also offer a more humble and
pacic alternative to the militaristic and messianic USA in the global advancer
ment of human rights and democracy (Giesen 2003). Others have claimed
after the Stockholm conference of 2000 the prevention of another Holocaust
became the civilizational foundation of a new European project (Levy and
Sznaider 2002: 10073).
The politics of reconciliation seems to have taken hold, in the form of
apologies by the US government to Africans for the slave trade, by the British
to the Irish for the Great Famine, and by the New Zealand, Canadian, and
Australian governments to indigenous peoples for the expropriation of their
lands and subsequent treatment. Transitional justice mechanisms in which
groups in bitterly divided societies acknowledge and seek forgiveness for
historical mutual atrocities are regarded as keys to future peace and stability
within states. This has led Elazar Barkan to refer to the guilt of nations, and to
maintain that the emergence of such restitutive politics marks a replacement
of martial realpolitik by morality in the conduct of international relations
(Barkan 2000: xvi).

Decline of the Citizen in Arms

A striking feature of the post71945 period is the decline of interstate wars

between the great powers. Michael Howard (1976: Ch. 7) has attributed this to
military, scientic, and organizational revolutions that gave rise to nuclear and
highrprecision weaponries and placed a premium on highly skilled specialists.
During the Cold War the nuclear standoff between the USA and the USSR
resulted in a long peace on the European continent and made the idea of
warfare between advanced powers all but unthinkable. From the 1960s there
has been a shift away from mass conscription to smaller professional armies.
The draft was abolished entirely in Britain in 1960, Australia and New Zealand
in 1972, the US in 1973, Belgium in 1994, and France and the Netherlands in
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 131

1996 (King 2013: 208710; Lachmann 2013: 54). With the onus of national
defence now placed on professional volunteers, the close relationship between
the military and the national collective has been loosened as one of the pillars
of the mass nation state, universal conscription, has gone (Posen 1995).
Howard maintains that war or its prospect no longer provides a source of
social cohesion, and states now do not feel the need to nationally mobilize their
populations. In Europe the rights to citizenship have become detached from
the obligation to bear arms in national defence, so that, in Howards words
(2002: 100), death was no longer seen as part of the social contract In similar
vein, Anthony King argues that in contemporary armies cohesion under re is
no longer maintained by smallrgroup male solidarities and ideological fervour,
but by an ethos of professionalism, derived from the choreographed cooperr
ation between highly trained specialists (King 2013; 2014).
The result is that there has been a general demilitarization of mature
Western democracies, particularly in Europe after the end of the Cold War,
as the proportion of state revenues devoted to the national defence has rapidly
declined in favour of the welfare system, which now provides the social cement
of the democratic nation state. There has been a corresponding decline in the
salience of nationalism, particularly amongst an educated middle class who
were pioneers of the original romantic cult of heroic sacrice, but who are
increasingly alienated from the martial values of the past. Modern middle
class democracies, it is argued, are now casualtyraverse and suspicious of
military campaigns of choice that degenerate into brutality (Merom 2003:
Ch. 3). The Vietnam war is often cited as evidence of the sensitivity of the
Western publics and policymakers to body bags, and to the sufferings of war
brought into their living rooms by the mass media (Carruthers 2014).
Many explain this by demographic factors: declining fertility since 1945
has produced the casualty aversion of advanced Western democracies
(Luttwak 1995). Lachmann (2013: 5576) observes that threatened or milir
taristic regimes tended to promote aggressive programmes to boost birth
rates, and that throughout the history of conscription only sons have been
exempt from military service in many countries. As fertility now declines to
bare replacement rates, parents are less willing to dispatch their children to
war. This places constraints on states and has encouraged a shift towards
what Martin Shaw (2005) calls riskrtransfer wars and Mary Kaldor (2006)
spectacle wars. These, characterized by longrdistance precision weapons
and highraltitude engagement, are replacing the struggles of mass armies on
the ground. Others have pointed to the rapid ageing ofthe populations of the
great powers, including China, which is already producing a redistribution of
resources from the military to welfare and pensions, as well as threatening
the economic growth necessary to sustain the military. These trends, set to
intensify over coming decades, will erode states capacity to intervene milir
tarily (Haas 2012).
132 Nutiunalism and War

War is now perceived as a moral anomaly rather than a constituent feature

of the state system, and many observers fear that the reduction of the military
threatens to make it a marginal actor in the larger society, with which it
appears now at odds. In the West the postwar period has seen many larger
scale pacist demonstrations, directed at nuclear armaments and successive
military campaigns from Suez to the Second GulfWar. Howard (1976: 14273)
has warned that the dominant culture of consumerism and individualism is
likely to undermine in the long run the morale of a military committed to
hierarchy, discipline, and selfrsacrice as part of a distinctive mission to the
nation state. The old stoical response to fatality, reinforced by religion, is in
decline, replaced by a concern for the security and wellrbeing of individuals.
While the increased military professionalism observed by Anthony King may
have enhanced performance in the battleelds, Hew Strachan (2014) and
Andreas HerbergrRothe (2014) worry about the growing gap between national
populations and the military and wonder if a professional code can provide a
viable motivation for combat in the absence of patriotic convictions.
Senior ofcers in Western democracies fear the loss of respect for the
distinctive military vocation, and the impact on military morale of the pres
sures of a global civil ethos, expressed in a declining tolerance for state violence
and a concern for human rights and for war violations. Legal rulings admitting
women and homosexuals to serve in combat roles have led to anxieties that the
military themselves are being civilianized, viewed just a branch of the public
service, and subject to the norms of the day (Forster 2006: 104879). Increase
ingly, the military face a difcult choice between civilianization and losing
their vocational distinctiveness and a reassertion of a martial ethos that divorces
them from the mores of their society.

Wars of Choice

This is not to say that Western nation states no longer wage war. Rather, it is
argued they ght peacekeeping wars of international coalitions that require a
new postrheroic ethos, unlike the previous existential conicts that inspired
mass nationalist passions (Luttwak 1995). After 1945 the disintegration of
their empires, often accelerated by humiliating liberation wars, appeared to
entail the gradual disengagement of European states, with the approval of the
USA, from the rest of the world. However, as we have noted, many of the new
soirdisanf nation states that emerged were extremely fragile. Because of the
intensied interconnectedness of the contemporary world they have become
sources of security problems, and subject to calls for external intervention.
Although the collapse of Communism inspired hopes of a harmonious new
world order, it also triggered state disintegration and ethnic cleansings in the
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 133

Balkans and elsewhere. These produced waves of refugees that destabilized

neighbouring states, as well as offering bases for international terrorism.
In the past, European imperial powers engaged in many small wars when
establishing and enforcing colonial rule, but foreign military missions are
now much more problematic. As we noted, empires could draw many of
their troops from the colonies themselves: the Indian army was the re
brigade ofthe British Empire (Barkawi 2006: 61). This colonial manpower is
no longer available, imperialism is now discredited, and the global diffusion
of nationalist ideologies and repertoires of popular resistance, including
appeals to world public opinion, make armed interventions much more
costly, and the nding of collaborators (on which empires depended) more
difcult (Moran 2006: 3175). To justify intrusions into distant regions and
override national sovereignty, the great powers must generally now obtain a
mandate from a world community, and form coalitions of states, invoking
UN Charter provisions.
The tasks of intervening states and their militaries are now very different,
not territorial conquest and glory, but conict resolution and peacekeeping.
For Strachan it is questionable if this is compatible with the traditional
conception of the military (Strachan 2006). In spite of the professed goals of
peacekeeping, the militaries tend to be sucked into asymmetrical conicts with
some of the contending parties, in which it is difcult to distinguish between
combatant and civilian. Shaw (2005) argues that a new form of riskrtransfer
war has developed in Iraq and Afghanistan that avoids entanglements in
asymmetrical conicts and minimizes the military and civilian losses that
could undermine the legitimacy of the interventions. This includes a targeting
of enemy combatants with highrprecision weapons, a shift of the risks of
ground combat to local allies where possible, the avoidance of direct and
visible civilian killing through indirect and less visible forms of longrdistance
weaponry, such as drones.

New Wars outside the European Heartlands

Such interventions are provoked by the proliferation of intrastate conicts in

the rest of the world which Kaldor claims fragment states into ethnic units.
Although the wars of national liberation against European empires (1947764),
created (to varying degrees) national myths, charismatic heroes, and popular
mobilization, they often occurred in countries without a strong sense of
national identity. National claims coexisted with or overlaid existing clan or
ethnic afliations, and the sense of unity was largely negative, against the
existing colonial authority. Moreover, other factors were in play: transnational
revolutionary ideologies were powerful inspirations to the leadership core and
economic grievances to the mass of the population (Iohnson 2014: 6475).
134 Nutiunalism and Wm

After independence the weak postcolonial states often dissolved into civil
wars, a process often exacerbated by the tensions of the Cold War, which
led to the USA and the USSR to sponsor rival factions as part of the global
battle for supremacy. Kjell Holsti (2000: 146) states that since the Second
World War the number of intrastate wars to interstate wars (excluding antir
colonial wars) is in a ratio of 7:1, and these stretch from the Balkans to Africa,
Asia, and Latin America. Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer (2003: 6172) have
noted that the number of intrastate wars has accelerated since the 1960s, and
these increasingly involve international intervention. From 1816 to 1960 only
12.4 per cent of intrastate wars were internationalized; between 1960 and 1997
this was 30.6 per cent.
Mary Kaldor, whose analysis was based on contemporary Balkan conicts,
coined the term new wars for this phenomenon, one now widely adopted (cf.
Munkler 2005). The term new' is to contrast with Clausewitzian statist wars,
which were more or less discrete, fought by the ofcial military units for
political ends and for control of territory, and ended by decisive battles and
peace agreements, regulated by international law. Such wars resulted in a
stabilization of territorial borders and a centralization of political authority
out of which the concepts of nationality and citizenship emerged. What is new
is that violence (genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape) is directed at civilians not as
a side effect but as a strategy. They are not classic guerrilla wars, since the
agents are a mix of paramilitaries and regular forces. They are funded not
through taxation but through criminality and plunder (Kaldor 2005: 214716;
2006: Ch. 4). They are characterized by derstatization; by the asymmetry
between regular units and guerrilla bands; and by an autonomization' of the
forms of violence in which state forces have lost control over the conduct of
war. Here, politics has become separate from violence, and the focus is on
control of populations and resources (including drug running and mining)
rather than territories. War has become a way of life and a form of predatory
political economy that is destructive to collective identities. It has parallels
with premodern conicts such as the Thirty Years War, which employed
mercenaries, blurred state and intrastate conicts, ared up repeatedly, and
took place in the territories of former empires. (Munkler 2005: Ch. 1).
However, Munkler and Kaldor maintain contemporary struggles in Africa
and parts of Asia have a postmodern global character rather than being a
return to premodernity. During the Cold War, the West and the Soviet bloc
sponsored competing groups, for example in Angola, Mozambique, and the
Congo, but there was an acceleration of such conicts after the Cold War,
when a triumphant neorliberal capitalism sought to absorb the countries of the
South into the dominant political economy. The new context is of a proliferr
ation of weak states that lack internal legitimacy in a world subject to global
processes that they are powerless to regulate. Internal struggles cannot be
described as civil wars since there is little concept of state, citizenship, or
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 135

borders. Moreover, external actors (competing ideological blocs, largerscale

diasporas, and N608) intervene to keep these conicts going indenitely.
Emigre groups in the diasporas supported oppositions within states, and the
international community, by establishing refugee camps, poured resources
into distressed areas that could be seized by warlords. A global arms trade
supplying inexpensive Kalashnikovs makes decentralized guerrilla struggles
cheap to run. The result has been the sustaining of protracted lowrintensity
warfare that would repeatedly are up.
These scholars claim that the grand ideological narratives of nationalism no
longer apply in a global world. These are identity wars where ethnic classicar
tions are used by predatory leaders as a means of subverting the state or in the
process of achieving (communal) ethnic cleansing. Kaldor argues that the major
task to be addressed by international peacekeeping missions is the breakdown of
legitimacy, and we need a new cosmopolitan politics to reconstruct this in the
zones of war. This involves not the negotiating of truces between warring
ethnonationalists but the building up of pluralist democratic politics. This has
inspired peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, where international organizations
have sought to derethnicize the warring factions, construct neutral symbols and
institutions, and prosecute war criminals.

Posimodern Deconstructions and Cult of Victims

Such changes have, it is asserted, in turn undermined the heroic ethos of war
and transformed the way it is conceived and commemorated. National states
have lost sovereignty in a global age, their homogeneity has been eroded by
largerscale immigration from former colonies, and as a result their heroic
progress stories, embodied in great public monuments to the glorious dead,
have lost their validity. As Leerssen has observed, this has underpinned a
deconstructive turn among a critical intelligentsia since the horrors of the
Second World War that has challenged the national myths of the dominant
nationality, exposed the oppression of previously marginalized groups, and
promoted a multicultural relativism. In the contemporary world the focus is
on the victims of war, one expression of which is the institutionalization of
Holocaust Days which express a universalist condemnation of genocides and
mass ethnic cleansings.
Christopher Coker dates this turn earlier to the mechanized mass slaughter
of the First World War. As a result Western societies lost faith in the civic
patriotism able to invest death on the battle eld with meaning. The tombs to
the Unknown Soldier and Edward Lutyenss abstract Cenotaph to the dead
indicated that with the triumph of industrial technology war had become
agentless. Soldiers are no longer warriors given individuality and meaning by a
shared national telos but have become anonymous victims (Coker 2004: 14).
136 Nutiunalism and War

He cites Paul Fussell (1975), who found the sources of this shift in the
modernist culture emerging at the time of the First World War. This was
epitomized in the war poets, notably Wilfred Owen, and immediately after the
war in T. S. Eliots The Wasteland, which conveyed a sense of exhaustion and
disillusionment with European civilization. Iay Winter, although disputing the
impact of modernist culture (except among intellectuals), has interpreted
commemorations of the dead after the First World War in Britain and France
as sites of mourning rather than national celebration (Winter 1995: Chs. 4, 8).
His emphasis is on the persistence of traditional religious symbolism to
express a sense of loss. Mosse, in noting the continuation of similar (religious)
genres after the Second World War, argues that this demonstrated the weak
ening hold of the national cult. After 1945 in Britain there was also a trend
away from the public sacralization of the dead in monumentrbuilding focused
on the national cullectivity towards the utilitarian provision of recreational
facilities that served the individual needs of the people. In the West and
beyond, history has become, with the development of a heritage industry, a
means of entertainment and nostalgia rather than of collective revival (Mosse
1990: 22071; see also Nora 1996).
In the absence of a sacralizing narrative, Ienny Edkins (2003: Ch. 3) maiir
tains that there is a tendency to view the military dead as victims. The Vietnam
Wall, which has displaced the Arlington Cemetery and the tomb to the
Unknown Soldier as the most visited memorial site, is another emblem of a
longrterm shift away from heroic towards traumatic remembrance (Lachmann
2013: 61). The architect (of Asian descent and a woman) deliberately rejected
masculinist phallic' celebratory forms and nationalist iconography in design
ing low black walls that descend into the earth, on which the names of the dead
were inscribed. The focus is on individual mortality and loss. Lacking, therefore,
a didactic national context, it aimed to encourage an individualistic and conr
structivist stance to the past that undermines the idea of an objectied moral
collective (Edkins 2003: Ch. 3).
In contemporary Britain and Russia, most recent monuments are set in the
localities of the dead, eschew heroic formulae, merely list their places of
engagement, and present (in the British case) the dead in passive terms (as
killed in action) (Danilova 2015: 6073). The homecoming' ceremonies for
the military dead, organized in 2007 by the British Legion in Wootton Bassett,
a small market town in Wiltshire, where cofns draped in Union Jacks
processed through the main street, appeared to mark a shift away from
didactic ofcial monumentalism to a memorialization that is local, now
political, and performative (Freeden 2011).
Anthony King argues in Durkheimian terms that what integrates the
military with the wider public is not a shared sense of national purpose but
rather a respect for the ethos of professionalism that pervades modern socir
eties (King 2013: Ch. 12). He has observed that military press releases set the
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 137

dead as individuals closely knit to families and bound by professional loyalties

to soldier comrades (King 2010). Nataliya Danilova (2015: 5879) asserts
that the Russian and British political and military elites thereby pursue a
deliberate decontextualizing strategy to avoid provoking debate about the
justice of contemporary wars of choice, and to buttress support for a military
service ethos, necessary to sustain future military operations. This raises
questions about the symbolic and emotional resonance of national events
such as Remembrance Day.
Jay Winter understands this alienation as an expression of a second
memory boom that emerged in the 1970s (Winter 2006). Whereas the rst
boom in the later nineteenth century sanctied the emerging mass nation
states, the second focuses on the traumas and losers of history, often crushed
by great powers. He cites Pierre Nora, who argued that the shared past that
knit nation and state in the heroic phase of nationalism has faded, as the state
has increasing lost authority to society, producing fragmentation and a rise of
identity groups. The result is a proliferation of public sites of memory in
which the vitalizing myths of history have been replaced by the nostalgia of
heritage (Nora 1996, Vol 1: Introduction). A key event was the growing
consciousness of the enormity of the Holocaust and its challenge to the
triumphal elds of the European nation states.
We earlier noted arguments that remembrance ofthe Holocaust, abstractr
ed from its specic context, has become cosmopolitan. In a globalized
modern world, characterized by the transcending of boundaries, it provides
the foundations for a universal politics of human rights based on earlier
remembered barbarism (Levy and Sznaider 2005: 25). Holocaust guilt has
created an ethos of never again and a justication as well as an obligation
to act to prevent future mass murders (Levy and Sznaider 2002: 10]).
Among cultural intellectuals it inspired the counterrmonument movement
in Germany which pioneered a search for forms appropriate to the come
memoration of such a rupturing event. This movement rejected static
monuments (associated with nationalism) that might encourage a passive
objectication of persecution that too easily distances spectators from their
responsibility for the events. Instead, spectators by various devices must
bring into existence the commemorative structures and thereby perform
the memories. Here people participate as individuals, not as members of a
given collectivity (Young 1993: Ch. 1).
The deconstructive turn was not conned to Germany but was applied
more generally to national pasts, many of which were tainted by an awareness
of the extent of the European collaboration with the Nazi regime, and by the
strong association of twentiethrcentury war with murderous ethnic cleansing7
from the Balkan Wars just before the First World War to contemporary
conicts in Cambodia, the Balkans, and Rwanda (cf. Mann 2005: Ch.1).
This has produced a shift in liberal opinion that rejects the essentialized
138 Nutiunalism and Wm

210: of national pasts and associated monuments and rituals. The past is a
construct rather than an objective datum with a determinate social meaning.
The postmodern critique, represented by John Gillis (1994: Introduction),
of commemoration as a political process focuses on the protests of now
dominant groups (class, gender, and ethnic) against their exclusion from
ofcial narratives of war, public spaces, memorials, and history textbooks.
National pasts are compromised because they occlude the state violence
towards minorities inherent in the establishment of homogenized units, and
they justify patterns of exclusion and injustice that lie behind many of the
worlds conicts. The task of peacekeeping, both internationally and domesr
tically, is to achieve reconciliation by persuading participants in conicts to
acknowledge the historical grievances of the other (Barzan 2000). South Africa
has been a setting for what are called Transitional Justice Mechanisms, where
this took the form of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (Meskell 2006).
The national past is presumed to be malleable, and capable of being detached
from the ethnic myths that have justied past violence in order to construct a
new rational civic conception of community.

NA'llONALlSM TRANSFORMED.
NOT TRANSCENDED

Together these perspectives suggest an epochal change in the way that people
now perceive the experience of war and its signicance for nationrstate
cohesion and national identications. What is being claimed is that in the
West there is a general loss of faith in the cult of national sacrice. This has
affected the status of the military, now problematic in an age where the virtues
of the warrior are looked upon with suspicion, and where there is a general
predisposition to view war as a moral anomaly rather than as an honourable
practice. Although outside the West conicts proliferate, casualty aversion
saps enthusiasm for longrterm military commitments, especially if the object
ives are politically diffuse, such as nation or staterbuilding. This is particularly
so when there is a loss of condence in spreading Western norms as imperir
alistic. An identication with minorities against the nation state has led to
revisionist criticisms of the past, including its heroic cults.
Although there is force to these claims, they require heavy qualication.
I will argue that they are WestrEurocentric, and nationalism and military
commitment remain strong in many areas of the world, even if suffused at
times with a sense of the tragic. In Europe the absence of an obvious enemy,
until Russias recent invasion of the Ukraine, has produced a scepticism about
war and casualty aversion. This, however, is related to the legitimacy of specic
wars, not of war itself Even farrdistant humanitarian wars of choice, though
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 139

less likely to obtain popular support, may reinforce a sense of national

allegiance. Outside the West, many of the new wars are far from novel in
their features and contribute to nation and state formation. Finally, although
commemoration of the war dead is contested and is more individualistic in its
expression, it relies on repertoire and practices that are embedded in everyday
life and the frameworks provided by sacred' ceremonial occasions.

Collective Trauma and Nationalist Mobilization

Has mass mechanization with all its destructiveness destroyed warfares

capacity to create heroes and regenerating collective myths? Has there been
a shift away from military retribution in favour of restitution? This perspective
seems very WestrEurocentric.
Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer (2003: 6172) reject claims that interstate
warfare has been in sustained decline since 1945, arguing that the incidence
of war is cyclical: the 1970s like the 1930s, 1910s, and 1850s were particularly
violent. Outside Europe there has been a succession of major interstate wars,
between India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, Israel and Arab states, and China
and Vietnam, as well as the American struggle against North Vietnam, which
generated national heroes and collective sentiments. Since 1945 states have
largely bypassed legal obligations under the UN Charter (forbidding the threat
of force against other states except in selfrdefence) by not formally declaring
war. In doing so, they have also evaded requirements to give belligerent status
to their enemies, thereby being able to treat insurgents as criminals.
Moreover, in striking contrast to Western Europe, recollections of the
Second World War in Asia have not inspired a politics of reconciliation and
restitution, but inamed national hatreds. Memories of Japanese aggression
and atrocities, rather than fading, intensied over the period. In large part,
this is because of the response of the Japanese government and people to
defeat. Unlike their German counterparts, Japanese governments have been
inconsistent in their expressions of apology and refused to offer appropriate
compensation to former coerced war prostitutes and slave labourers. Leftist
social movements to pressure the government have been ineffective because of
the Japanese sense of double victimhood, both at the hands of the Japanese
war leadership and a ruthless USA that targeted them with nuclear weapons
(Hein 2010: 15375). Authoritarian governments in Asia, anxious to obtain
Japanese economic assistance, saw it in their interest to curb popular antir
Japanese sentiment. However, democratization in South Korea and the Chinese
Communist Partys effective abandonment of Marxism and search for alter
native legitimations have led to a resurgence of popular nationalism focused
on the Nanjing Massacre and the exploitation of comfort women' (Berger
2010). In China the sufferings of war and foreign occupation, deeply felt at a
140 Nutiunalism and Wm

popular level, have become part of an ofcial national cult, institutionalized

in national days of humiliation to buttress the Communist regime and its
territorial claims on japan and Taiwan (Callahan 2010: C113).
Even in the case of the European continent and North America, the idea
that world wars have fundamentally eroded an identication with the nation
and heroic martial traditions needs strong qualication.
First, although the First World War, dominated at least on the Western
front by immobile trench warfare, lacked obvious individual heroes and
agency (except for ghter pilots or exotic gures such as Lawrence of Arabia),
this was not the case with its successor. This was a war of clashing ideologies,
articulated by charismatic leaders, Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Roosevelt.
It was one of dynamic movement, in which star generals rose to prominence
(Rommel, Montgomery, Patton, MacArthur, Zhukov) in epic conllicts.
Decisive naval battles were fought in the Pacic, and ghter pilots became
aces' in the Battle of Britain. Heroism was not conned to military individuals
but was also attributed to civiliansito the peoples of Stalingrad and Leningrad,
celebrated in Shostakovichs Leningmd Symphony, who withstood the German
siege, and to Londoners, who were unbowed by the Blitz, and to the partici
pants in the Warsaw Rising.
Second, much depends not just on the experience of mass death and
destruction, but also on its intemremtion, something that is shaped by the
outcome of war. As lay Winter and Antoine Prost observed (2005: vii),
although the First World War was more devastating in its losses for the French
than for the British, it has been seen in heroic terms by the former as an
existential war on their own territory that ended with their defeat of the
Germans and the recovery of their lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.
The Second World War was demoralizing for much of Europe because the
Continental peoples had to be liberated by external actors (demonstrating the
failure of the autoremancipation myth of nationalism).
The Western European perspective on war and national military virtues is
arguably peculiar, as one arising from traumatic defeat. For the victors,
however, the Second World War had the status of the good war against
evil (Schrijvers 2014). This has framed and justied all major military actions
in the postwar period: Anthony Eden constructed parallels between Hitlers
aggression and Nassers seizure of the Suez Canal, as did George Bush the
Elder when confronted by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Successive
British governments after 1945 celebrated the war period as a heroic age that,
in spite of the loss of empire and its precipitate military decline, justied
Britains leadership in world politics in alliance with the USA, and its military
interventions.
The USA and the USSR took pride in saving the world from Nazism and in
the postwar period used the war experience to advance their claims of moral
and political leadership of the world. Both suffered military humiliations, the
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 141

USA in Vietnam, and the USSR in Afghanistan. But the military in the USA
have been central symbols of national prestige and regularly waged largerscale
conventional wars from Korea to Desert Storm. In Russia itself, after the
collapse of Communism, Yeltsin initially repudiated the core Soviet myth of
the Great Patriotic War as legitimizing Stalins failed socialist experiment
(Krylova 2004). Under Putin, however, Russian authorities have returned to
a cult of the Second World War dead, to project the power of the new Russian
nation state and its quasirimperial ambitions. Successive international annir
versaries of this war have been used to assert its continued mission in the
world (Danilova 2015: 213716). This mission included the conduct of costly
wars in the Caucasus, Georgia, and currently the Ukraine.
Third, the interpretation of the war experience is shaped by the dominant
historical tropes of a given country. Although the defeat of 1940 and occupar
tion was humiliating to the French, the ingrained perceptions of France as
the great European power also inspired projects of national regeneration. The
myth of the Resistance was created, and French politicians of the left and
the right sought to regain French honour as a great power by military
campaigns to retain Frances empire, developing a force d5 frappe, asserting
its duty to defend Francophone interests in Africa, and attempting to lead a
European bloc to counter USA and Soviet hegemony. In similar vein, we have
seen how, condent in Chinas natural status as the Middle Kingdom,
Chinese nationalists deliberately cultivated a trope of humiliation to spur
nationalist campaigns.
In Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast with their Western neighbours,
the memories of the world wars intensied national consciousness and had the
effect of provoking WestrEast tensions. For nationalists the First World War
could be celebrated as marking their liberation from imperial yokes, the rise of
heroic fathers ofthe nation (e.g. Masaryk and Pilsudski), and achieving national
independence. In contrast, the Second World War marked their betrayal' by
the Western powers, which, in the Munich agreement of 1938 and at the Yalta
Conference in 1945, had condemned them to imperial oppression at the hands
of both the Germans and the (Soviet) Russians. For many Eastern Europeans
the Second World War ended only with the withdrawal of Soviet troops after
1991. After the Soviet collapse, there was an afrmative return to strongly
ethnicized national pasts to nd an alternative value system for the new states,
and to make sense of their recent experience. Previously suppressed memories
of German and Russian occupation were expressed in the establishment of
museums of occupation (e.g. in Estonia) and celebrations of popular resistance
(e.g. of the Warsaw Rising). Key moments of Second World War commemor
ation have triggered Polish and Baltic demands for Russia to repudiate
Stalins legacy of conquest, and for the West to acknowledge the equal status
of victims of Communism and Nazismiincluding the claim that Eastern
Europeans suffered a unique double genocide at the hands of Hitler and
142 Nutiunalism and Wm

Stalin (Malksoo 2009). Suspicions of French and German willingness to

accommodate rst the USSR and later Russia have led them to support US
defence bases in Eastern Europe and the USA's invasion ofIraq in contradiction
to the West European mainstream.
A second point of tension is over the recognition of the Holocaust. Over ve
and half million of the six million Iews murdered met their fate in countries
that became Communist after the war, the memory of which was suppressed.
As we observed, a Holocaust consciousness has become central to the European
project. In the East, a sense of competitive national victimhood occurred, in
which there was little room to acknowledge the sufferings of others, notably of
Iews and Roma (Assmann 2007: 16717; Harris 2012: 35073). Worse still, after
1991 the revalidation of interwar nation states and their elites, following the
long night' of Communism, also led to the heroization of dubious nationalists,
many tainted with extreme antirSemitism. Coming to terms with the dark past
of antirIewish pogroms and collaboration with the Germans is still a difcult
process, encountering public hostility because of its insult to a fragile sense of
national pride (Himka and Michlic 2013: Introduction).
All this indicates the peculiarity of Western Europeiboth in historical
terms and as a region in the contemporary world that has enjoyed an unr
usually long period of extended peace. In many parts of the world nationalism
and a cult of martial virtues remain strong. The relative pacism of Europe can
be interpreted as an escapist desire of Europeans to shelter under the US
umbrella, and it can also be seen as a differentiating device. Nationrstate
leaders in Europe have presented themselves as having a continued civilizing
role in the world, via a European Union that employs soft power, as opposed
to the USA, to advance human rights and democracy. The European peculir
arity, however, may not last as we move into a more unstable multipolar
world, indicated by the recent crisis in the Ukraine. The impact of the recent
nancial crisis and attempts to resolve it in Europe have revealed how old
nationalist hatreds arising out of experiences in the Second World War remain
just below the surface.

The Nation and Its Military: Volunteer Vs Conscription Debates

What of the claim that a civilianization of Western states consequent on the

disbanding of conscription armies has led to a loss of national cohesion? Are
the distinctive missions of the military, its linkages to the nation, and the
validity of national defence being eroded? A historical perspective suggests
that there has been a recurring debate in many countries about the status of
the military as defender or opponent of national values. Moreover, although
many countries introduced conscription as a means of national integration,
there is no clear relationship between the two.
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 143

In contemporary Europe the welfare state has been a major source of

national cohesion, and national pride in Germany, Iapan, and Korea was
also expressed in economic performance (Helleiner and Pickel 2004: Intro
duction). I have already argued that war is not the only or necessarily the most
signicant source of national identication, which can rest on multiple founr
dations, for example, democratic constitutions, distinctive religious beliefs,
and cultural achievements. There is a long history of national debates about
the balance between military requirements and citizen satisfactions (guns
versus butter arguments). This has extended to the nature of military estabr
lishments and their role in the defence or oppression of the nation. In
Chapter I we observed that in Britain and the USA mass conscription, except
in wartime, was seen as portending a statist threat to national liberties. Liberals
and republicans too in nineteenthrcentury Germany associated standing
armies with despotism and wars of imperial aggression (Moran 2003b: 5577,
6778, 7374). In the nineteenth century smaller countries such as Switzerland,
Belgium, and the Netherlands relied on the idea of a popular mobilization
rather than a standing army to deter invasion (Horne 2003: 112716).
Eugene Webers classic study (1976) seemed to support arguments that link
the introduction of conscription and mass education to the successful natiow
alist indoctrination of the masses in late nineteenthrcentury France and
Germany. Nevertheless, his conclusions have to be qualied, since these
innovations in the French case were triggered by humiliating national defeat
and the loss of AlsacerLorraine. In other words, nationalist sentiment was a
cause as much as a consequence of a moral and organizational rearmament of
society. In contrast, the initiation of conscription in Italy and Spain failed to
produce a strong sense of national cohesion (Centeno 2002: 242). Even in
France mass conscription opened up conicts about the idea of the nation
between republicans, who wished to weaken the political inuence of the
military hierarchy, and conservatives, who feared the introduction of social
radicalism into the army (Leonhard 2006: 24]). Likewise, the German army,
combining aristocratic professionals with shortrterm conscripts, has been
depicted as the school of an imperial patriotism, combating the spread of
socialist ideas among the working classes. But its leaders feared that a shift
from short, decisive cabinet wars to extended peoples wars would require the
longrterm participation of all classes in the military, and to the demand for full
democratization (Leonhard 2006: 246).
In short, conscription has generated complex debates about the centrality of
the military to national identity and its role as either higher exemplication of
the nation or, alternatively, as an expression of its democratic values. It has
often divided the military, who generally preferred trained and motivated
professionals to often unwilling drafts, viewing conscription armies, at least
in peacetime, as diverting them from their primary vocation of national
defence in favour of national socialization. They have also worried about
144 Nutiunalism and Wm

importing unwanted civilian values (and sometimes politically subversive

ideas) into a hierarchical organization (Strachan 2014: 5071). Moreover,
conscription in peacetime has often been resisted by populations unless
there is a sense ofpervasive threat (Enloe 1980: 8273).
It is this last point that is crucial. The supposed unwillingness of democrar
cies to endure sacrices has little to do with whether armies are conscripts or
professional volunteers. The key question is whether the nation appears to
be under threat. We need not go so far as Benedict Anderson, who, in rejecting
that the idea that nationalism is necessarily aggressive, writes of the goodness
of nation' (Anderson 2006: Ch. 17). However, the cult of the fallen soldier
celebrates the virtues of sacrice not of killing for the nation. Politicians,
when they need to arouse largerscale popular support, almost invariably
justify the resort to war as essential for the defence of the nation. Even
Hitler tried to portray his military aggression as a response to a Polish threat
(Mosse 1990: 203).
Feaver and Gelpi (2004: 14172; Feaver and Miller 2014) would go further,
arguing the legitimacy of wars is rarely questioned, even when accompanied by
high casualties, if politicians articulate a clear rationale to the public and the
military campaign is attended with rapid success. However, wars on foreign soil
without a clear defensive rationale generally become unpopular once they run
into difculties, when the death of individual soldiers tends to be portrayed in
tragic terms. The unpopularity ofwars provokes casualty aversion, not vice versa
(Scheipers 2014: 11). Lachmann (2013: 5778) is more cautious, pointing to the
tolerance of high casualties by the US public during the Korean War to suggest a
longrterm trend towards casualty aversion among advanced industrial states. But
arguably the memory of the consequences of appeasement was then still vivid,
whereas the long series of subsequent foreign missions with at best ambiguous
outcomes has produced a sense of exhaustion and scepticism. Most problematic
in the postwar period are those perceived as imperialistic wars and as divisive of
the nation, for example, Suez for Britain and Vietnam for the USA. In this
situation national divisions may be more likely when military forces are con
scripted rather than professional. Where a war lacks legitimacy or is contentious,
particularly among the political elites, conicts over the draft have further
weakened support for the war (Carruthers 2014). During the Vietnam War the
draft heightened social tensions, as it was perceived to be racially and socially
skewed, suggesting that AfrorAmericans and the white working class were
bearing the burdens of an unpopular war, compared to white middlerclass
universityreducated youth who avoided enlistment. As a result, after Vietnam
the US moved to a professional volunteer army. Nonetheless, when the home
land itself was attacked in 9/11, there was a powerful and sustained support
for external intervention, and the US population has mobilized strongly around
the military as representative of the nation. These considerations also apply
to the demographic arguments about ageing, which might raise the threshold
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 145

for dening a threat to the nation but will not by themselves lead to the
abandonment of military solutions.

The National Bases of International Missions

This last point poses an awkward question, namely, where a sense of existenr
tial threat is not present, what effective justications can be found to sustain
external interventions that are wars of choice? Is the maintenance of inter
national law and humanitarian ideals able to inspire popular backing for
foreign missions? What can prescribe military conduct in asymmetric combat
where the normal conventions of war are in dispute? In spite of appearances,
I will argue that such interventions may reinforce the salience of nationalism
as a legitimating force.
Levy and Sznaider (2002) argue that the memory of the Holocaust came to
be salient as a justication of international interventions from the time of the
Balkan wars of the 1990s. In particular, it persuaded all political sides in
Germany of the duty to intervene. This, however, does not provide the basis
of a cosmopolitan or universal moral imperative. As they admit, this event has
greater resonance for situations in Europeithere was no sustained European
public pressure for military intervention in the Rwandan genocides or, more
recently, Syria. Even in Europe, the meaning of the Holocaust is contested, as
one saw in the attempts to Catholicize' the Auschwitz site in Poland
(Zubrzycki 2006). In Iran there has been a simple denial of the event. As
Assmann suggests (2006: 14), the Holocaust, rather than being a universally
shared memory, is at best a template through which other genocides and acts
of violence may be viewed.
Cheyney Ryan makes an important distinction between reasons that justify
and those that motivate action (Ryan 2014: 12678). The former may be
couched in universalist terms (e.g. the prevention of genocide), notably to
the international community. But effective interventions are made by coalir
tions of nation states which are able to mobilize support among their popur
lation by appeals to national interests, ideal and material (e.g. security). The
two, of course, can and are frequently combinedicalls for a new liberal
imperialism to tame dictators and genocidal regimes or to demand leadership
in the spread of democracy tacitly evoke older national civilizing missions
(Cooper 2002).
International coalitions in spite of their difculties can strengthen national
identities. Japanese and German leaders (the latter in the case of Kosovo) have
been able to normalize their nation states by justifying military expeditions
abroad, previously forbidden under their respective constitutions, as part of
their international obligations (Warburg 2010). Coalitions create signicant
challenges for militaries: the problems of divided commands and separate
146 Nutiunalism and Wm

forces answering to national governments. But they may also strengthen

national identications among their publicsiwhen invidious comparisons
are made with the contributions of other nations or when complaints are
made that their nation is being drawn into an unnecessary conict by a
hegemonic power (the USA).
The goals themselves, when they envisage the construction of state institur
tions based on civic conceptions and new neutral symbols of territorial
nationhood, tend to reinforce assumptions that the global political norm is
nation statehood. Where the signicant foundations of state and national
institutions already exist, as in much, though not all, of the former Yugoslavia,
interventions could have at least partial success. In the absence of such
foundations (e.g. in Afghanistan), establishing stable and successful states is
a task of decades and beyond the patience of Western populations, while it is
very doubtful that nations themselves (on which most successful states are
built) can be engineered by external agents. Nations are, in the eyes of their
adherents, autochthonous. If nations arise from interventions, it will generally
be in resistance to them. Indeed, it is all too easy when high technology is
applied to insurgent movements for ideologues to construct the latter in
romantic heroic terms as David against Goliath.
There is little evidence of the longrterm effectiveness of aerial weaponry and
drones: indeed the collateral damage' ensuing may undermine hearts and
minds strategies directed at the general population (Iohnson 2014: 7072).
Michael Howard (2002: 102) pithily describes the problems of postrheroic
asymmetric wars: Tomahawk cruise missiles may command the air, but it is
Kalashnikov submachinerguns that rule the ground. It is the imbalance that
makes the enforcement of world order a rather problematic affair. A source of
public and military concern is how to avoid soldiers trained to be disciplined
killers in conventional rulergoverned combat from morally degenerating when
faced with nonruniformed adversaries employing unrestrained violence.
Those who consider the military as emi aries of a cosmopolitan political
project may look for solutions in an extension of universal legal and human
rights norms into the battleeld. Christopher Coker (2007: Ch. 7), however,
has argued rationally based external strategies to regulate the conduct of
soldiers in battle zones will always break down in stress situations. To be
effective, he suggests, norms have to be internalized in particular warrior codes
of honour, and militaries are increasingly seeking these in ancient martial
sources, also reinforced in the case of the USA military from the 1990s by a
renewed emphasis on religious and nationalist values (King 2013: 42778).
Indeed, the military profession cannot stand alone, but must be inuenced
by the norms of the community that it serves, namely those of the democratic
nation state. The term military covenant (used in Britain) implies a mutual
obligation (of privileges in exchange for sacrice) between independent par
ties. The relationship between the military, international law, and democratic
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 147

national sentiment is not unproblematic, and the military may take a different
conception of the national interest from that which is dominant. Military
professionals have sustained aristocratic honour codes that include adhere
ence to the laws of war in deance of demotic passions for a war without
limit. But this (transnational) sense of mutuality is founded in part on
agreements between states that recognize each other as legitimate actors.
Such disciplines were cast aside by German and Soviet armies in what was
viewed as an elemental war of ideologies and peoples. In asymmetrical conict
in culturally alien terrains a sense of mutuality is shallow, and, although in
1977 the belligerent status of guerrillas was recognized through additional
protocols to the Geneva Convention, the problem of how to distinguish
between legitimate and illegitimate combatants remains unresolved in the
laws of war between the martial, Grotian, and republicanrnationalist concepr
tions. Nabulsi points to a major tension between jus ad bellum and jus in hello.
(Nabulsi 1999: 241). Prohibitions on reprisals and the torture of prisoners,
when soldiers are faced with insurgents operating without restraints, must
come from withinifrom internalized norms, deriving in part from military
codes, but also in part from broader conceptions of national values that are
informed by (often erce) debates within civil democracies about acceptable
behaviour in conict zones. In exploring these complex problems, Mark Osiel
(2009: 346 and more generally Ch. 12) observes that the conception of martial
courage (heroism) has altered to reect the new combat situations, so that in
the US military one might win medals for saving enemy nonrcombatants by
holding re until their protected status is ascertained.
The armed services may play an active part in such discussions; they cannot
ignore them. It is instructive that generals have repeatedly insisted on the
importance of public support for the troops even if they do not agree with
the reasons offered by governments for military interventions. This illustrates
the complexities of the militaryinationrstate relationship produced by wars of
choice. In the long run, political leaders, to retain national support, will need
to exercise more considered judgement about the circumstances under which
military force can be used effectively. Meanwhile, there is popular sympathy
for the predicaments of the armed services. Indeed, the widespread use of term
military covenant' implies a strengthened relationship between military and
nation. Although there may be reactions against the government or even the
state, the military can be pictured simultaneously as victims of the state and
heroes of the nation.

The Old Features of New Wars

How novel, then, are the new wars and to what extent are they working in
tandem with global forces to fragment nation and staterbuilding processes?
148 Nutiunalism and War

The case for the disintegrative effects of contemporary conicts is strongest

in Africa but, while a new global context is relevant, the driving force lies in
the unresolved problems of the colonial legacy. As we have noted, many
nation states were judicial ctions: they had few prerEuropean collective
traditions, and their boundaries, inherited from the colonial unit, were not
closely matched with ethnographic realities. Imperial policies of divide and
rule had resulted in minority groups being allocated privileged power
positions, which was challenged during the decolonization processes and
resulted in interethnic conicts. This was exacerbated by the freezing of
the territorial map after the Second World War and also by agreements
ofthe Organization ofthe African Union to avoid a reconsideration of state
boundaries. The effective banning of war between states except under
limited circumstances meant in Africa conicts with neighbours took in
direct forms, with states seeking to advance their designs on resources by
giving support to rebel groups. A perverse effect of the UN dutyrtorprotect
doctrine may be to give the secessionist elites of ethnic minorities a strong
incentive to assert victimhood and by military means to provoke state
violence against them, with the hope of foreign intervention in support of
their cause.
There are good reasons, then, for the prevalence of intrastate wars, in which
novel global contexts play a part. Nonetheless, Kaldor and others have under
played their nationalizing effects. Many of the global factors claimed as novel
are so only in their scale or intensity. Several have a long history: the transfer
of ideas and resources from diaspora to places of conict, the role of trans
national organizations (in the past these were religious missions) that often
sided with resistance movements, and ows of arms. For Stig Forster (2010)
the global expansions of the European powers made the Seven Years War
(175663) the rst World War, and the later revolutionary wars were both
international and civil conicts. Hew Strachan contends that what is novel is not
the phenomenon of new wars themselves, but the decision of Kaldor to widen
the denition of war to include features that would in the past be viewed as
brigandage or, at best, as revolution. Many modern wars had a strong predatory
character (e.g. Napoleons campaigns), and asymmetrical strategiesiguerrilla
campaignsiwere historically the normal recourse of weaker parties. In the
nineteenth century, interstate was combined with intrastate conict and
included non tate actors. The experience of the French Revolution led
contemporaries to conate political insurrection with nationalist war
(Strachan 2006: 18723). Brigandage was a feature of the Greek War of
Independence. Strachan (2006: 9) is also sceptical of gures of dramatically
rising percentages of civilian deaths between 1900 and 2000, since we know
little of conicts in the earlier period, especially outside Europe, and in any
case many of the recent civilian casualties were combatants (child soldiers),
recruited into guerrilla forces.
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 149

Claims that these are identity wars founder on the inability to easily
divorce identity from ideological politics. The sorcalled decentralized Balkan
wars of genocide in 1990s (on which Kaldors thesis was based) were highly
organized nationalist campaigns that relied on state structures (Malesevic'
2010: 325). They were powerful agents of nation staterbuilding, mobilizing
popular movements in the homelands and producing a legacy of historical
memories that were used to legitimize the new polities. Diaspora movements
(notably, the Croatian diaspora in Canada and the USA), so far from
undermining state formation, played a key role, rather in the manner of
their historical precursors in the Jewish and Irish diasporas. After independ
ence the Croatian diaspora uniquely was guaranteed seats in the Croatian
parliament.
Charles King makes similar points about the halfrdozen or so small wars of
the 1990s, dubbed the wars of Soviet succession in NagornorKarabakh, Osser
tia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, Chechnya, and Tajikistan (King 2004). The sepr
aratis in each case engaged in criminality, beneting from untaxed trade and
production owing through the war zones. By the early 2000s, however, they
had created staterlike structures able to establish armed forces, administer the
territory, educate their population, and sustain local economies as well as the
recognized states to which they were nominally afliated. These were relatively
successful cases of not just state but also nationrbuilding, in which intellecr
tuals joined political leaders to create national histories and festivals, a process
reinforced by the myths generated in the aftermath of the collective conicts
(King 2004: 14779, 16476).
Military conicts cannot be explained reductively by reference to the
logic of global capitalism or to the perceptions of risk to Western interests
and norms. The new global context is of a multipolar world (rather like the
long nineteenth century) in which we nd a series of great statesichina,
Russia, India, and Iran, emerging to challenge US hegemony, each appealing
in different ways to a sense of national mission.

The Resilience of Nationalist Commemorative Narratives

It is, however, undeniable that there has been a move in the twentieth century
away from liberal optimism towards a more tragic conception of history
that focuses on the value of individual life and victims of war. To what extent
has this eroded a sense of national identity and transformed the public
memorialization of war? Have the experiences of mass ethnic cleansing and
persecutions of subaltern nations resulted in a new traumatic mode of
remembrance, as Leerssen seems to suggest, and what are the consequences
for international politics?
ISU Nutiunalism and War

This shift is particularly visible outside the West, where the relatively recent
mass creation of national states has arisen from the collapse of empires in
three waves in the twentieth century. Although the achievement of independ
ence produced heroic liberation myths, many of these new states dened their
identities in terms of centuries of subjugation, martyrdom, and victimhood.
Independence and its aftermath were frequently accompanied by civil wars
and ethnic cleansings, as nationalists dealt with the unnished business' of
unwelcome minorities on their soil or of unrealized irredentist agendas. After
1945, as they entered or rerentered an international order governed by human
rights norms, many new (and not so new) states with compromised pasts
struggled to overcome pariah status in the international community and faced
pressures to confess to events that threatened to contaminate key founding
myths. Turkeys denial of the Armenian Genocide (a crucial event in the
carving of a national state out of the Ottoman Empire) as well as its treatment
of the Kurds has been used as a justication for the delay of accession talks
with the European Union. Serbia, seeking admittance to the European Union,
is expected to demonstrate its commitment to European norms and repudiate
a past of ethnic persecutions. There is pressure on conllictrtorn countries like
Rwanda, when requesting international aid, to establish programmes oftranr
sitional justice and/or truth commissions that would demonstrate willingness
to renounce exclusive claims over the past and accept the historical sufferings
of the other'.
The notion of trauma tied to collective victimhood, however, is misleading
when it suggests the notion of a breach of meaning arising out of overwhelnr
ing experiences that produce broken peoples unable to come to terms with
their pasts. In fact, a claim of victimhood is often a strategic choice (an
exercise of agency). We observed in ChapterZ how historically the Jews and
the Serbs linked a sense of victimhood with religious eschatologies that
interpreted apparent disaster as being ordained by God or history to conrm
their chosenness as a people. Victimhood may be constructed to coexist with
heroic narratives, sometimes in tension with and sometimes reinforcing the
latter. The constructed aspect is manifest in the changing interpretations of
the mass murder of the Iews. At rst the survivors of what became named as
the Holocaust were regarded as objects of shame in Israel by Zionists. They
counterposed the passive surrender of the religious Orthodox diaspora to the
military heroism of the Israeli nation builders, and also to the resistance of the
Zealots against the might of the Roman Empire in the myth of the Masada
(Zerubavel 1994). Over time it was adopted by Zionists to justify a separate
homeland for the Jewish people as the only protection against a hostile gentile
world and, later, in defence of Israeli defence and territorial policies. Rashmi
Singh argues that Palestinians initially narrated their expulsion and displace
ment from their lands in 1948 in passive terms of collective victimhood.
A later narrative was superimposed on this about the (active) heroism of
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 151

secular nationalist guerrillas of the PLO. This narrative in turn evolved as

Islamist movements became more prominent, to construe guerrilla ghters as
martyrs for the cause (Singh 2014: 26273).
Constructing one's nation as a victim is often to make claims on others.
It can also be a ploy of political elites to divert popular attention from
poor performances, as we noted in the Chinese Communist regimes use of
a century of a humiliation motif when its legitimacy was threatened. A sense
of victimhood at the hands of a powerful imperial neighbour, could be used by
small nationalities, like the Irish, to justify' failures to realize economic and
social progress. African nationalists cited centuries of European intervention
in Africa, from the time of the slave trade to later colonization, to excuse their
inability to meet the expectations of their populations, and to obtain as
recompense foreign aid from the West
Such selfrvictimization tends to reinforce exclusive ethnic conceptions of
nationality. Populations which perceive themselves as victims are often blind
to the oppressed status of other groups, including their own minorities. We
earlier noted the prolonged unwillingness of Eastern Europeans, suffering
under rst Nazi and then Soviet occupation, to acknowledge their complicity
in the lethal culture of antirSemitism and murder (cf Himka and Michlic
2013). Indeed, attempts by peacerseeking historical revisionists to deconstruct
hegemonic myths and explore their intolerant consequences may stir up a
backlash in populations resentful of having founding or legitimation myths
questioned. The claims of truth and insecure collective identities are generally
at odds. Even where international pressure is powerful, it may not result in
more than formal allegiance to change. As part of the Serbian states drive for
membership of the EU, it has reconstructed public rituals and its history
textbooks to present Serbian national emergence as part of European mode
ernity, but this has been analysed as an elaborate process of impression
management, offering different meanings to international as opposed to
domestic audiences (David 2014).
Finally, myth deconstruction in the absence of material restitution is often
problematic. Historical revisionism created a defensive backlash in sections
of the dominant group in Australia, where the then prime minister, John
Howard, labelled the uncovering historic abuses against indigenous peoples as
the black arm band view of Australian history. At the same time, the lack of
substantive as well as symbolic concessions means that Aboriginal grievances
still remain.
It might be argued, however, that the changing character of war in the
contemporary world together with postrimperial guilt in the West has pror
duced a scepticism about the national past that returns us to the important
questions raised by Leerssen in the introduction to this chapter. Do we see a
rejection of monumental and ofcial didactic occasions in favour of a more
individualistic and diffuse memorialization?
152 Nutiunalism and Wm

Only to a degree. Many postmodern critiques are based on historical

misreadings. Winters (and Noras) distinction between a rst memory
boom in the late nineteenth century designed to integrate state, regime, and
nation and a second boom that focuses on the traumatic identity politics of
minorities is overdrawn. First, a monumental memory boom dates back to the
late eighteenth century. In Britain there were several waves of war memor
ialization: after the Napoleonic Wars (in which the initial impulse came from
below from middlerclass merchants followed by the ofcial legacies of Trafalr
gar Square), the Boer war, the First World War, and the Second World War.
Second, a unifying and a contentious memory politics could emerge side by
side in the late nineteenth century. The reafrmation of a strong sense of
French nationality, arising from military rivalry with Germany, was compatr
ible with a erce internal contestation between Catholics and republicans
about the content and direction of that national identity (Hobsbawm 1983;
Gildea 1994: Ch. 5). What has been distinctive about the European present
after the collapse ofthe USSR is the absence until very recently of an obvious
neighbouring military threat that might lead to a resurgence of nationalism.
Third, the memory struggles of minorities (for example, of Australian aborir
gines to be properly included in Anzac Day ceremonies) that John Gillis
charts are often against their exclusion from ofcial histories and public
rituals and therefore do not so much fragment the nation as redene and
reinforce it. In Britain a recognition of a more multicultural and socially
diverse conception of the nation has been registered by the provision of
military monuments to Gurkhas (1997), Africans, Caribbeans, and Indians
(2002), and women (2005).
The character of national memorialization has changed. As Winter and
Mosse observe, the strong religious symbolism of the mass public and local
commemorations after the two world wars demonstrated a desire to make
sense of overwhelming loss rather than a triumphal nationalism. But such
symbolism (in France, the iconographical cult of St Joan, and in England the
images of the village graveyard) often contained strong national connotations.
Whatever the intentions of the in' iators, the siting of monuments like the
Cenotaph next to the British Parliament and like the Vietnam Wall close to the
Washington and Lincoln Monuments inevitably gave them a national signi
cance. Even the Wall, whose design initially eschewed the national, increas
ingly took on such a meaning as a ag and heroic statuary were added in
response to pressures from veterans, and a variety of patriotic messages were
left by mourners. Indeed, by recognizing the sacrice of soldiers in a war
previously viewed with deep ambivalence, it came to be seen as a necessary
instrument ofnational reconciliation (Edkins 2003: 7378; WagnerrPacici and
Schwartz 1991: 39576, 40478).
For Sibylle Scheipers (2014: 14715) this reveals how the construction of
heroism (and that of trauma) is a dynamic process that expands and contracts
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 153

over time. Just as an awareness of the dubious pasts of former military heroes
of colonial wars has led to a renaming of military bases in Germany, so too
events seen as traumatic can be given a heroic gloss as memories of divisive
wars change. In fact, victim narratives may provoke heroic ripostes, as with
the Vietnam Wall.
A fundamental question is whether it is possible to collectively mourn
without monumental foci. Just as a postmodernist stance only has force
where there is a tradition to critique, so a counterrmonument movement
feeds off a culture where the monument is taken for granted. The idea of
commemorating the Holocaust as a universal symbol through such (counter)
forms reveals the fragility of global human rights as an interstitial project of
committed individuals, lacking the institutional support of a grounded come
munity. For much of Western humanity that community remains the nation
(though not always the state).
As Anthony King observes, many attempts to honour the dead of recent
wars are communal and demotic, and there is a strong focus on the loss as
personal as well as on their supposedly exemplary military professionalism.
Some contemporary British ofcers have expressed concern at what they
perceive the public Dianaization or excessive popular mourning of the
dead as victims of the state. Nevertheless, it is likely that such emotions
arise because of confusion about the validity of the Iraq and Afghan wars
rather than of the nation for which it is fought. As the language of the popular
press testies, there is a popular thirst for heroes, expressed through a near
sanctication of the returning dead as model husbands, fathers, or sons. The
homecoming ceremonies of Wootton Bassett for the returning dead deliberr
ately eschewed ennobling nationalist grand narratives (Freeden 2011: 4, 6, 7).
However, the power of such narratives is demonstrated by the absorption of
these ceremonies into a national frame.
These started out as initiatives by local members of the Royal British Legion
in 2007 to honour the dead, as they passed through their town, who were
joined by townsfolk lining the route up to 1,000 strong. The regular televising
of the Wootton Bassett processions made them national as well as local events
so that they attracted pilgrims from far and wide. In 2008 an Armed Forces
Parade was staged in recognition, and in 2009 a national campaign to bestow
royal status on the town. Prince Charles visited in 2010 to thank the local
people. The renaming of the town as Royal Wootton Bassett in 2011 come
pleted the process of the local and demotic being absorbed into the public
iconography of the nation state.
This is dependent on the continuing relevance of larger national commemr
orative rituals that hark back to foundational war experiences, which in
countries like Britain, the USA, France, and Australia act as master frames
for subsequent wars (Sumartojo and Wellings 2015). Indeed, what is impresr
sive is that, in spite (or perhaps because) of the many secular changes within
154 Nutiunalism and Wm

contemporary societies, they retain their power. Concern was expressed that
institutions such as Remembrance Day in Britain and Anzac Day in Australia
would wither as the last survivors of the First World War disappeared. In fact,
the very awareness of the increasingly fragile physical links brought a resurr
gence of popularity from the 1980s onwards. One reason for their persistence
is that they were revitalized by the inclusion within their ceremonial frames
of the dead of subsequent wars (Beaumont 2014: 33879). This, of course, begs
the question of why the commemorative repertoire, say, of the First World
War, still seem appropriate as vehicles through which the public pays homage
to the military dead, in the way that commemorations say of Waterloo or
Trafalgar do not.
Such public ceremonies work because they are underpinned by a popular
awareness of the events to which they refer. In Chapter 2, I referred to the
necessity that memories of war be socially embedded and discussed the many
bridging mechanisms at work in social practices whereby a martial past is
channelled into the present. In Britain there is a neverrending thirst for
documentaries, comedies, and ctional stories about the two world wars.
Images of the great events of the Second World Wariof the Blitz, Dunkirk,
and Eerlamein are regularly cited by politicians to justify policies and mor
bilize support, and journalists playfully' evoke memories of the Huns on the
eve of sporting occasions featuring the Germans. In Australia Paul Keating
used the British betrayals of Australian servicemen in Gallipoli (vividly
depicted in Peter Weirs lm, Gullipuli of 1981) and in Singapore (1942) in
order to justify his campaigns for an Australian republic. In the banal natioir
alism of daily life the images of war provide a store of meaning through which
individuals and communities reect on the everyday problems of their lives.
This provides the soil in which public commemorations live.
Lyn Spillman (2003: 16378) argues commemorative events have staying
power in so far as they are multivalent, generating contested meanings. In
modern Britain, the myths of the Second World War have provided a power
ful repertoire to which different political projects have made appeal. For
Conservatives they evoked a sense of grandeur (of Great Britain), military
heroism, and the foresight and visionary power ofa great Conservative prime
minister and world statesman, and for Labour, the democratic spirit of the
people, the collective values and institutions mobilized for victory, and the
inspiration of these for the later welfare state (M. Smith 2000: Chs. 7, 8).
There is a deeper reason why such national commemorations persist during
periods of extensive social change. Collective identities rest on a sense of
common history, one that tells ind' iduals who they are, from where they
come and where they are going. As Spillman observes, because commemorr
ation is crossrgenerational, it cannot be reduced to a politics of the present.
National commemorative days, in so far as they are calendrical, give a natural
rhythm to a national life, and are a way of overcoming the attrition of time.
 Warfare and the End afHemic Nationalism? 155

Wars can be the foundational events of nations or mark critical junctures,

and hence operate as important reference points for populations. Their power
may rest not just on the events and the memory of collective sacrices but on
perceptions of their broader consequences. Explored in canonical novels,
lms, plays, requiems, and television dramas, the First World War has been
variously portrayed as the end of an aristocratic rural idyll, the catalyst of the
mass democratic nation state, the seedbed of Fascist or Communist barbarism,
the instigator of female emancipation, and so much else. The Second World
War is invoked to support British pretensions to remain a world actor (with a
seat on the UN Security Council) in spite of its relative decline as a great
power. Iust as the Wars of the Roses in Shakespeares history plays were the
settings for discourses about kingship and the condition of England, so too
these conicts offer powerful backdrops in high and low culture for analysing
where the nation is now.
Finally, as I argued in Chapter 2, wars are recalled because of the unprer
dictability of the modern world, in which many states and their populations
have been periodically subject to crises. At these points, populations are forced
regularly to consider existential (and in a sense prerpolitical) questions of who
they are and what they stand for. Inevitably they are drawn to consider the
relevance of the stock of older myth images, where they are available, in order
to reformulate programmes and mobilize populations in support of the
nation. Hence they turn to the recollection of great crises such as war that
the collectivity has faced and overcome in the past, which then provides hope
for their future.

GLOBAL RELIGION, COSMIC WAR, AND BATTLE

OF CIVILIZAIIONS

Such commemorative repertoire arising from earlier conicts will not necessarily
continue to justify wars of intervention, especially if they are perceived to
endanger national security. Existing national identities both in the global
North and South face a considerable challenge as a result of what seems
to be a worldwide religious political resurgence since the end of the Cold
War, which some claim introduces a new threat to the Westernrderived
international order.
The increasing multicultural character of advanced Western societies ariSr
ing from mass migration from former colonies since the 1950s has already
provoked debates about national identity and the legacy of empire. Until
recently, these debates were framed in racial terms, but have been transformed
by the rise of radical Islamist ideas, disseminated by global communication
156 Nutiunalism and Wm

networks based in the Middle East and Asia, and provoked by a series of
unpopular Western military interventions in the Muslim world.
This Islamist revolution belonged to a general worldwide resurgence since
the 1960s of religion into the political sphere (Hutchinson 1994: Ch. 3).
Political Islamism, in particular, was activated by disillusion with socialist
nationalist regimes in the postcolonial world that failed to deliver economic
and social development at home. What transformed this internal conllict into
an antirVVeStern struggle was the military and geopolitical humiliations of
supposedly independent regimes, in the face of superpower competition
between the West and the Communist bloc, in which the protagonists fought
proxy wars and engaged at times in direct military interventions, in the Middle
East, Central Asia, Africa, and later the Caucasus.
There were several key moments. First was the disastrous defeat of the
Arab armies in the Six Day War against Israel, supported by the West. This,
for many Muslims, was a sign ofGodsjudgement against impious elites who
had forsaken Islam in favour of secular ideologies such as nationalism and
socialism, because it resulted in the loss of Jerusalem and the custodianship
of the Dome of the Rock, sacred to Muslims. A second was the Islamic
revolution in Iran in 1979, which, in overthrowing the shah and storming the
American Embassy, humiliated a major superpower and contributed to a
resurgence of radical panrlslamic movements. Using modern technologies
such as transport, mass literacy, radio cassettes, and videos these movements
reached across states into Muslim communities worldwide, aspiring to over
throw the current world order in the name of a universal Islam (Haddad 1991:
9). A third was the defeat of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its puppet
regime by mujihadeen resistance drawing recruits from the Muslim Middle
East. A fourth was the First Gulf War, which brought a Western ledrcoalition
deep into the Muslim Middle East and USA military bases close to the holy
sites of Mecca and Medina. This war was seen by many Arabs as a move to
protect Western oil interests, and out of these twin events alrQaeda was born,
with the project of ejecting the West from the holy areas of the Middle East,
the rerestablishment of a caliphate to govern all Mu ims, and the recovery of
the lost territories of southern Spain. Fifth, the Russian destruction of the
edgling Chechen state and its nationalist leadership ensured the ascendancy
of Islamist groups in the Caucasus, reinforced by mujihadeen recruits from
across the Muslim world (Campana 2006). Finally, the US intervention in
Iraq in the Second Gulf War created the conditions, reinforced later by the
fracturing of the Syrian state, for the current rise of ISIS.
The upsurge of transnational religiously inspired armed networks with
global ambitions (the rerestablishment of a caliphate) such as alrQaeda and
more recently ISIS has wreaked havoc in the Horn ofAfrica, Mali, and recently
Syria and Iraq. More generally, religiously inspired movements have emerged
in much of the Middle East and global South, rejecting both liberal democracy
 Warfare and the End ofHemic Nationalism? 157

and socialism, to offer a singular challenge to secular nationalist regimes. Some

have argued that this resurgence changes the nature of armed conict.
Mark Iuergensmeyer maintains that this religious revival is qualitatively
different in several respects from traditional nationalist movements. Such
revivalism has advanced the idea of cosmic war, where unceasing conict is a
constituent element of the universe until an apocalyptic victory is achieved over
the sources of evil. Images and symbols of violence are a core element of a
religious ritual that articulates a framework ofmeaning and order through which
they are overcome. Religion generates physical violence when disorder is idenr
tied with a specic group that is satanized as the bearer ofevil. Such violence has
a theatrical and symbolic character because of the belief of religious followers
they are conducting a divine struggle. This seemed exemplied by the (literally)
spectacular 9/11 attack on New York by alrQaeda, based in Afghanistan. This in
turn launched George Bush's war on terror, directed initially against Iraq and
Talibanrdominated Afghanistan and then Islamic revolutionary movements.
(Iuergensmeyer 1992: 161770; Iuergensmeyer 2001: Ch. 8).
This absolutist concept of struggle brooks no compromise. In principle, it
is unlike nationalist conicts which are thisrworldly and fought in the name
of delimited territorial communities. This resurgence has introduced new
techniques of violent struggle such as suicide bombings, justied by reinterr
pretations of the concept of martyrdom to apply to political struggles
(Marone 2013). Because of these goals, techniques, and the idea of ceaseless
conict, Iuergensmeyer maintains that religious movements are not controlr
lable by violent repression since this merely reinforces the idea of eternal
struggle, and earthly defeat is countered by the idea of necessary martyrdom.
Such organizations have drawn support from across the Muslim world,
including alienated Muslim youth in Western Europe. They not only are
an external threat to Western nation states, but also, in attracting Muslim
adherents in Europe, disrupt the cohesion of nation states by eroding
support from religious minorities and from the dominant nationality for
multiculturalism.
Some have seen this as conrming Samuel Huntington's The Clash of
Civilizations (1996: Chs. I, 6), which suggested that the apparent global
triumph of the West over Soviet Communism would trigger a farrreaching
battle of civilizations, underpinned for the most part (though not exclusive
ly) by antagonistic religions. In particular, he singled out Islam as a special
threat to an ascendant West: Islam above all the other great religious
civilizations had bloody borders. However, Huntington argued states (and
national states) would play a leading political role within their civilization,
whereas the current conicts have millenarian overtones. Unfortunately, the
willingness of Western politicians and media to frame specic conicts as
part of a world battle against terror have played into the hands of the global
jihadists who have formed from the unintended consequences of interstate
158 Nutiunalism and Wm

military rivalries and misguided international settlements that undermined

state formation.
Although alrQaeda and ISIS in theory threaten the current world order of
territorial states, they are dependent on allying with dissident organizations
and alienated populations within existing states, often those of a nationalist
character or with delimited ethnic goals. Elsewhere, religious revivalism has
fused with national sentiments and existing state orders. The Shiite Iranian
revolution, after going through an initially messianic phase when it sought to
export paanslamic sentiments throughout the Middle East, made terms with
Persian nationalism, a process accelerated by the war (198078) against the
Arab Sunni regime of Iraq that was supported by the bulk of Arab states. Many
of the Islamist movements it supports (Hezbollah and Hamas) are rmly
nationalrterritorial in their orientation, with the former seeking to transform
the balance of power within Lebanon and the latter focused on winning a
Palestinian state. The competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia
for regional hegemony in the Middle East in turn divides along sectarian lines
the ihadist struggle. In short, although religious revivalism exposes the thin
roots of nationalism in parts of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, there
is little evidence it can supplant the order of nation states.
In many contexts such as the Palestinian territories, Sri Lanka, and India,
religious narratives of martyrdom combine with those of secular nationalists.
It is also misleading to claim that religious movements have a unique reperr
toire of violence. Although the use of mass suicide volunteers was used by
Iranians in the Iranrlraq war to clear mineelds, secular nationalis uch as
the Tamil Tigers have also employed suicide squads, as earlier did the Viet
Cong and the Japanese state, when training Iapanese kamikaze pilots. Muslims
have utilized this tactic only sporadically in history, usually like other
practitioners for political (rather than cosmic) objectivesithe liberation of
territory (Brym and Hamlin 2009: 8577). These can be understood as forms of
asymmetrical war, practised by the weak when they were unable to match the
conventional power of their adversaries.
In short, the emergence of these groups indicates the thin bases of national
identities and the fragility of nation states in some regions and the opportunr
ities offered insurgent groups by global media and communications. But their
political strategies and military methods expose their weakness. They offer no
alternative to the existing state system, while the Wests conicts with transr
national religious zealots contain parallels with older attempts by states to root
out revolutionary threats to existing regimes, whether these were liberal in the
rst half of the nineteenth century or, later on, anarchist or socialist.
The impact of such religious radicalism on Western nation states is more
problematic. Atrocities in Europe and the USA have led to a backlash against
Muslim minorities, a radicalization of sections of alienated Muslim youth, and
the development of a surveillance state, even as there are further pressures on
 Warfare and the End ufHemi: Nationalism? 159
Western states to continue to intervene in the conict zones of the Middle
East, Central Asia, and Africa. While a concern with internal security may
make Western states more cautious about further military adventures, the
situation has intensied debates about national identity and the relationship of
minority populations to the native' core.
 5

Is Nationalism WarProne?

INTRODUCTION

In a recent study examining 484 wars between 1816 and 2001, Andreas
Wimmer (2013: 125) breaks them down into wars of conquest (77), interstate
(111), and civil wars (296, of which 109 were secessionist and 187 now
secessionist). He argues that the large majority were associated with two
major institutional transformations, the expansion of empires (notably the
wars of conquest) and the spread of nation states (interstate and secessionist
conicts). Whereas in 1816 only Great Britain and France were autonomous
nation states, through the processes of war by 2001 almost the entire globe was
controlled by putatively modern nation states (Wimmer and Min 2006: 871).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century only a quarter of wars were
ethnonationalist, whereas today most are (Wimmer 2013: 2).
Although armed conict is a regular feature of human history, it has been
claimed that with nationalism comes a new type of unlimited war, justifying
the overthrow of old laws and conventions in the name of the people. These
are wars of peoples gripped by a quasirreligious fervor, and they result in
atrocities against civilians. Even though a world of nation states has become
institutionalized, irredentist and secessionist conicts are, justied by the
principles of selfrdetermination. In the two world wars and beyond there has
been an explosion of ethnic hatreds and a proliferation of episodes of genocide
and murderous ethnic cleansing directed against external and internal
enemies. In the twentieth century about 100 million people died as a direct
result of action by organized military units backed by one government or
another. A comparable number of civilians probably died of warrinduced
disease and other indirect effects (Charles Tilly 2002: 1).
In previous chapters I considered the impact of war on nations and nation
states. It is time to examine the other side of the relationship: the degree to
which nationalism (broadly dened) is, in Wimmer's words, war prone. This
chapter will address the question of whether violence is inherent in nationalr
ism and its referents, the nation and nation state. What role does it play in
their constitution and practices? Wimmers claim accords with the view of
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 161

many scholars that there is a strong elective afnity between nationalism and
violence in the modern period (MaleSevic 2013: 13).
I review four competing, although sometimes overlapping, general interr
pretations that stipulate there is such a connection. These focus respectively on
nations, nationalist ideology, nation states, and nally the international sys
tem. The rst is a functionalist view that war is inherent in nations, since
regular blood sacrice is required for their origins and reproduction. The
second is the view that nationalism, qua ideology, produces a form of milleir
arian politics whose rejection of all institutional limits leads necessarily to
external and internal violence. I then turn to a third interpretation, the belief
that militarism is embedded within nation states, since they are creations of a
competitive European state system that has expanded worldwide, one characr
terized by recurring wars that have shaped their central institutions. Finally,
I examine the claim that violence derives from contradictions in a new
international order founded on the principles of nationalism which are
invoked by national minorities to justify rights to secession and by dominant
nations to defend the territorial integrity of exi ing states.
In reviewing these positions, I reject claims that there are necessary conr
nections between nationalism and war. Nationalist wars are those fought in
the name of the identity, territorial integrity, and political autonomy of the
nation. They can be interstate or intrastate wars. I argue that many modern
wars may have a nationalist character, but this does not entail that nationalism
was their cause. We shall nd that there are situational linkages between
nationalism, broadly conceived, and collective violence, but strong nation
states can also contribute to the resolution of disorders.

BLOOD SACRIFICE AND THE NATION

The rst claim is that violence is built into the constitution and justication of
nations. For many nationalists the cult of the fallen soldier is central to their
national identity, as are myths of emancipation in which the people rise to
liberate themselves from tyranny. During the nineteenth century claims
were made that the right to national independence and martial virtues were
indissolubly linked. A German delegate to the Frankfurt Assembly in 1848
declared: Mere existence does not entitle a people to political independence:
only the force to exert itself as a state against others (cited in Howard 199 .
39740). Some young wouldrbe nation states have viewed largerscale sacrice
in war as an essential rite of passage, as Australians viewed the Gallipoli
campaign in the First World War. The remembrance of such loss requires
subsequent generations to ght to preserve the nation against its enemies,
lest the earlier heroes be dishonoured. Blood sacrice is a cleansing and
162 Nutiunalism and Wm

sanctifying thing, declared the Irish nationalist Patrick Pearse in response to

the mass patriotic death in Europe during the First World War (cited in Lee
1989: 27). This statement marked his fear of the growing assimilation of
Ireland into the British Empire. Shortly after this, he and his fellow revolur
tionaries launched the Easter Rebellion in 1916, hoping that by their martyrr
dom they would revive a dying national spirit. Linking their revolt to previous
insurrections of 1798, 1848, and 1867, they proclaimed that each generation
must demonstrate a will to die for the nation.
This seems to support the view expressed by George Mosse (1990), amongst
many, that the myth of fallen heroes who die in blood sacrice was integral to
nations (at least in the nineteenth century), and had a special appeal to the
idealism of young males. We nd such assumptions in the powerful study by
Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Bland Sacrice and the Nation: Totem
Rituals and the American Flag (1999), which, drawing on Rene' Girard and
Emile Durkheim, emphasizes the importance of bodily sacrice for the conr
stitution and reproduction of societies. The totem god of society, in order to
live, must eat its worshippers, who must volunteer for this fate. In the modern
world where authority has passed from religious institutions to the state, the
most powerful ritual institution by which this is achieved is war (Marvin and
Ingle 1999: 4). Blood sacrice for the nation has replaced supramundane
religion as the central legitimizing social and political ritual, experienced
through commemorative ceremonies focused on the ag, which stands for
the body of the nation. It is this rather than a civil religion focused on the
constitution and democratic institutions that legitimizes the political system.
Intellectualized commitments to nation are secondary to more visceral idenr
tications. In support, they highlight the popular fervent denunciation of the
burning of the American ag by conscientious objectors during the Vietnam
War as unrAmerican, even when the latter cited the rights granted under the
American Constitution to oppose the draft.
Through war the violence of human beings (particularly of young males)
that is an inherent threat to social order is tamed by diverting it against
outsiders. A cult is subsequently developed around the young male dead,
now worshipped as martyrs, who have died in willed sacrice for the nation.
This cult creates and recreates the sense of a unique bounded group and binds
the living in moral obligation to the dead to maintain the social order. It
socializes the young to sacrice in future wars. Hence, the nation is dened as
the shared memory of blood sacrice, periodically renewed (Marvin and
Ingle 1999: 4).
The ugly secret (or totem taboo) behind this cult is that the voluntarism of
the young males is an illusion, because their death is enforced by the nation.
Although, to elicit sacrice and solidarity, wars need to be portrayed as in the
nations defence, in reality the nation state acts as a deity demanding the mass
death of the young on a regular basis (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 9). In this model
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 163

the state exists merely to implement the national social compact that has been
sentimentally forged in violence. The role of ritual is to hide contradictory
attitudes to the young, who are indeed viewed with ambivalence. Although
violence is regenerating, it must be separated from the centre of the nation and
must be performed outside its borders. Because all who kill, even with ofcial
sanction, are regarded with fear, the defenders of the nation must ritually leave
the group (through rst assuming a distinctive military identity), and ideally
die as heroes, lest they return to pollute the society.
Marvin and Ingle (1999: 63798) qualify their interpretation, aware of the
internal conicts generated by the Vietnam War. Wars are effective when
they touch signicant numbers of the group (in casualties), evoke a willingness
to ght, threaten group survival, and are decisive. There are also other
authority systems that either rival the ofcial totemic order or act as a backup
when it weakens: afliative bodies such as families, churches, and sporting
associations, but they lack the totemic authority to kill (Marvin and
Ingle 1999: 1727215). Electoral contests operate as a form of contained
war between opposing interests, which through the process of struggle
regenerate the nation.
Nevertheless, it is above all warfare that establishes the boundaries of the
group against hostile others. It diverts potentially damaging energies outside
the group towards strangers, and it creates a cultic object, the memory of
the dead (young males), whose sacrice is invoked to demand the subordinr
ation of individual egos to the common good: When external threats recede,
the sacrice of excess males on the battleeld may become the slaughter of
excess males in the streets ofthe city (Marvin and Ingle 1999: 82).
This is a neorDurkheimian interpretation, and one based on a single case
study, the USA. This is usually perceived to be the exemplary modem society
by virtue of its Enlightenmentrbased democratic constitution separating relir
gion and state, its integrating ideology of individualism, and its status as the
leading capitalist economy. But the history of the USA is, as the authors say,
punctuated by wars, and their arguments are generalizable beyond the
USA. One of their targets is the cognitive approach of Benedict Anderson,
who explains the rise of national identities by reference to the emergence of
new print media (such as the newspaper and the novel). As Anthony Smith
argues, while Anderson may account for how people know the nation, he
cannot explain why they feel it (Smith 1998: 140).
Marvin and Ingle bring out the often neglected religious and ritual dimeir
sions of war. In their support, they could point to how, as in Europe in 1914,
the outbreak of war can release euphoria and quasirreligious desires for
transcendence, notably in the cult of fallen youth. As they argue, the nation
must be portrayed as innocent and the war as defence against an outside evil.
They also identify the powerful taboos to protect the myths of unity that hide
the tensions between troops and civilians. On the one hand, there is the
164 Nutiunalism and Wm

ambivalence of societies to returning soldiers (admired as heroes from afar but

feared as seasoned killers) and the importance of welcoming homecoming
ceremonies to enable ghters to reintegrate into society. On the other, there is
often, as in the First World War, a sense of resentment by troops against those
in security at home who had sent them into peril (Ferro 1973: 15478). After
the war, taboos are enforced to repress ugly realitiesiof hostility to the draft,
episodes of cowardice, mutinies, wanton killing, and collaboration. This social
ambivalence is also displayed in the desire to heroize the dead while hiding
away disgured and broken survivors (Grant 2008).
However, their anthropological model is reductionist and fails to explain
why people ght for the nutiun. It fails to take account of external factors in
the outbreak of wars; it does not consider the extent to which solidarism is
affected by the outcomes of war; and nally it fails to explain the stability of
pacic nations.
It fails to explain why primordial' emotions have come to be attached to the
nation rather than other potentially enduring groups. What is missing in their
analysi is the role of culture and of thinkers and of the reli ious, political,
and economic institutions through which a national identity is formed. As
Anthony Smith (1981a) argues, warfare by itself may strengthen and reinforce
group identities, but cannot by itself create them. For a population to defend
itself, there already has to be a sense of common values and interests around
which it can be mobilized that shape the proclivity towards war or peace. This
thesis is better at explaining the role of violence in the reproduction rather
than the formation of nations. Moreover, the idea of war as reinforcing a
boundary between a home of innocence and a violent exterior can only apply
to a minority of interstate wars, where the civilian population is not subject to
occupation or military adversities such as bombing, and it does not apply to
their paradigmatic case of the American Civil War.
The authors are not alone in presenting frustrated male energies as an
indirect driver of conict and pointing to the use of hyperrmasculinized
language (including the feminization of the enemy) in combat. In some settings
this is accompanied by mass rape (Coldstein 2001: Ch. 5). Fredrik Earth (2000)
is only one of many who correlates an oversupply of adolescent or young
adult males to collective violence in the Middle East. Feminist scholars have
outlined how nationalism was instrumental (through the inuence of theorists
such as Rousseau, Michelet, and Mazzini on national educational systems) in
constructing a sexual division of labour whereby boys were trained for citizen
ship and war and girls for the bearing and education of children (Sluga 1998).
Men had the patriarchal role of defending the nation, feminized as a mother
land', and womenandchildren, as feminists put it (Anthias and Yuvaeravis
1989: Introduction). Conscription in many societies has been construed as
a masculine rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, and military
service has created networks of power unavailable to women that men are
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 165

able to use in future civilian life (Altinay 2004: Ch. 3). Others have linked
extreme nationalist or religiornationalist violence, including rape, to a crisis of
masculinity arising from a loss of traditional status and/or unemployment
(Bracewell 2000; Aslam 2012). Sylvia Walby (1992), in noting the over
representation of women in peace movements, has even questioned whether
women identify with the nation similarly to men. However, it is often women
who reinforce these gender roles: young women in Britain handed out
white feathers (symbols of cowardice) to young men in civilian clothes at the
beginning of the First World War.
Military sociologists such as Anthony King agree that the construction of
masculine smallrunit solidarities is at the core of ghting effectiveness. Noner
theless, men only become trained to kill through rigorous resocialization in
military camps that seek to break down their normal civilian identities
(Goldstein 2001: Ch. 5). Nationalists extol sacrice not ki ing for the nation.
To be fair to the authors, they maintain young men are coerced by social
pressures into military service. However, to explain the outbreak of war in
functionalist and intrarsocietal terms, by an internal buildup of pressures
(an oversupply of young males), is implausible, since external conicts or severe
social instability should occur generationally, whereas long periods of relative
peace as in postrNapoleonic Europe can alternate with clusters of conict as in
the outbreak of the First World War. A recent study concluded most countries
with large youth bulges avoid armed conict most of the time, and, even where
it is a signicant factor, this i in combination with other issues such as poor
governance and failing economic growth (Urdal 2012: 130).
W. H. McNeill (1984: 310714) relates demographic change to the outbreak
of the First World War but only as part of a subtle multicausal argument.
Rapidly rising rural populations throughout Europe, and particularly in Cenr
tral Europe between 1900710, produced increasing social pressures on land
and resources. These were only partly offset by the safety valve of emigration
to the USA or overseas colonies, and migrations to industrializing cities. One
possible outlet was revolutionary socialism, but German traditional elites were
able to deect these pressures outwards into a drive for nationalist expansionr
ism. Demography is only part of an explanation in which shifting military
balances of power interact with internal discontents to radicalize the situation.
For others, the outbreak of the First World War was an outcome of
miscalculations by the leaders of the great powers, who were engaged in
intensied military competition in multiple geographical spheres, while
faced by internal unrest (Mann 1993: Ch. 21). Politicians sensitive to growing
social tensions are capable of manufacturing a sense of external threat in order
to divert popular energies towards wars of conquest. But such tensions are not
necessarily a product of demographic pressures. The surplus young male
argument has its obverse in casualty aversion claims linked to falling repror
duction rates: whereas one situation is assumed to predispose societies to war,
166 Nutiunalism and War

the other explains the reluctance of populations to ght. Howewer, demography

cannot explain the outbreak of the Second World War. Although the Nazi
ideology can be viewed as hyperrmasculinist, Hitlers drive for war occurred in
spite of a declining birth rate, one that he sought to reverse by providing
incentives to families and banning birth control (Fulbrook 2002: 6475). This is
not to discount a nationalist preoccupation with demography, but we may
have to reverse the causal relationship. Historically, nation states threatened
by more successful and populous military neighbours have often sought
seek to boost birth rates, as did France after its calamitous defeat in 1870
(Hunter 1962).
Furthermore, wars, even if defensiv , do not of themselves have solidarist
effects. Much is dependent on a match between the goals of populations
participating and actual consequences. Whereas the wars of Prussia against
Austria, Denmark, and nally France (in reality wars of aggression) were
unifying, since they established a German nation state, catastrophic conflicts
may indeed undermine national cohesion. We observed that the defeat of
Germany in 1918 triggered the November revolution, and that a demoralizing
peace treaty delegitimized the new Weimar Republic. Indeed, many smaller
nation states (Denmark, Belgium, Holland) after demoralizing defeat have
subsequently sought to avoid war as too dangerous. Outbreaks of war have to
be understood in a geopolitical context. There are other forms of competition
(in sport and economic performance) through which a national identity may
be strengthened.
Finally, it is implausible to view regular warfare as a requirement for
national cohesion, since we noted that there are many examples of polities
without experience of recent wars, such as Switzerland, Iceland, or Sweden.
Marvin and Ingle (1999: 5) describe the nation as the memory of the lust
sacrice, but in many countries the key commemoration may be far distant.
This suggests we need to separate the solidarist effects of the mythologization
and memorialization from the experiences of war. Arguably, then, it is the
memory of war, socially embedded through ritual, that is crucial for social
unity rather than regularized aggressive bloodletting. The authors, like many
others, suggest that one of the functions of commemoration is to create heroic
role models for future sacrice. Nataliya Danilova (2015: 216) considers the
proliferation of ofcial warrcommemorative activity in contemporary Britain
and Russia as attempts to normalize war, pointing out these states have been
almost continuously at war in recent decades.
The reality, I maintained in Chapters 2 and 4, is much more complex. In
some contexts commemorations may generate a drive for vengeance against
an enemy or inspire a desire for heroic emulation until national goals have
been satised. Military establishments, concerned to valorize the status of their
professional vocation and secure a ow of recruits, may also encourage the
public glorication of war, but they have been only one of many participants
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 167

in the politics of memory. As Danilova shows in her excellent study, ofcial

initiatives, while garnering support for the sacrices of servicemen and
women, have failed to generate popular enthusiasm for military interventions
abroad. She also documents how commemorations can be instigated as
protests of veterans against a government and nation that betrayed them
(Danilova 2015: 157761). Commemoration is often for bereaved families an
outlet for grief. In twentiethrcentury Britain and France, the message of world
war commemorations has been for many veterans pacic: never again.
This is not to deny a linkage between nationalism, nation states, and
violence. But functionalist explanations are insufcient. We need to examine
the goals of nationalists and the conditions under which they engage in
violence, as well as the way individuals and groups process violent experiences
of the past to guide action in the present.

THE POISON OF NAllONALlSl lDEOLOGY

The ideologies of modern nationalism seem to be integrally linked to warfare.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ideology of nationalism, in both its
civic and ethnic varieties, was forged in war: the former during the defence of
the French republic against the armies of the European monarchies in 1792;
and the latter, articulated by Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation
(1807) after Napoleons humiliation of Prussia.
For Elie Kedourie (1966) it is the mismatch between the utopian goals of
nationalism and the necessary limits of any human social order that explains
why the global spread of nationalism is accompanied by violence. Kedourie
interpreted nationalism as a form of political religion, invented in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Enlightenment thinkers such as
Herder, Kant, and Fichte, who coupled the idea of authenticity to individual
and collective selfrdetermination. Nationalism crystallized into a doctrine that
humanity was divided by nature into distinctive peoples objectively differenr
tiated by their own languages and cultures, and that the only legitimate form
of government was national selfrgovernment (Kedourie 1966: 1). In reality,
the nationalist doctrine was historical fantasyithere were no such objective
linguistic and historical entities.
Kedourie explains the dynamism of nationalism by its appeal to a politically
excluded class: young secular educated intellectuals who felt themselves arbir
trarily barred from power by unrepresentative placeholders and viewed the
modern state as a bureaucratic machine that separated man from nature. To
locate an authentic model of society and rally support for it, they invented an
ancient past, nding often violent exemplars to justify an overthrow of the
established rulers. Nationalism displaced the idea of salvation from heaven to
168 Nationalism and Wm

earth, and the mechanism by which this was to be achieved was an organic
polity that dissolved the boundaries between the public and the private and
embodied the collective will of the people (Kedourie 1966: 43750). The task of
nationalists was to destroy a corrupt world and establish a reign of nationalist
saints. They established revolutionary organizations, rst in Europe and then
the rest of the world, to advance this goal. But the drive to establish a world
order based on nations meant tearing up the established compacts between
polities, which they regarded as illegitimate because they had not been agreed
by peoples. This led inevitably to conicts between states and, also, in the
French revolutionary period, to uncontrolled wars of peoples on the basis of
abstract principles (Kedourie 1966: 18719).
When nationalists achieved power, their attempts to realize their utopian
dreams were disastrous. They could offer no tested principles of good govr
ernance, and the results were totalitarian dictatorships, civil wars, and the
persecution of minorities. The effects of nationalism on the noanestern
world were particularly damaging, where deracinated intellectuals, in seeking
to mobilize the masses against the spell of imperialism, felt compelled to
appeal to the dark gods of religious traditionalism, generating a violent
irrationalism (Kedourie 1971: 7377).
Kedouries polemic may be idiosyncratic in tone, but it articulates
widely held views of the fanatical character of nationalisms directed not
just at regimes but peoples, its associations with cults of violence, its use
of historical myths impervious to reason to justify political claims, and
its intolerance of minorities (see Geary 2002: Introduction and Ch. 1).
Kedourie's polemic would have appalled Herder, who in Letters on the
Advancement of Mankind wrote:

Cabinets may deceive each other; political machines may exert pressure on each
other until one is shattered. tutheylunds do not march against each other in this
way; they lie side by side and help each other like families... he idea or
fatherland against fatherland in blood feud is the most horrible barbarity that
can be expressed in human language. (cited in Honl 1995: 215)
Isaiah Berlin, however, argued that in Germany the celebration of national
diversities by a Herder was transformed by military humiliations at the hands
of France into the modern doctrine of nationalism that was missionary and
aggressive. Patriotism expresses the love of the customs, laws, and character of
ones homeland, is defensive, and makes no claims on others, whereas natioir
alism is an aggressive doctrine. It is a manifestation of the radical subjectivity
introduced by romanticism that repudiates the possibility of objective truths
and prescribes the duty to follow ones inner truth. When applied to collect
ivities, this entails a rejection of a common humanity and international law in
favour of ones own truths. The only way of resolving conict is through
violence (Berlin 2013: 1867218).
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 169

Although conict is a regular feature of human history, many have claimed

that nationalism gloried a new type of unlimited war. Knox quotes the
Girondins of the French Revolution who declared that war was a national
blessing, and that a military campaign directed by peoples against kings would
be salvation both of France and the human race (Knox 2001: 6374). We
noted earlier how Rousseauian doctrines gave older concepts of the just war a
new twist, in which the struggle for national freedom outranked all other
principles, and activated subjugated peoples to resist their oppression (Nabulsi
1999: Ch. 6). The consequences of these wars of peoples were seen rst in the
atrocities perpetrated by both sides in the Spanish guerrilla war against the
French (Bell 2007: 278793). By the time of the two world wars the distinctions
between military and civilian were increasingly blurred (Shaw 2003: Chs. 476).
Kedourie is surely right to argue that nationalists tendencies to justify
claims to power and territory on the basis of historical myths have the
potential to generate conflicts, as there are no objective criteria by which to
adjudicate differences (Mayall 199 7764). This is particularly difcult when
the myths are underpinned by religious differences. We saw how in contemr
porary politics the European project has been built on a negation of the
uncontrollable passions that nationalism may unleash, just as recent Balkan
wars are blamed on backward looking nationalism (Kaldor 2004). Organizar
tions such as Gush Emunim, in claiming a divinely ordained mission to regain
the biblical lands of Israel after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, pioneered a
largerscale settlement movement in the West Bank which has made accomr
modations with Palestinians increasingly difcult (Hutchinson 1994: Ch. 3).
Nationalism has also exacerbated differences within states. The achiever
ment of independence is often followed by civil warsiin the USA (186175),
Ukraine (1917), Finland (1918), Ireland (192273), and Algeria (199172002).
Sometimes the division is expressed over competing conceptions of the same
national myth (in the USA the meaning of the Constitution, in Ireland the
objectives of the Easter 1916 rebellion), sometimes over competing secular and
religious visions (Algeria) or over class ideologies (Finland) (Kissane 2013).
On losing a general election called to resolve a dispute between Irish natioir
alists over the terms of the treaty to be agreed with Britain, Eamon de Valera
famously declared, The majority have no right to do wrong. He summoned
the ethnohistorical nation against the living population that had cast its votes,
thereby setting in train a bitter civil war (Daly 1999: 70).
Nonetheless, Kedourie exaggerates the causal power of ideas and myths in
instigating violence. His characterization of nationalism as totalitarian is also
shaped by the Nazi example and is not universally shared. I have contended
that there are always competing repertoires within nationalism which can lead
to a sense of pluralism about national identities (Hutchinson 2005: Ch. 3).
Anthony Smith has argued there are core features of nationalism (a concern
for the nations autonomy, its territorial unity, and its cultural distinctiveness)
17U Nutiunalism and War

which inspire programmatic action. A position stating that there are core
features is compatible with one that allows for the coexistence of other loyalties
over which nationalists make no overarching claims. In short, nationalists vary
considerably in the social niches they wish to regulate, and the salience of
national identities uctuates in potency for individuals. It is only in crisis with
an external threat (armed aggression, opposing revolutionary ideology, mass
migration) that nationalists tend to become totalizing as they attempt to
mobilize all the energies of the nation against supposed danger.
Nationalism as an ideology, I would claim, is culturally thick, but it is also, as
Michael Freeden (1998) has argued, politically thin and particularist, having little
to say about the balance between liberty and order, liberty and equality, and the
distribution of resources within the nation. To establish the political principles
around which the nation will be organized, nationalists must combine with other
ideologies. Freeden rightly rejects the idea that Nazism is only the most extreme
form of nationalism, which is for some the logical culmination of an irrational
creed. While fascists claim to advance the national interests, they espouse an
eschatology of violence, a cult ofleader (rather than people), and a philosophy of
totalitarianism and corporatism that is antithetic to most nationalists.
Kedourie ignores the fact that nationalism rarely stands alone but combines
with many other ideologies, republican, conservative, liberal, and socialist,
as well as with forms of chiliasm, and that circumstances tend to determine
which variety will become dominant. In Britain and the Netherlands a stable
political order could be built on much older national sentiments that reinforced
the monarchical, constitutional, and religious establishments. Englishmen
claimed an exceptionalism of constitutional liberties based on their island
heritage (and a strong navy), compared with the despotism oftheir Continr
ental neighbours, who were oppressed by standing armies. Another national
tributary was neoclassical republicanism, for which the core of the republic
was democratic selfrgovernment and a love of nation that was not exclusive or
competitive (Hont 1995: 218731). In Germany, liberal republican nationalists
after 1815 opposed standing armies that could oppress the people in favour of
volunteer civil militias, which would be mobilized only for defensive wars
(Moran 2003a: 6277). Liberal nationalists in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars
combined a moral revulsion against war with utilitarian arguments promoting
international trade and commercial society as means of overcoming the misunr
derstandings of peoples. The Cobden/Bright little England tradition tirelessly
rejected interventionist war and imperial expansion (Howard 2002: 23733).
Although the nationalist movements of some nineteentlircentury stateless
nations were revolutionary, the dominant traditions in others were libemlr
constitutionalist in character. Daniel O'Connell, leader of the early nineteenth
century Irish Repeal mass movement, declared that that the best possible
political revolution is not worth one single drop of human blood (quoted in
Cusack 1875, Vol. 2: 441).
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 171

Circumstances explain the shift of republican and liberalrconstitutional

nationalisms into violent and revolutionary forms, as Berlin seems to
recognize. French Iacobin republicans (unlike their Girondin rivals) were
initially pacic, rejecting war as a product of national monarchies, predar
tory aristocracies, and the greatrpower system (Hont 1995; Howard 2002:
2374). The militarization of the French Revolution was provoked by the
invasion of monarchical armies. Similarly, early nineteenthrcentury liberals
in Italy, attracted to ideas of constitutional government, formed into violent
secret societies such as the Carbonari as a result of political censorship
and repression.
Nationalists can and do generate revolutionary vanguard traditions,
endowed with romantic myths of mission and sacrice, and have looked
back, as we saw with Pearse, to national martyrs who rose in periodic revolt
against the state. Basque nationalists (ETA), like Pearse's Easter rebels, have
sometimes selfrconsciously staged rituals of violence to exemplify the spirit of
the nation in the hope ofprovoking state repression. This, however, is an index
of popular apathy about their message. Such violence and the construction of
supportive myths are often a means to claim leadership of the nation from
constitutional nationalists as much as to inspire aggression against the fore
eigner. Revolutionaries themselves tend to be a small minority who move into
violent politics through state repressioniETA by Francos state, the contemr
porary IRA in Northern Ireland by the Protestant Unionist crushing of the
civil rights campaign.
If Kedourie refuses to properly acknowledge the many competing varieties
of nationalism, can we argue a more limited thesis, contrasting a good civic
conception of the nation as a voluntary contract between its constituent
individuals with a bad ethnororganic' form that is xated on irrational
myths and is authoritarian and culturally exclusive? This distinction has a
long vintage (cf. Kohn 1944) and an extensive literature. But this also is too
simple. lust as a civic liberal nationalism does not lead to peace, as we see with
republican France, ethnic nationalism does not of itself generate war. As
Stephen Saideman (2013: 347) has argued, irredentist claims on another
state are a likely cause of war, but xenophobic nationalists have opposed
international adventures, when the annexation of a neighbouring territory
would bring into the nation state ethnic others' that they despise. Many ethnic
nationalists, moreover, although shaped by warfare, dene their nation not in
martial but in religious or cultural terms as having a moral mission to
humanity. A sense of ethnic superiority may lead nationalists not to aggression
but to attempts to isolate their nation from contaminating inuences, includ
ing greatrpower politicsithus, Irelands neutralism under de Valera, who
envisaged the country almost as a rural and religious utopia. The distinction
has also been subject to a thorough critique (cf. Brubaker 2004; Kreutzer 2006;
Calhoun 2007; Zimmer 2003a). David Brown (2000: Ch. 3) shows that both
172 Nutiunalism and Wm

ethnic and civic nationalisms are compatible with both authoritarianism and
liberalism, and the key factor is the sense of security of nationalist elites.
Ethnic nationalism, when shaped by later social Darwinist ideas, did mutate
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into racist and Fascist
ideologies that gloried violence and genocide (cf. Viroli 1997). Michael Mann
argues that such ideologies, by conating ethnos with demos, denied the
legitimacy of ethnic minorities and were factors in the prevalence of murder
ous ethnic cleansing' in the twentieth century. However, his explanation is
multicausal. This violence occurred only under specic conditions: where two
or three old' ethnic groups made claims to a territorial state which was
undergoing democratization; where the weaker sought help from abroad;
where ethnic conicts absorbed class conicts; and where the state was
threatened by geopolitical instability, usually war (Mann 2005: Ch. 1). Any
study of nationalism must also take into account relationships between other
ideologies and forms of genocide, whether we examine the politicides and
classicides of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, the mass killing of native peoples by
colonis in the Americas before the age of modern nationalism, or indeed the
massacres of seventeenthrcentury religious wars.
It would be foolish to deny that nationalism is implicated in wars, but such
wars are generally limited, given that the core nationalist goal is the realization
of an independent state on its natural or historical homelands. Kedourie
creates a false contrast between the epoch of nationalism as one of endemic
conict and the premodern period. The revolutionary wars which conveir
tionally initiate the era of nationalism were preceded by centuries of incessant
war on the European continent: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
religiorpolitical, and in the eighteenth century, dynastic and imperial. It is
from these wars, we argued earlier, that the identities and patterns of enmities
of many modern nations crystallized. Indeed, for some historians (see Scott
1992) the French revolutionary wars mark the end of the Second Hundred
Years War' between Britain and France. In short, modern nationalism
and national identities emerged within a European state system that was
militaristic, and nationalism became dominant as it took root within powerful
states, feeding off the memories of historic conicts.

THE NATION STATE AS MlLlTARY

POWER CONTAINER

Can, then, the conicts accompanying the diffusion of nationalism be

explained by its militaristic state origins and the memories of bloody enmities
with neighbours?
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 173

We examined in Chapter 1 Charles Tilly's explanation of how war made the

nation state in a European region divided into multiple and competing
political jurisdictions after the collapse of the Roman Empire. In turn, these
states made war. In Europe most of the territorial states of the early modern
period disappeared during the nineteenth century as a result of war, reducing
from about 500 units in 1800 to about 20 states in 1900. There then was also an
increase of states as empires broke up (Leonhard 2006: 235). Tilly identied
the existence in Europe of two main phases of statermaking. The rst was the
growth in power and extent of an existing state by conquest, dynastic alliance,
and bargaining; and the second, the creation of new states by existing states
(for example, German and Italian unication), which from 1648 occurred at
the ends of wars. These phases were part of a shift to a worldwide system of
nation states that occurred in ve steps. There was, rst, the development in
Europe of the early modern national state that coexisted with many other
political units; second, the crafting of most of Europe into nation states by war
and alliances; third, the spread of European political and economic dominr
ation to much of the world by the formation of client states and colonies;
fourth, the creation from these latter polities of autonomous states through
rebellion and international agreement; and, nally, the extension of this state
system to the rest of the world. Europeans played the dominant role in the
making ofthis system (Tilly 1975: 63278).
Michael Howard argued that nationalists not only inherited the xation with
the greatrpower politics of the state system, but they gave it a new impetus. In
great powers such as Britain or France there was a long heritage of relating
military might to prestige. This shaped the national values of the governing
classes, justifying imperial expansions, and this was diffused down the social
scale. A martial nationalism was adopted by statusrconscious industrial middle
classes, anxious to make themselves acceptable in a society still dominated by
an aristocratic ethos (Howard 2011: 53). Nationalism married to imperialism
justied a larger civilizing mission to the lesser races. As new nation states such
as Germany and Italy emerged from the 1860s onwards, they too sought the
prestige of a place in the sun, driving a huge competitive quest for empire in a
global expansion that ultimately led to the First World War. During the
nineteenth century this was spread by public schools (in England), state
education, and conscription. Militarism also became an instrument of social
discipline aimed at troublesome working classes (the target of German army
propaganda). Dangerous' youth, which was emerging as a social category as a
result of extended education, was also targeted by associations organized on
quasirmilitary lines like the Boy Scouts, Boys Brigades, and national youth
movements in Germany (Black 2012: 957101; Springhall 1977).
Nationalists have also made wars ever more lethal, by transforming the state
into a more centralized and penetrative instrument of the nation and pionr
eering military technological and organizational revolutions, such as the
174 Nutiunalism and Wm

conscription army and militaryrindustrial complexes, leading to the coining of

the term warfare state' (Edgenon 2005). David Bell interprets the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as the rst of the total wars, involving
not just military, but also ideological, economic, and political mobilization
(Bell 2007). War was not only conducted with a new intensity but also on a
new scale, with a much higher proportion of the population and the revenues
of the state mobilized.
In a recent book Andreas Wimmer expands these arguments, combining a
Kedourian view of nationalism as a warrprone' ideology with a Tilly/Mann
perspective that the nation state was a product of increasing state centralizar
tion and military mobilization, underpinned by a new contract between elites
and masses. In return for the former granting political participation and access
to public goods, the latter accepted taxes and military service (Wimmer 2013:
4, 17). The nation as an extended family of political loyalty and shared identity
provided the ideological framework that reected and justied this compact.
Nationalism meant rule by the people or that like should rule like. This
compact made the new nation states more powerful than their rivals, motive
ating and compelling the political leaders of other states to follow in their
wake. The process of shifting from empire, theocracy, or dynasticism to
national principles has been a major source of war within and between states
in the modern era in three ways. It produced violent struggles against empires
to achieve nation states, producing wars of secession. Second, newly created
nation states tended to ght interstate wars of an irredentist character
with neighbours over ethnically mixed territories, or over the ownership of
cornationals ruled by ethnic others across the border. Third, civil wars broke
out in those multirethnic nation states when the dominant ethnic elite pror
ceeded to exclude ethnic minorities. Referring to a global data set he has
compiled, Wimmer states that when nationalism gains hold in a political
arena, the likelihood of war more than doubles (Wimmer 2013: 127).
Wimmer uses sophisticated statistical techniques to relate nationrstate
creation to specic periods and types of nationalist warrmaking. Interstate
wars based on irredentist claims rose sharply after the creation of nation states,
but secessionist wars increased shortly before their formation and then
declined (2013: Ch. 4). As the nation state became the global norm, interstate
wars declined, though civil wars (to be considered in the next section)
substantially increased. One of the major mechanisms for explaining conict
is that it is motivated by fears of ethnic exclusion from power or public goods,
which offends against principles of equality or selfrdetermination. It is barely
institutionalized nation states that are most susceptible.
Impressive though his analysis is, Wimmer is overly rationalist, and while a
statistical approach can be illuminating, it is only as good as its data set and
the principles under which it was compiled. For example, he lumps together
many disparate states as nation states, uses (implausibly) the duration of a
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 175

nationalist movement as a proxy of its strength, and codes wars as a single

factor (for example, as interstate or civil), whereas many can be categorized
under multiple headings (Wimmer 2013: 92, 124, 23477). Nationalism
appears like a dens ex machinu to buttress a political exchange between elites
and masses. This says nothing about why a population should wish to be
recognized as a particular nation nor how nationalism generates potent
attachments to identity, territory, and autonomy. His notion of the compact
is functionalist and as mythical as Rousseaus notion of the social contract: it is
unclear if it is a cause or consequence of the nation state. Any notion of a
compact is simplistic. As we have noted, in parts of Europe populations were
mobilized in the Napoleonic Wars to defend the homeland under threat before
achieving political and social citizenship, and national citizens have often
opposed conscription for wars without this justication. That, of course, was
the thrust of the Tilly/Mann theses: that the nation state was formed in
resistance to the military and taxation burdens of the bellicose state and that
there was a progressive civilianization of the state as a consequence. True, the
term blood tax was widely used in nineteenthrcentury France but as a term
of resentment, not to signal assent. By 1905 there was assent to universal
shortrservice conscription but in the context of a rising threat from Germany
(Horne 2003: 104).
General approaches like Wimmers would suggest an interpretation of the
nation state as both the product and a cause of a bellicose Europeanrbased
state, and he has been criticized for oscillating between the two perspectives
(Hall and Malesevic' 2013). His account of violence is also schematic. To
maintain that the rise of nationalism creates conict with existing power
holders legitimated by imperial principles is to say little more than that,
where there are antagonistic principles of institutional order, discord is likely,
something close to tautology. This ignores the fact that in the modern period
many of the expanding empires were also nationalizing states. He is able to
show statistical signicance for some claims, but in failing to specify causal
chains is unable demonstrate that nationalist or nationrstate projects directly
cause war. Even when nationalism is the dominant ideology and practices of
exclusion are present, conict often arises unintended out of multiple inter
actions. At best, he is able to show that in the modern age, when war occurs, it
tends to take nationalist forms.
What, then, is generally missing from his account is an historical analysis of
why nationrstate formation may be accompanied by violence in some cases
rather than others. Projects of nation staterbuilding generated multiple armed
conicts between competing groups in the borderlands of the great empires
after the First World War, and military authoritarian or Fascist regimes
dominated the interwar period, but this is at the end of a long causal chain.
These populations were vulnerable national minorities, subject before the war
to a history of imperial ethnic dividerandrrule strategies, and during the war to
176 Nutiunalism and Wm

staterinspired ethnic scapegoating, forced migrations, and killings. As the war

ended, they faced the collapse of overarching political and economic institur
tions, and the threats of Bolshevik revolutionary interventioniall conducive
to paranoia and extremist action (see Chapter 3). The military and xenophobic
nationalisms were outcomes of the First World War, a war of empires.
One could reply that military politics has been the rule rather than the
exception in the majority of nation states during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, and military regimes, claiming guardianship of the nation, have
been prevalent until recently in the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia
(Koonings and Kruijt 2002: Introduction). Samuel Finer (2002: Ch. 12) has
observed that the replacement of dynastic regimes by bureaucratic states with
differentiated institutions had profound implications for the ofcer corps of
the armed forces. Once exalted as the preserve of the aristocracy owing
personal service to the monarch, they had become one profession among
others and required a distinctive and impersonal vocation to the state. They
found this in nationalism, as the defenders of the national territory against
external and internal enemies. Before, the most the military could do was
exercise power indirectly by replacing one monarch with another, but now the
concept of popular sovereignty allowed them to intervene in a revolutionary
fashion when civilian politicians were perceived to fail the nation and rule
directly themselves (Finer 2002: Ch. 12). The archetypal man on horseback
was Napoleon, who, when the French republic was threatened by internal
chaos in time of war, seized power and declared a French mission to lead a
Europe of nations. He was only the rst of many men of destiny who would
appeal to the French at times of crisis: Napoleon 111, General Boulanger,
Marshal Petain, and General de Caulle.
This authoritarian conception of the nation can be justied by what
Koonings and Kruijt (2002: 19723) designate as the birthright principle. In
the rst case, the military perceived themselves as crucial to the birth of the
nation or to the survival of the nation at moments of cm ithus, Mustafa
Kemal in the founding of Turkey amidst the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and
the Kuomintang in the establishment ofTaiwan as the base by which to regain
China. A second case is where, as in Algeria, Burma, Cuba, and Eritrea, armies
were formed out of successful guerrilla movements ghting against empires or
larger nation states, which then imposed dictatorships on the population.
The prestige of the military as nation builder can be reinforced by another
factor: when the army or revolutionary militia is the only coherent force
capable of establishing order in a highly stratied society with few civil society
traditions (Finer 2002: Ch. 12). Such militarism, however, seems to be a
feature of less developed societies. Tilly and Mann argue for a gradual civilr
ianization of the European state during the nineteenth century, arising from
its capture by social movements, as budgets were allocated increasingly to
nonrmilitary purposes, paving the way for the shift from a warfare to a welfare
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 177

state. Even where military regimes are found, there is no necessary link to
interstate wars, as Centeno (2002) demonstrates in Latin America, although
they may engage in violence against internal enemies, whether class, indigenr
ous peoples, or ethnic minorities. Much depends on the strength or otherwise
of liberal constitutional traditions in a given context.
If we cannot identify direct, what about indirect links between nationalism
and the creation of nation states and war? In Chapter 3, I argued that the rise
of nation states destabilized an existing state system, dominated by empires,
thereby creating power disequilibria, which, in Robert Gilpin's understanding
(1981), has been a classic recipe for war. As Iames Mayall (2000: Ch. 1) has
argued, the existing system was based on the Westphalian settlement, whereby
the great powers achieved stability through the mutual recognition of, and
nonrinterference in, each others sovereignty and territorial integrity, prinr
ciples that implied the equality of states. These were modied by the realist
recognition of an inherent hierarchy in world affairs in which great powers
exercised authority, and security was maintained by a balance of power, often
through the mechanism of war.
Nationalism, we saw in Chapter 3, disrupted the existing stability in four
ways. First, by placing legitimacy in peoples rather than states, it threatened all
previous treaties and the existing territorial order (something I shall discuss
further in the next section). Second, the nationalist revolutions that mobilized
the mass of the population in support of developmental and military pror
grammes signicantly increased the power of large nation states visrarvis
dynasticrimperial neighbours, forcing them to respond. As we observed,
they struggled to compete militarily and economically, and their attempts to
raise taxation to nance military programmes created growing resentments.
The growing power of nation states was also reected in a global seaborne
expansion in the nineteenth century that threatened to encircle traditional
dynastic empires. Perceptions of imperial weakness encouraged European
nation states to intervene militarily in support of Greek independence and
of Italian unication and of Japan (in alliance with Britain) against Russia,
furthering weakening empires. Third, the growing power of nation states in
the interstate system allowed them to nationalize the rules of the interstate
game. The Congress of Berlin (1878) justied the allocation of territories
between warring states on ethnic grounds, and in the late nineteenth century
nationalist propaganda was employed on all sides to foment discord among
the national minorities of ones enemy. The result was a growing fear of
disintegration in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, in the latter case
justifying a preventative war in 1914 to crush Serbian/Slay irredentism.
Fourth, the nationalist revolution resulted in the transformation of world
territorial space with the creation of over a hundred nation states, often, though
not exclusively, through peace treaties at the end of general wars. The prolifer
ation of new states created power imbalances either through their strength
178 Nutiunalism and War

or weakness. The violent creation of a powerful German nation state at the

centre of Europe disrupted the balance of power on that continent by chalr
lenging both France, previously the leading continental power, and, by its
rapid naval expansion, Britain, the global imperial power. This intensied an
arms race that in conjunction with the imperial crisis in Central Europe led to
the First World War. On the other hand, the establishment of nation states
can produce power vacuums encouraging greatrpower interventions. After
the First World War the largerscale production of unstable nation states
in Central Europe, weakened by mutual rivalries and internal ethnic tensions,
encouraged Nazi German irredentism and Soviet expansionism. The similar
creation of states in Africa and Asia after 1945 in an era of superpower
rivalry for global supremacy has created the conditions for interstate and
intrastate conicts
Critics of disequi brium approaches have argued that they are unfalsiable,
since dening a situation in such terms is dependent on the subjective
judgements of actors. Moreover, changes in the geopolitical environment do
not necessarily result in war. Gilpin identies alternative strategies for threatr
ened powers, which might nd accommodations with rivals or overcome their
weakness by forming alliances (Gilpin 1983: Ch. 5). In contrast with the
Hobbesian View (put forward by realist scholars) of the international order
as inherently anarchical in the absence of a hegemon, statesmen can and have
built architectures of peace.
Indeed, the number of interstate wars declined during the era of nation
alism. One of the targets of the Cobdenite little England' school of liberal
nationalism was the doctrine of the balance ofpower that legitimized wars of
intervention and imperial expansion (Howard 2011: 3375). Although this
school could be rejected as unrealistic idealists, Gil Merom (2003: 54762)
maintains that, with the rise of middle classes given power by the extension
of the suffrage and growth of education and communications, a normative
gap was opening in the nineteenth century between traditional state elites
and a public increasingly seeking to impose utilitarian and liberal standards
on foreign policy. There was public disquiet at the brutality of imperial
wars, of the French campaigns in Algeria during the 1840s, of the British
concentration camps during the Boer War, and the German atrocities
against the Herero.
What is notable is the attempts by great powers, in which nation states were
increasingly prominent, to construct international institutions designed to
regulate the conduct of war. During the nineteenth century an international
order formed, regulated initially by the Congress system, based on the adopr
tion of multir and bilateral agreements, the extended application of inter
national law, and the recognition of humanitarian obligations. An important
development was the recognition of neutrality as a principle for conning
conict. British governments were important actors, since it advanced Britains
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 179

interests as the global imperial power to stand outside Continental conicts

and to ensure the free ow of world trade and communications. A key
moment was the Declaration of Paris (1856) at the end of the Crimean War.
A second was the willingness of Britain to accept an adverse judgment in 1872
over its treatment of neutrals by the Court of International Justice. A third
occurred with the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. Although they
failed in their objectives of general disarmament, they made signicant pror
gress in codifying the laws of war (Abbenhuis 2013: 578).
International regulation was a response to recurring outbreaks of war in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the Francorlrussian, Sinor
Japanese (1894), SpanishrAmerican (1898), AnglorBoer (189871900), and
Russorlapanese (190475) conicts (Abbenhuis 2013: 13715). This did not
prevent the First World War, but few would attribute the outbreak of general
warfare simply to nationalism, which was one factor in an ensemble that
included global imperial rivalries, a geopolitics of secret alliances governed
by traditional balance of power considerations, and elite miscalculations
That war was followed by another round of international institutiow
building to ensure future peace, including the establishment of the League of
Nations to protect and regulate new putative nation states, and Geneva
Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. This too failed, and many have
blamed the Second World War on a resurgent German nationalism using
irredentism as a tool of foreign policy. However, the German response owed
much to the injustices of the Versailles Settlement, the use of nationalism
to serve the geopolitical interests of the winners in seeking to conne Germany
and its First World War allies, and the radicalization of Europe by the
Great Depression.
This further disaster led to the enhanced commitment of the great powers
to international institutions, notably the United Nations, whose Charter
requires its members under Article 2 to refrain in their international rela
tions from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent
with the Purposes of the United Nations. This narrowed the scope of
legitimate war to that of selfrdefence (permitted under Article 51) or to
actions in accordance with the UN Charter. A second manifestation is
the creation in the originating theatre of twentiethrcentury global war7
Europeiof the European Union as a voluntary association of nation states
to ensure cooperation on the subcontinent between former enemies and the
institutionalization of democracy. These institutions and charters have not
solved the problems of war. They do show, however, the formal commitment
of the major nation states to avoiding interstate armed conict, and to
operating within the framework of international law in establishing peace
in areas that can plausibly be claimed to be a threat to the security of system
as a whole.
180 Nutiunalism and War

This indicates the relationship between nationalism, the nation state, and
war is much more contingent. First, warfare is only one of the sources of
national identity; although military cults have been signicant in some
nation states, there are strong antirmilitarist traditions in others. We noted
in ChapterZ that the populations of many nation states (e.g. Switzerland,
Canada, and India), even when moulded by experiences of war, rejected an
identity based on greatrpower prestige by dening themselves (in religious or
cultural terms) as having a moral mission to humanity. This is especially true
of smaller political units earlier subordinated within empires, like Ireland
and Norway, which rejected greatrpower politics in favour of advancing
peace through international institutions. Second, nationalism is compatible
with an internationalism supported by concerts of nation states that
aim to regulate conict through international law and institutions. Indeed,
since 1945 there has been a dramatic reduction in interstate wars between
great powers.

UNSATISFIED NATIONALISMS
AND lN'lRASTAlI-L WARS

If interstate war is in decline in the post71945 period, this has not been the case
for intrastate violence, much of which has an ethnic character. Kjell Holsti in
2000 argued the ratio of intrastate to interstate conicts was now 7:]. War here
is dened by a threshold principle of 1,000 deaths per year. Between 1950 and
2000, civil wars, guerrilla, and separatist conicts killing half a million people
or more occurred in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Mozambique, Cambodia,
Angola, Indonesia, and Rwanda (Tilly 2002: 2172). In the 1950s and 1960s
these were associated with decolonization and interventions by the great
powers in the Cold War. They then took on the character of armed rebellions
against consolidating states to seize national power or separate territories.
Civil wars (in Tilly's terminology) reached an early peak in 1975, with
substantial conicts in Angola, Burma, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran,
Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Mozambique, Pakistan, the Philippines, Vietnam,
and Zimbabwe. But they continued to proliferate until they reached another
peak in 1992, when fully twentyreight internal military conicts raged across
the world. Such wars declined during the late 1990s, but internecine killing
continued at much higher levels than those of the 1960s, and there have been
fresh waves of war since then. There were also substantial increases in genor
cide (staterdirected or staterauthorized killing of populations identied by
race, ethnicity, and/or religion) and politicide in Rwanda, Afghanistan,
Uganda, El Salvador, Iran, Syria, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Iraq (Tilly 2002).
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 181

Why in a period marked by the end of formal empires and the mass
construction of internationally recognized nation states do we see an increase
in violent ethnic intrastate conicts? To Kedourie's charge that the
global diffusion of nationalism would inevitably produce such violence, Ernest
Gellner replied that the nation state provided the structural framework for
modern industrialism, and the nationrstate system the foundations of a liberal
international order. A world state, he argued, would be like apartheid South
Africa, in which a hierarchy of powerful nations would seek to monopolize
public resources. A world of nation states functioned as a series of (canal)
locks, in which each group could nd its niche in a competitive world (Gellner
1964: 17578).
However, Walker Connor (1978: 38273) observed, of those entities called
states in 1971, only twelve at most could be considered as ethnically homor
genous nation states. Later, Ernest Gellner (1983: 44) stated, whereas there are
about 200 independent states in the world, there were about 8,000 languages
and, hence, potential nations. Gellners claim is contestable, since only a
minority of language groups would be considered as viable nations. But the
broader point is that from a statist nationalist perspective we still await the
selfrdetermination of the nations of the world. Moreover, because nations
emerge through selfrascription, there is potentially no end to the making of
national claims against existing states.
In an important study Benjamin Miller (2007) argues that statertornation
imbalance provides the major motivation to war and explains why some
regions are more warrprone than others (for example, the Middle East in
contrast to Latin America). He constructs a classication that includes revir
sionist states prepared to risk war for irredentist purposes, incoherent multir
ethnic states, liable to internal wars and foreign interventions, and frontier
states in regions where boundaries are disputed (Miller 2013: 76). Although
his analysis is illuminating, he narrows his argument by claiming only when
ethnic nationalism (dened as the aspiration to form a state on ethnic lines)
becomes dominant does war become more likely and by dening a nation
as a politically conscious entity that seeks a state (Miller 2007: 34). As we
observed, not all nationalisms seek such ethnorpolitical exclusivity, nor do
they necessarily dene their aspirations for national selfrgovernance in statist
terms. Crucially, he contends that it is the nature of greatrpower involvement
in such regions that determines whether the outcomes will be of peace or war
(Miller 2007: 370). If statertornation imbalance was a sufcient factor, then the
statistics cited by Walker Connor would suggest a world of perpetual conict.
In practice, Miller invokes situational factors such as geopolitics and the
history ofviolence between groups to explain violent conict (Miller 2013: 80).
International relations scholars tend to regard acceptance of the principle of
national selfrdetermination as opening a Pandoras box (Mayall 1990: Ch. 4).
They point to Wilsons project of rerestablishing peace and stability after the
182 Nutiunalism and Wm

First World War by giving selfrdetermination to the populations of the former

Central and Eastern European Empires, which provided the tinder for a
further world war. The victorious powers in 1945 decided to neuter the right
of selfrdetermination, by redening it in statist terms in the United Nations
Charter to refer to the rights of political units to maintain their territorial
integrity without external interference (Higgins 1994: Ch. 7). There is a fun
damental tension in the modern word between these principles of state
sovereignty and national selfrdetermination, the result of which has been a
qualied domestication of nationalism through adherence to the rule of uti
passidetis (Mayall 1990: Chs. 3, 4). This reframing of the principle to support
exi ing states and the reluctance of the international community to recognize
insurgent states has had a repressive effect on nationalist liberationist mover
ments, reinforcing the imperial controls of dominant nationalities over their
minorities (Beissinger 2005: 3377).
Why, then, the explosion of intrastate wars in the global South? Some of this
is down to the sheer increase in the number of new states of uncertain
leg' macy that increases the cases of wars. But the number of conicts
outstrips the creation of states. For Wimmer the primary cause is the natiorr
alist ideology of selfrdetermination combined with the practices of political
exclusion of ethnic groups. Cederman, Wimmer, and Min (2010) complain of
the neglect of nationalist ideology in much of the scholarship on internal
ethnic violence or civil wars, much of which focuses on state weakness and/or
materialist factors (of greed) (see Collier and Hoefer 2004). Fearon and Lai n
(2003), taking a rationalrchoice approach, maintain that, because ethnic
grievances are pervasive, yet most intergroup relations are peaceful, rare
episodes of conict cannot be explained by reference to ethnicity. The relevant
factors are economic and political: state weakness (that is a states inability to
repress insurgencies) and/or the presence of natural resources that encourage
the rise of warlords. Barry Posen relates the violent mobilization of ethnic
groups in the Balkan wars to security dilemmas arising from the sudden
breakdown of a state (Posen 1993).
Cederman, Wimmer, and Min (2010) however, argue that it is not the
weakness or absence of the state but rather its appropriation by ethnic groups
and use to exclude other politically signicant groups from power and resources
that generates violence. This is particularly so where civil associations that cross
cut ethnic afliations are lacking, so that when nationalism emerges, it is
identied with the interests of a particular ethnic group. During this struggle
for power, nationalism is employed by political actors to claim ownership of the
state. Roughly half the conicts fought since the Second World War can be
linked to this dynamic of ethnopolitical struggle for state power' (2010: 114).
Stuart Kaufman (2006) likewise argues, citing Armenian and Azerbaijani
bloodshed over Karabakh, that security dilemmas come at the end of a causal
chain of elite chauvinistic political mobilization driven by the emotional
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 183

power of ethnic myths of group hostility. But he asserts such myths only
become salient when the group feels a sense of existential threat and has the
political capacity to act. Building in nationalist ideology to account for violent
conict is essential, as is the strategic importance of state power, but still more
important is to place in the foreground what has been left in the background,
namely the geopolitical history of state formation as it affected interethnic or
national relations.
A problem with many of these accounts is it is not clear whether we are
discussing nationalist or ethnic conicts. Nationalism is more than a project to
control the resources of a state: central to nationalists is the creation or defence
of nations as distinctive moral and territorial commun' es that can participate
as equals in the wider world. Many postcolonial states are weak both in
capacity (in being able to offer public goods and to repress challenges) and
in legitimacy, where they inherited diverse peoples within colonial boundaries.
Where decolonization came from above, they lacked what Michael Howard
called the rite of passage provided by a war of independence that could unite
ethnically disparate populations. Their borders were sanctied by the UN and
reinforced by the agreement of the Organization of African Union to reject
any reorganization along ethnic lines. This meant that conicts were likely
to be intrastate rather than interstate, exacerbated by states that conducted
proxy wars through supporting internal dissidence in neighbouring states, as
Rwanda has in the Central African Republic.
We also noted in Chapter 3 that postcolonial conicts arise because inder
pendence provides majorities opportunities to overturn the privileging of
minorities by colonial powers as part of ruling strategiesihence the struggles
of Sinhalese against Tami in Sri Lanka, Hutu against Tutsi in Rwanda, and
Hindus against Muslims in India. Geopolitical factors further destabilized the
new states, when during the Cold War the rival superpowers in a struggle for
global supremacy intervened covertly or were invited into internal conicts
(for example, by UNITA or the MPLA in Angola) to champion potential allies.
Internal rebels were also strengthened by the relative inability of new states to
control their access to a global arms market, by a covert international trade in
drugs and resources, and emigrant nancial support enabled by global comr
munications. In short, the nationalist claims of rival groups are but one factor
in internal conicts which were intensied by the lack of (national) legitimacy
of the state, the imperial legacy they inherited, and external intervention.
Wimmer (2013) and Cederman, Wimmer, and Min (2010) acknowledge
the importance of including as causal factors the mobilization capacities of
oppositions and the histories of group relations. Wimmer (2013: 172) also
agrees that most cases of violence occur in states that are relatively weak and
soon after a nation state has been established. They are more likely when the
centre is contested by a large number of ethnic groups and when substantial
sections of the population are excluded. Where a state is incoherent, conict is
184 Nutiunalism and Wm

likely to take secessionist forms. These qualications weaken his central claims
about the warrproneness of nationalism and the project of nationrstatehood
and suggest there should be a greater focus on the legitimacy of states. Many
contemporary armed conicts in Latin America, he admits, are socialr
revolutionary rather than nationalist, and in the Middle East and Asia they
are Islamist. At one point he writes that war remains a rare event even at
the height of the process of nation state formation' (Wimmer 2013: 143). Of
postcolonial states, it might fairly be asked in what sense can they be characr
terized as nation states, how genuine is the nationalism proclaimed by political
actors, and how responsive are their constituencies to nationalism as opposed
to other afliations.

CONCLUSIONS

Our analysis indicates there are many links between nationalism, nations, and
nation states and collective violence. Nationalists have often mythologized war
and collective violence as constitutive of their nation, in creating a collective
selfrconsciousness via a popular insurrection or in the achievement of national
freedom. Most states are founded on conquest, and in Europe nationalism has
been allied to bellicose campaigns to advance (nation) state formation. This
occurred in both the medieval and early modern period as well as in the
classic era of nationalism, when statesmen like Bismarck achieved a German
unication in the service of Prussian power and conservative values. Outside
the West elites have adopted natioustate models in order to galvanize popur
lations for defence and development.
Where nation states were forged in war, this could valorize militarism in the
eyes of broad social groups, though there were movements that contested this.
When regimes are under threat, leaders may summon myths of sacricial
heroism to divert democratic pressures into violence against external or
internal Others. Milosevic, fearing the collapse of the Yugoslav federation,
evoked with powerful effect in 1987 memories of Kosovo Polje to set himself at
the head of an aggressive Serbian nationalism. Revolutionary nationalists too
can turn to violence out of despair or deliberately create a tradition of martyrs.
It is also the case that wars of nations tend to be more intense and to have a
mass character than cabinet wars for limited political objectives. Success or
failure is perceived not just as a test ofthe legitimacy of regimes but of the moral
character of peoples. Although such wars can be democratizing, leaders, to
mobilize the full capacities of peoples, have also instituted totalitarian controls.
We have also identied factors which make nationalist conict more likely.
These include demographic pressures, revolutionary upheavals or military
catastrophes, conditions of imperial repression and breakrup, and sudden
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 185

changes in the geopolitical environment. All of these can create a sense of

existential panic. Thus, we have observed how demographic change can raise
tensions, whether it is population numbers (or perceptions of) putting presr
sures on resources, creating fears of shifts in power between national groups
within a state (especially under conditions of democratization), or producing
apprehension in external military rivals. Equally, many have pointed to the
problems of an excess of ambitious young males lacking career or political
outlets (the blocked mobility thesis), facing a threat to their masculinity from
loss of employment or other loss of status, since the young are over
represented in violent nationalist movements.
Political upheavals where there is a collapse of the state, humiliated in war,
can lead to a nationalist radicalization, feelings of uncertainty visrarvis ethnic
others, and demands for vengeance. Imperial collapse in war, especially when
preceded by ethnic scapegoating and ethnic dividerandrrule tactics, was likely
to produce violent nationalisms in populations that were intermingled and
had competing claims over territories and peoples. Economic crises, when
accompanied by mass migration of culturally alien peoples, were also probe
lematic. The night and fog of war' have offered an opportunity for dominant
groups to engage in mass ethnic killing of pariah peoples, minorities perceived
to fth columnists, and potential allies of external enemies, as the Armenians
allied to Russians were regarded by the Ottoman Turks.
Dramatic and unanticipated transformations in the geopolitical environr
ment that appeared to threaten the status of existing states have created
security dilemmas, triggering arms races that in turn might result in war.
The unication of German states and the new states statusrdriven quest for
empire, if not overseas, then in Europe, was a factor in the realignment of the
great powers and the outbreak of the First World War. At this point, technor
logical progress, accelerating the capacity of states to mobilize their militaries
with ever more lethal weaponry, reduced the time for effective calculation and
increased the likelihood of preventative war. We also saw the rise of new
powers, and the struggle for world hegemony between the USA and the USSR
resulted in many proxy wars outside Europe.
But all such links are contingent. It is true that nationalists adhere to a now
rational belief system that requires its followers to volunteer for martial
sacrice when the nation is perceived to be threatened. Nationalists emphasize
through myths and legends the cultural differences between nations. They
seek, in a world where populations are often intermingled, the consolidation of
the nation in a circumscribed territory, sacralized as a homeland. Their
demands for political freedom tend to clash with the existing order of states.
It is much more difcult to negotiate compromises with others on core issues
for nationalists (of identity, homeland, selfrdetermination) than on material
grievances. But difference does not entail conict, and conict does not
necessarily lead to violence and war.
186 Nutiunalism and War

It is important to emphasize that a willingness to sacrice for the nation is

not a glorication of killing. Even if it were, nationalists by themselves cannot
be the cause of violence. Without the existence of a cohesive nutiun or an
effective state or political organization, nationalists can do little. SiniSa
Malesevic' (2013) maintains that the rise of nationalist ideologies and of
revolutions in the coercive capacities of political organizations are separate
processes, only contingently related. Where populations are faced with unexr
pected shocks, we have seen there is the potential for violence directed against
internal or external threats. But that is to say no more than that where ultimate
loyalties are under challenge, whether these are class, religious, or familial,
individuals may react emotionally rather than rationally. Although certain
pressures create conllict potential, none necessarily produces violence. Many
nations have achieved statehood out of multiple experiences of war, occupar
tion, and ethnic cleansing. Nations that perceive themselves as victimized by
history are not necessarily sympathetic to their neighbours. But even in the
case of nations and nation states deeply affected by war, there are generally
other bases of national identity, including cultural, political, or religious
afliations which offer alternative and often opposing conceptions of what
should be done. There are many varieties of nationalism, some more xenor
phobic than others. We have noted nationalism in liberal forms generally
predicated on a universalist sense of duty to humanity as a whole, one of
which is a commitment to internationalism. But even ethnic nationalisms (as
opposed to civic) are not necessarily violencerprone.
Positing that nationalism is the cause of violence implies there are effective
pacic ideological alternatives. But as we saw in Chapter 4, it is not clear what
they are, other than a return to forms of empire. To support his claim that
nationalism is warrprone, Wimmer focuses substantially on borderland popur
lations either just before or after imperial collapse. However, Riebers analysis
(20141) indicates that wars in borderlands are better seen as part of pattern
(dating from the sixteenth century) of recurring conicts between world
empires in which borderlands regularly changed hands. In short, a longer
historical perspective prioritizes geopolitical competition over ideology as a
causal force. The bloodiest conflicts in the modern period (the world wars)
were fought by empires for their preservation or expansion. Much of the
disorder since 1945 (and indeed 1919) has been the consequence of these
wars which threw into existence a mass of halfrformed national units often
lacking in legitimacy and without the attributes of stable rule, developed
administrative structures, economies, and educational systems. Such states
were further disrupted by interventions from great powers (and later super
powers) to sustain their place in the great game'. Democratic peace theorists
may pretend to have an answer to such problems, but the very attempts to
establish democracies in the Middle East have produced largerscale violence.
The move to reconciliation and the establishment of secure democracies in
 Is Nationalism Warerne? 187

Europe have been driven by special circumstances: the memory oftwo catastrophic
wars between imperial states.
Violence between collectivities long predates the era of nationalism and
nation states and can be found where they are weak. In the present, strong
nation states seem to be a necessary precondition for social pacication. In
their absence there is considerable violence, as in Africa. In many of these new
wars' the problem is the absence or weakness of an overarching national
identity integrating the different interests within clear territorial state bound
aries (Munkler 2005). One should also note that effective nation states are also
required for international peacekeeping missions.
Possessing an effective nation state is still perceived to give populations a
measure of control in an uncertain world, a platform for managing their
problems. As Mann (1997) has argued, it is still the most effective provider
of the infrastructures for developmentiscal mechanisms, property rights,
education, social securityias well as defence and internal peace. In a similar
spirit, Geoffrey Hosking (2014: Chs 7) proposes that through their quasir
kinship symbolic systems nation states operate as bounded trust communities
that provide a sense of collective security in an increasingly global economy.
The political and intellectual leaders of even powerful nation states recognize
the necessity of international cooperation to deal with a wide range of per
ceived threats (nuclear proliferation, climate change, terrorism, nancial
instabilities). But only by possessing a nation state can populations obtain
membership of global and regional bodies such as the United Nations, and
thus participate in decisionrmaking on the world stage. There is, consequently,
a hierarchy of power between populations with and without such nation states,
which in turn encourages new waves of nationalist mobilization. In the
contemporary world, where competition for scarce resources remains intense,
the possession of a state is viewed as essential for achieving and defending such
resources, and international recognition of a collecti ity is granted on condir
tion being a nation state. Given that there are many more claimants for
independent nationhood than there are states, there are undoubtedly inceir
tives for minorities to attempt to break free, in spite of the hostility of the
existing order of states, most of which, if not multinational, are multirethnic.
But must selfrdetermination be viewed in statist terms? Can it not refer to
political or cultural autonomies, and can this not lead to the accommodation
of the interests of dominant and minority nations by states reforming on
federal and consociational lines, or by offering more powers to (national)
regions' (on this, see McGarry and OLeary 1993)? This seems to be the
pattern in North America and Western Europe, where the European Union
provides a protective umbrella and institutionalizes, albeit imperfectly, the
idea of multiple sovereignties. It might be argued that such transnational
institutions are the future, with nation states being compelled to devolve
power downwards and at the same time pool their sovereignty in regional
188 Nutiunalism and War

and global bodies. One harbinger is the rush of populations in Eastern Europe
to share their sovereignty, recently recovered after the Soviet dissolution, with
the European Union in the name of enhanced socioreconomic progress and
military security. But this is still an experimental project with imperial char
acteristics, dependent for its security on the USA and still determined by great
natiorrstate interests.
A solution, if there is one, then might be to establish stronger international
institutions with a greater reach that can offer security guarantees, contain
arms races, manage scarce environmental resources, and support economic
development in troubled states, while demanding in return recognition of
minority rights. This would require strong nation states as sponsors of inter
nationalism, and also, on the receiving end, effective states through which
enlightened policies of cooperation can be implemented. Such interventions,
however, have been viewed as imperialist by dissident parties in conict zones
and can generate a reactive nationalism. In any case, North America and
Europe are arguably special cases, operating in regions characterized by high
living standards and (until recently) a sense of military security. In other areas,
such as the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucuses, and the Asian subcontiir
ent, a sense of insecurity persists, memories of historical conicts remain vivid,
and competition for scarce resources, power, status, and wealth remains
intense. Dominant nationalities in such circumstances have been resistant
on geopolitical and economic grounds even to democratic campaigns for
autonomy, let alone secession. Here, the possession of a territorial state, with
its protected borders/geography and resources (including population size), is
perceived to be a sine qua mm for the defence of national identity and the
achievement of economic progress. Minorities, in turn, such as the Kurds in
Turkey and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, have seen violence as the only means by
which to obtain their goals.
One consequence of increased global interconnectedness is exposure to
sudden and unpredicted challenges which upset existing balances between
ethnic populations. The establishment of effective regulatory transnational or
international institutions still seems to be a tall order, given the discord and
differences of interest between the great powers. Since war is so often an
unintended consequence of many contingent factors, rather than a product of
ideology, it seems unlikely that we shall nd any route to a perpetual peace.
Perhaps the preservation of peace may in the end depend on the memory of
the horrors of war.
 Concluding Thoughts

What general conclusions can we make about nationalism and war? This is a
difcult question for several reasons. The wars analysed here vary enormously
in their military organization and in the range of sectors mobilized, which in
the case of total wars may include much of society. They differ in their
temporal and geographical scope and in the scale of violence. They can be
interstate, intrastate, imperial, and liberation in character. They can be sinr
ultaneously all of these. Moreover, analysts use war as an umbrella term that
can refer also to peacetime institutional initiatives and practices related to
mi tary preparedness. Finally, war can be a retrospective label placed on a
series of disparate events; the myths of war can be as signicant for collective
ities as objective experiences; and the interpretations of specic wars change
over time. Notwithstanding such qualications, we can draw out several
implications of this study for the understanding of nationalism.
First, it throws doubt on structuralrfunctionalist accounts that understand
nationalism as an effect of a shift from hierarchical agroliterate to mobile
industrial societies marked by egalitarian citizenship. In Gellners explanation
warfare is entirely missing as a causal factor in the rise of nation states. Gellner
argued conicts arose between early nationalizing societies produced by the
unevenness in the industrialization process, but as modernization proceeded
he expected the passions of nationalism to recede. Indeed, his claim that a
world organized into nation states resembles a system of canal locks implies
that nationalism defused potential conict between diverse populations
(Gellner 1964: Ch. 7). There is something to be said for this latter statement,
but Tilly (1992) and Mann (1986; 1993) offer a better guide to the origins of
many nation states and spread of nationalism in arguing for the importance of
military imperatives. Even political struggles for citizenship were often linked
to the duties of bearing arms for national defence, and, as Mosse (1990)
observes, this association raised the status of soldiering. In many countries
the high prestige of military service among social elites signicantly shaped the
values of national populations. These were disseminated through elite educm
tional institutions, to which the socially aspiring sent their children, and youth
associations such as the Boy Scouts.
190 Nutiunalism and Wm

Tilly (1992) and Mann (1993; 1995) also qualify militarist interpretations,
recognizing that the balance between the military and the civilian varies over
time. They argue that as states in the nineteenth century became captured by
rising social classes, so they became civilianized, one indicator of which was
the declining proportion of public expenditures dedicated to military pure
poses. The deepening of state authority has also led to pacication within
emerging national societies, even as external violence in the form of interstate
wars has become more lethal. Some might claim that the status of the military
and that of nationalism are now in precipitate decline. This, however, is
doubtful, and largely conned to Western Europe, where the memory of the
horror of two world wars is still vivid. European demilitarization is by no
means the norm today, and in many countries, including the USA, the nexus
between the military and industrial technology remains tight.
However, the twentiethrcentury experience of total wars that resulted in the
rapid destruction of empires and the mass catapulting of nationalist mover
ments into power strongly qualies Tilly's central contention (that wars make
states). It also highlights missing elements in the militarist framework, namely
the prior existence (or otherwise) of national sentiments as foundations for,
and drivers of, state development. Imperial dissolution has had very varied
consequences. In some cases (for example, Poland, Ireland), there already was
a strong sense of nationality around which it was possible to build a viable
nation state. In others, the war experience itself (not discussed by Tilly) was so
intense as to enable nationalist leaders to create a mass national consciousness,
but in still others the rapidity of imperial disintegration, when this was only an
indirect effect of war, might result in the coming into existence of political
units that were states and nations only in formal terms. This could apply to
many African countries in the 1960s and 1970s.
Second, our analysis lends qualied support to diffusionist accounts of the
rise of nation states as products of distinctive European conditionsiof a
competitive interstate system that engaged in permanent military revolution.
This is not to say that the noanestern world previously lacked nations or
nation states. Rather, the military ascendancy of European nation states led to
the restructuring of the political world according to Western norms through
imperial conquest, the adoption of these norms and institutions by threatened
noanuropean powers, and the ability of European great powers to construct a
global interstate order. This, of course, is but one side of the story. Inter
national recognition via treaties and supporting transnational institutions may
have led to the formal establishment of nation states in much of the world.
But Centenos study of Latin America points to the weakness of such political
units, both as states and as nations, in the absence of prior conditions
(Centeno 2002: esp. Ch. 6). Many polities lacked a common sense of cultural
distinctiveness and cohesive social elites that provided emergent states with a
coherent sense of mission. These international settlements have given rise in
 Concluding Thoughts 191

the contemporary period to alternative religious political projects in Iraq and

Syria that decried the nationrstate system as a Western imposition. This rather
exposes the limitations of diffusionist models.
Third, these considerations should make us qualify statist interpretations in
the manner of Tilly (1992) and Conversi (2007), who contend that wars create
homogenous mass national units. In many cases interstate warfare was key to
establishing the boundaries of the nation, generating a mass consciousness of
the enclosed territory as homeland, and creating a sense of common values
through the forced assimilation, expulsion, and murder of minorities. Here
scholars (e . Marx 2003) have in mind the Western European pattern in
kingdoms such as England, France, and Spain, where rulers in wars against
heretics or confessional opponents (after the Reformation) centralized the
state and extended its territorial reach. But it is important to bear in mind
the injunction of Walker Connor (1972) that what is designated as nation
building' (via coercive state power) can be from another perspective nation
destroying. In other cases, state power proved unequal to the task, resulting
in forms of national resistance by the Irish against Britain, and Basques
and Catalans against Castilian authority. Warrmaking could also cause state
bankruptcy and breakdown, which led in the Dutch case to secession. State
conquest of territories might also enhance the imperial character of states:
the wars of German unication had the effect of creating a substantial Polish
minority in the Second Reich.
Much depended on the nature of the states engaged in warrmaking. As we
have noted, the sudden collapse of empires in the First World War gave rise to
the formation of states in Eastern Europe with substantial minorities and
disputed boundaries. At the end of the Second World War, the winners agreed
to territorial changes and forced population movements that would overcome
the instabilities of the previous settlement. This, however, was successful only
up to a point: substantial disputed minorities remained a problem that in
Eastern Europe has persisted after the Soviet collapse. Indeed, the failure
of settlements contributed to the proliferation of intrastate wars in the conr
temporary era and the subsequent interventions by great powers that to the
populations of the conict zones have a neorimperial character.
Fourth, while not discounting staterled military processes, they operate in
interaction with ethnic and national identities that are often prior to a polity,
arising from a sense of religious or linguistic distinctiveness, common codes
and customs, and experiences of colonization and mass migration. Such
identities may shape emerging states, giving momentum to or restricting
their abilities to go to war. In assessing how war in turn can form the rise of
national communities, I have examined several aspects. These include objectr
ive factors such as the economic, social, and political consequences of victory
or defeat, but I have highlighted the subjective or psychological dimensions of
war, including the sense of transcendence that comes from facing existential
192 Nutiunalism and Wm

questions that in peacetime rarely arise in a collective form. Intense wartime

experiences have often fed into utopian sentiments and ideologies. Although
these would often fade with a return to social life, the memories of war, of
sacrices, as well as of horror, have provided a potent store of meaning of a
quasirreligious character.
Ethnosymbolic approaches, pioneered by Anthony Smith, that address
national identity formation are particularly pertinent in studying this subject
ive dimension. As we saw, the myths and legends of war could strengthen an
identication with a national community, sometimes in competition with
traditional religious belief systems that were oriented to the salvation of the
individual. Many nationalists singled out periods of war as turning points with
long term consequences for the collective history of their nation. Frequently
embedded in banal everyday routines as well as canonical representations
and public rituals, this memorialization of war was subject to change and
contestations as people sought to make sense of their circumstances. Such
representations of the past, however, could be evoked at times of crisis when
fundamental choices had to be made.
John Hall and Sinisa Malesevic' (2013: 577), in an incisive overview of
existing approaches to our subject, have made several criticisms of what they
dub culturalist frameworks articulated by Anthony Smith and the present
author. First, such approaches exaggerate the signicance of war commemorr
ations in maintaining the longrterm intensity of nationalist solidarity. Nationr
alist violence is historically unusual since most political disputes are settled by
nonrviolent means. Second, culturalis neglect the manipulative character
of commemorative rituals, which entail ideological and organizational work
which is largely the preserve of the state and parastate agencies. Third,
culturalists also assume that populations automatically react in monolithic
nationalist terms to external threats, whereas this is patently false. Individuals
may embrace nationalist rhetoric for nonrnationalist reasons, and the fact that
nationalists have to make repeated calls for national unity shows the fragility
of social cohesion at the macro level.
I make the following rejoinders. First, in Smiths and my work warfare is
only one factor in the formation and reproduction of national communities.
I have previously explored the role of cultural nationalists and Smith has also
discussed in depth the importance of religion as well as ethnicity (Hutchinson
1987; Smith 1986; 2003). I have attempted to show also in this book how these
other source traditions of national identity (which include legal and constitur
tional traditions) help frame attitudes to war, contributing in some contexts to
a rejection of militarism in the name of the nation and to a suspicion of the
state as a potential despotic threat to national communities.
Second, this critique also ignores the prevalence of warfare in the medieval
and early modern periods out of which so many national myths formed. In the
modern era interstate war was less frequent, particularly on the European
 Concluding Thoughts 193

subcontinent between 1815 and 1914. The periods of hostilities, however, (of
the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic years and of the two world wars)
were so devastating that they have been imprinted on the memories of
successive generations. In the contemporary period there has been a decline
in armed conict between the great powers, but countries such as Britain and
the USA have been involved in military operations in almost every year since
1945. Moreover, as I pointed out, warfare can include the preparations for
conict (and this is explicitly discussed by Tilly and Mann). The threat of war
hung over Europeans in the years of the long peace of the nineteenth century,
particularly in its latter decades, contributing to a mood of national foreboding
and revolutionary turmoil.
Third, although political agents and institutions have been important in
constructing commemorative rituals, the critics exaggerate the power of elites
to manufacture consent and also the stability of regimes and states, which
I argued were often engulfed in crisis, either in war or in the aftermath of war
or in sociopolitical turmoil. In any case, I argued in Chapter 2 that ofcial
commemoration is only one part of the story, which must include its relation to
popular culture. We saw in some cases state commemorations might be based on
older folk traditions of remembranceiwhen the Serbian kingdom (1878782),
after its ofcial recognition, used the occasion of the verhundredth anniversary
of the battle of Kosovo Polje in 1889 to establish its legitimacy. Equally too,
I contended that formal commemorations retain their resonance when the
memories are solidly embedded in a popular culture (see also Hutchinson 2009).
Commemorative traditions develop a potency independent of their origins
in specic wars. There are always multiple actors involved in commemoration
and at different levels, and the in iative is often taken by oppositional groups.
One ofthe reasons for myth construction has been to make sense ofmass death in
an increasingly secular age; another was to nd alternative models of political
community to overcome crises, including those of defeat and occupation. Meme
orialization was about meaning as well as about the distribution of power.
Attempts to impose hegemonic narratives in a period of social and political
instability we saw often resulted in cultural contestation, which could (depending
on context) generate civil wars or a pluralization of national identities.
Fourth, I have also stressed in previous work (Hutchinson 2005: Ch. 4) that
national identities coexist and compete with many other allegiances and that
while they may become hegemonic in war, they may also be eroded by the war
experience. As I show in the present study, only under particular circumr
stances does the invocation of external threat produce a national mobilization.
It must also be emphasized that a sense of historic nationhood is not a given
and is subject to great variation. Many of the selfrdesignated nation states
arising from imperial collapse and recognized by the international community
are sociologically ctive. Here a weakness of national solidarity contributes to
levels of intrastate violence.
194 Nutiunalism and Wm

Finally, my analysis tends to foreground war as an agent of political and

social change and to assert the role of contingency in nation and state
formation. This is plausible in at least two senses. The rst is that the origins
of wars are not readily predictable, and their effects are often unexpected and
farrreaching. To what extent, then, can we view wars as radically disrupting
existing social patterns and resulting in a new social order? There are several
ways in which this might be envisaged. One is when through imperial
or external conquest a novel orderipolitical, cultural, and economlciis
imposed on a society and results in a transformation of the meaning systems
of the conquered. One might view the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire and
of Gaelic Ireland in these terms. In each case, religious institutions and
ideologies claimed a leadership of a stricken population whose ruling class
had been replaced, preserving a sense of distinctiveness that eventually took on
a national colouring. A second is where war accelerates the development of
national consciousness. The First World War offered opportunities for dis
contented and repressed national elites, and the intense experiences of war
(starvation, forced migrations, conscriptions, and foreign occupations) radicr
alized wider constituencies. War, in conjunction with other factors, could also
transform the status within a nation of particular social strata (for example,
the political standing of women). In other circumstances, wars could be
critical junctures, in which often novel and competing conceptions were
considered, before one triumphed and became institutionalized in a path
dependent fashion. Here we are referring in the modern period to state
breakdown or crises, in which existing political elites and the values that
supported them were queried, and there might be a return to the past to
nd alternative national models. Indeed, as I argued in Chapter 1 in the case of
Germany and France, victory or defeat in war could be decisive when popur
lations faced a choice between radically different conceptions of nation.
To speak of war as decisive for patterning social relations makes sense in
conicts between bounded states, when one can make a clear distinction
between internal and external patterns of change, and when one can differ
entiate periods of war and peace. This is harder to do when war is a more or
less continuous practice, for example during at least parts of the medieval and
early modern periods, as in, say, the Dutch revolt and in the case of many
contemporary intrastate conflicts. However, even in such periods warrmaking
may be crucial for introducing revolutionary changes in interstate relations or
social philosophies, including conceptualizations of nationality. Thus, the
intense confessional wars of early modern Europe, which were as much
continental and civil as interstate, were crucial for the selfrdenitions of
particular territorial populations as Protestant or Catholic. The sense of
exhaustion from these destructive conicts gave rise to important novel
interstate arrangements, for example the Peace of Augsburg and Treaty of
Westphalia, to regulate conict between the great powers and the place of
 Concluding Thoughts 195

religion in statecraft. In similar fashion, the wars of the French revolutionary

period, unleashing radical conceptions of nationalism, transformed the nature
of war and ideas of political sovereignty with such force globally that European
statesmen acted to avoid a general war during the rest of the nineteenth
century. The total wars of the twentieth century resulted not just in the
collapse of European empires and the rise (and fall) of novel collectivist
ideologies and states, but also the emergence of a new global order attempting
to regulate nation states according to universal norms.
All this needs to be qualied. As we saw, victorious powers or parties can
rarely, if ever, override embedded social arrangements, and their very success
can radicalize opposition. Nonetheless, these reections underline the con
tinuously changing character of war. This arises from technological innovr
ation and the formation of new economic and communication systems. Some
scholars (Shaw 2005) have argued for the novel, longdistant character of war
and others have speculated on implications of futuristic combat, shaped by
robotics (Coker 2004). One should also not discount the dynamic role of
ideological innovation in its constitution. Such innovation is linked to the
entry of new social actors into politics, whether religious groups, classes, or
subordinate ethnic populations, the rise of new economic systems and come
munication networks. War also can bring to the fore new powers (e.g. the
USA, the USSR) that seek to rewrite the rules of international relations,
whether in the form of refraining international law or institutions (e.g. the
United Nations). The dynamism and unpredictability consequent on these
developments render moot any attempts at predicting future trends. The very
uncertainties have in many areas of the world led to a reinforcement of
national identities.
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 Index
Amea 47, 36, 37, 91, 997100, 102, 103, 105,
110713117719,12172,13o,134,133,
141,143,15172,156,15379,131,133,
137, 190
Amluners/Boers 47, 53, 57, 50, 100, 152,
1739
Alexander, Jeffrey 55
Algerla 45, 53, 70, 99, 112, 123, 159, 176, 173
Amerrcan Clvil War 42, 53, 32, 154
Anderson, Eenedlcl 1, 3, 70, 144, 153
antinmlllmrlsm 40, 170, 173
Anzac Day 34, 152, 154
Arabs/PannArablsn-l 95,101, 103, 112, 115,
118,135,156,158
Arllnglon Cemetery 135
armies, types of 40
Asra 12, 21, 29, 47, 59, 35,37, 39, 94,97, 100,
102,103,105,105,107,111,12,117,121,
123,139,155,153,159,175,173,134,133
asymmerrleal/guernlla wars 40, 5379, 10273,
122313013475, 14779, 151, 153, 159,
175, 130
Anslraha 44, 5379, 73,33, 130, 151, 152, 153,
154, 151
Anslrra 34, 39, 42, 94, 95, 95, 93, 109, 110,
115, 130, 155
authorllarian polillcs 3, 13, 29, 37, 39, 41, 42,
43,44,539,115,117,139,17172, 17576
balance ofpower 4, 25, 33, 49, 91, 9375, 105,
103,116, 153, 17779
Balkans 56, 90, 96, 133, 134, 137, 149, 159,
132,133
Ballle republlcs 35, 95, 105, 105, 114, 117, 121
Bandong Conference 112
Basques 33,124,171, 191
Eelsslnger, Mark 106, 120, 124
Brsmarek, Otto Von 39, 42, 134
Eolshevlks see Sovlel Union
Bonaparle, boulanalpoleon 39, 45, 43,
94,175
Bonaparle, Napoleon 15, 19, 30, 3773, 45, 53,
55, 53, 51, 57, 74, 31, 37, 93, 104, 143,
152, 157, 176
borderlands 2, 22, 33,91, 9477, 115, 12071,
175,186
Breurlly, John 7, 22,71
Erluln/Brillsh Emplre 13, 29, 30, 35, 33,
39740, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 54, 57, 7071, 74,
76, 7773, 30, 3274, 37, 9174, 977103,
109712,115713121,3,123,130,133,
136,140, 144, 145, 15275, 150,152,
16571169770, 17273, 17779, 191, 193
Burma 11,10273,176,18D
cablnel wars 39, 143, 184
Canada 44,83, 130, 149, 180
Casually averslon 131, 138, 144, 165
Cenotaph 1, 153, 715, 135, 152
Cenleno, Miguel 6, 2D, 37, 41, 83, 143, 190
Chlna 12, 22,47, 64, 73, 8U,102,105,111712,
12274,131,134,139,141,149,17E
Chosen people 24, 25, 29, 33, 55, EU, 84
churches/clergy (5224130 rellgion) 22, 25,
28, 32, 41, 44, 415, 51, 5476, 6071, 7475
Cllizenshlp/cllizenry 1, 13, 115, 22, 2677, 33,
36745, 49, 72, 84, 88, 9475, 97, 104,
13072,134, 164, 175, 189
Cobden, Blehard See antinmllltarlsm
Coker, Christopher 135715, 146, 195
Cold War 6,49,78,10576,118,13071,155,
180, 183
Colllns, Randall 27, 60, 70, 89791, 105
Congress of Berlin 93, 177
Congress of Vienna 19, 38, 48, 93
Connerlon, Paul 62, 615
conscripllon 3, 576, 17,25, 34, 315742, 44, 57,
155770, 9172, 9475,109,122,126, 13041
14275,164, 17375, 194
Crimean \Var 40, 58, 179
crillcaljunclures 4576, 155
Crusades 3, 23, 27, 29, 33, 53, 54, 71
Cultural wars 10711, 4576, 7475
Czech lerrllorles 24, 98, 105, 109, 115716
Darwin, Iohn 23, 8778
Declarauon ofArbroaLh 9
democratizalion/democracy (sec 455
cillzenshlp) 3, 13,27, 37,39,4175,56v
151, 63, 73, 78, 82,106,109,113,115,117Y
119,122,129r32,135,139,142r7,15576Y
162,170, 172, 179, 18476, 188
demography (see also casually averslon) 5, 10,
3475, 38,89,103,1115,109,115,117,13lY
14475, 16576, 18475
Denmark 5, 35, S8, 61, 11515
dlaspoms 126, 135, 14879
Dulch Sec Netherlands
218
Eastern Europe 49, 69, 10577, 116, 121,
14172,151,132, 133, 191
Egypt 101, 103,112,113
Eighty Years War 19, 25, 29, 5374, 58
emplre, conceptlons of 3778, 1204
England 14, 15, 19, 2276, 29, 3172, 40, 5773,
60, 67, 74, 152,155,170,173,191
ethnic cleanslng/genoclde 3, 31, 9677, 114,
119,12379,132, 13475, 137, 14172, 145,
149750160, 172, 130, 186
ethnic mlnorltles sec minomies
ethnicrclvlc distlnctlon (m aka natlonahsm,
types) 17172
ethnosymbolism 3, 5072
fallen seldlers, cult 01(502 also myths of
sacnoe) 6173, 3374, 123, 144,
161, 163
Fascism/Nazlsm 45, 60, 71, 7379, 10475, 116,
12071,123,129730, 137, 140, 151, 166,
16977D,172, 175, 178
Flner, Samuel 29, 176
Flrsl World War 4,20, 3 ,40, 4276,48, 53,
6374, 69772, 7578, 30, 32, 32, 36, 90, 96,
99,101,104,103, 110, 114, 115, 118,
12579,13577,14072,143,152, 15475,
16072,16475,169,17576,179, 132,
18576, 194
France/French Empire 3, 15716, 19, 2277,
3172, 34, 37744, 46, 48, 5879, 62, 6778,
7373, 80, 32, 37, 9277, 10172, 115717,
121,12374,128730,136,143,1524,160,
16677,169,17173,175,178,191,194
Francolrussian (German) War 34, 39,42,
75, 80,32, 94, 166
French Revolulion 3,10, 12, 16, 13719, 20, 29,
35, 37, 40, 58, 61, 63, 93, 148, 16879, 171,
174, 193, 195
Galllpnll 58, 84, 128, 154
Gellner, Ernest 8, 10, 30, 181, 189
genocide :02 ethnic cleansing
Germany/Germans 8, 18719, 24, 29, 3376, 39,
4175, 4778, 5375, 5879, 6172, 64, 6879,
7174, 77, 79, 81, 84, 87, 91, 9378, 10475,
107,109,11,115,116,121,124,127,
129730,137, 139743, 145, 152,154,161,
16576,168,170, 173, 175, 178, 179,
$475,191,194
Gllpin, Robert 11, 17778
global processes 5, 10, 13715, 18, 21, 47, 49,
78, 87, 997100, 108, 120, 121, 12374,
[26,30,13275,137, 146789, 190, 195
Gorsk1,Phlllp 7, 9, 25, 29, 52
Great Northern War 19, 25
Great Patrlotic War 105, 141
Index
Greece/Greeks 30, 33, 5476, 6476, 9576, 148, 177
Habsbllrg Emplre (m .136 Austria) 19, 2375,
23, 3172, 35, 54, 58, 69, 34, 36, 33, 9071,
9373,109,115,177
Hall, John 19273
Herder, [charm 47, 16778
Holocaust 5, 45, 79, 123, 130, 135, 137, 142,
145, 150
Horne, John 64, 3072
Howard, Mlchael 13,34, 13072, 146,
173, 133
humlllarlon, cult of 60, 64, 7375, 14071, 151
Hundred Years War 19, 24, 23, 53, 30
Hungary 35,43, 64, 95, 96, 98, 105, 109,
115717
1ndla 21811007111142,117718,133,
139,149, 152, 153, 130, 183
1nternatronal law/laws nfwar 2, 21, 2a, 31,
119,127, 129, 134, 14577, 163, 179730
1nternatronal order/system 2, 21, 4679, 83, 36,
9D,119,12l,150,155,162,178
1nters1ate wars 476, 57717071837486, 120,
130,134,139,148,15778,16071,164,
1745177730, 133, 139792, 194
1ntrastale wars 2, 5, 83, 114, 126, 13375, 143,
161,178,18074
Ireland/lrlsh 22, 25, 29, 33, 44, 54, 56, 6374,
67, 69770, 73, 83, 100, 130, 149, 151,
169771,19071,194
1rredentism (See also secesslnnlsm) 2, 4879,
6475,71,96, 115717,lll,150,160, 171,
174,17779,131
Israel/Jews 57, 6o, 63, 79, 103, 113, 129730,
142,149,511, 169
luly/lulians 34, 41, 43, a9, 9374, 143, 171,
173, 177
Japan 21,47, 64, 8778, 92, 95, 100, 102, 105,
107,110,11,121,124,139,413,143145,
153,177, 179
Journallsts/pamphleteers (see also propaganda)
23,30,53,1oa,1o9,123,154
Iuergerlsmeyer, Mark 157
Kaldor, Mary 131, 13374, 14379
Kedoune, Elle 167772, 174, 131
Klng, Anthony 71, 13172, 136, 153
Knox, MaeGregor 20,169
Korea 101,111,117,122,139,141,14374
Lalln Amerlca 30,33, 105, 111, 12172, 134,
17677, 134, 190
League ofNations 13, 19,48, 86, 103, 115716,
119,121, 127, 179
 Index
Leerssen, Ioep 53, 125, 135, 149, 151
legtumacy s, 7, 14, 2074, 3475, 43, 4575,
4379, 53, 7071, 77, 79, 31, 33791, 94, 95,
93,107,113,115,1191227413375,
133,9,141,14475,147,149,151,152,
1553172175, 17779, 13374, 135
Lenin, \Vladtmhv 10374, 10379, 111
Lteven, Domlnlc 37, 93, 9577, 103, 193
Maiesevic, Sinisa 70, 135, 19273
Mann, M1chael 3, 7, 13722, 27,3, 3071, 3374,
35, 40,1, 44, 49, 7o, 72, 12273, 172,
17475, 139790, 193
Marvin, Carolyn 71,15275
Marwidc Arthur 4375
Maya11,1ames 177,131
memory, commemoration: concepts and
deniuons 50,2, 55,3, 70
mercenaries 14715, 2773, 31, 134
Middle East 53,35, 101, 103, 110712, 113,
121215515379, 175, 134, 135, 133
military revolutions 2, 3, 13,21, 31, 41, 39,
9271071733353, 110, 125, 13072, 190
militias 5, 39,40, 95, 104, 170, 175
minorities, ethnic, religious, national 13, 27,
33, 35, 43, 43, 59, 31, 93,5, 93, 103, 105,
109710115717,119,21,124,133,143,
150215773151, 153, 172, 174, 177,
1323135137, 133, 191
Moran, Daniel 34, 12273
Mosse, George 5273,57,70,123,135,152,152
myth of the war experience 59, 53
Nahttlsi,1<arrna 59,147
nation, concepts of 7711, 22
national liberation wars 53, 55, 53, 53, 70, 33,
110,122,13273,141,150,153139
nationalism, concepts and theories of 7711,
139795
nat1ona11sm, types:
civic 37,42,117,135,145,157,171e2,135
ethnic 7, 13, 25, 42, 44, 47, 55, 57, 59, 71,
90,1, 94, 94, 95,7, 107, 110, 114719, 124,
135,133,141,15071,15o,157,17172,
174517313073, 13575
Fasclsl sec Fascism/Nazism
liberal 30, 35, 39745, 52, 100, 113, 12071,
123,143, 153, 17071, 177, 173, 131
monarchical 3, 2375, 23, 30, 32, 33,9, 45,
50, 52, 74, 115, 17071
republican 15, 2575, 33, 33,9, 42, 4577,
5575,5071,7375,73,143,147,152,17071
Netherlands/Dutch 15, 19, 2575, 29, 3172,
5374,53,50,59,37,99, 102,111,12, 130,
143,170,191,194
Norway 33, 130
219
ottoman Empire 19, 24, 47, 5475, 5475, 59,
31,35,90713376,101,109,10,115,150,
17577, 135
Parker, Geoffrey 14, 19720, 31
puma 778, 2374, 51, 61
Poland 15, 35, 69, 88, 9475 97, 10577V
115716,121,141,14473,19Drl
postcolonial 513185 2, 10, 111, 119, 126, 134Y
156, 18374
propaganda (See also journalists) 23,5,
28,30,315274, 5778, 71, 96, 100,112
Prussia/Prussian: 15, 17, 26, 34, 3779, 4172,
54, 59, 7475, 9375, 179, 184
re11gton 3, 5, 7, 9711, 15717, 2277, 29, 3071,
33,337 50752,5575,53,71,7475,7379,
31, 3375, 33, 9374, 997100, 117, 127 8,
132,135,143,145,143,150,152155755,
157772, 130, 135, 19172, 19475
remembrance ceremonies 7773, 137, 154
Reynolds, Susan 779, 2274, 25, 23, 31, 32
Russla/Russmn Emp1re 13, 21, 41, 43, 45, 47,
53, 55, 59, 59, 72733, 9373, 100, 1037
110,113,17,121,123,124,135,138,
14172,155,15577,177,179,135
Russorlapanese War 21, 47, 95, 100, 179
Scotland 9, 23, 25, 29,44, 55
Secessionisni (set also irredentisrn) 2, 95, 113,
115,117, 143, 15071, 174, 134,133,191
Second Hundred Years War 25, 172
Second Thirty Years War 127,30
Second World War 5, 35, 43,9, 53, 59,70, 73,
3071,35,33,99,10172,104,110,115,19,
121,12579,134,139742152,154,5,150,
155,159,179,132,135,19071
selfrdelermmtltion 5, 43, 97, 103710, 114,
115,119,121,124,150,157,174,13172,
135,137
Serbia/Serbs 33, 54,7, 95,5, 15071, 177,
134,193
Shaw, Martin 123,131,133, 195
small (imperial) wars 40, 39, 99,100, 133, 149
srnaihgronp male sohdarities 131
Smith, Anthony 7, 9, 33, 52,3, 55, 57,3, 52,
31, 15374, 159, 192
Soviet Union/11 4, 19, 43, 47, 49, 54, 72,
3573,91,103e14,115717, 12074, 123,
134,14172, 147, 151, 155, 175,173,135,
133,191, 195
Spain/Spanish 2275, 23732, 40,1, 53,4, 53,
53,9, 32,3, 37, 124,143,155,159, 191
Sn Lanka 29,111,113,153,130,133
state, denitions 5,7
Strachan, Hugh 13273, 143
220
Sweden/Swedes 25, 37, 58, 61, 83, 130, 166
Swuzerland/smss 6, 8374, 130, 143, 11515, 180
Th1rly Years Var 19, 54, 71, 79780, 127, 134
T111y, Charles 13722, 27, 3071, 36, 41, 4679,
108,119,17376, 189791, 193
[0141 WAYS 375, 20, 315, 4275, 57, 59, 86, 91,
9378, 107, 128, 174, 189790, 195
Transnlslrla 149
lrallmzmc memory (See 4150 hllmution, cull
of) S, 63, 67, 109, 114, 128730,13677,
139740, 142, 148753
[realms (sec 11150 Wesrplralra and Versailles)
41579
Turkey 47,153,9577,104,110,115716, 121,
128,150,176, 185, 188
kaam 96, 98, 10376, 108, 110,117,138,
142, 1159
United Nauons/UN Charter 2, 12677, 129,
133,139,179, 182, 187, 195
USA/Americans 18719, 36, 39740, 4273, 47,
60, 63, 8274, 87, 91, 103, 105, 107, 1139,
111712,114,116,118,12174,128,13D,
13213944, 146, 149, 153, 1515, 1635,
169,179,185, 188
Versailles, Treaty of 13, 19, 45, 64, 78, 107,
1 2 1, 179
Index
v1clims/vicl1mhoed (m aka lmumallc
memory) 5, 76, 11412571112879,
13591412147753, 186
Vremam 56, 58, 68, 70, 111, 117, 122, 139, 180
Vremam Wall 125, 136, 15273
Vremamese wars 58,68, 111,12273,131, 141,
144, 16273
war culture 4, 5, 9, 5476, 59760, 6273,
61577, 7778, 1 8,131,136,146,155,
171, 193
war deniuon and Iypes (see my
asymmelnml/guernlla wars, 1nlerslale
Wall's, 1nlraslale wars, 1121101121 111391311011
wars, small (1mperial) wars, 101211 wars)
376, 40
Westphalia, Trealy of 13, 19,26, 127,
177, 194
Wilson, Woodrow 48,150, 101, 10379, 131
Wimmer, Andreas 89791, 16071, 17475,
18274, 186
Winter, lay 73, 77, 13677, 152
women, status of 38,4375, 7173, 139, 152,
115471161194
World War 1 m F1rst World War
World War 2 m Second World War
youth, male 6, 43, 6172, 67, 72, 78, 84, 15778,
115271161173, 185, 189