Waves of War
Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World

A new perspective on how the nation-state emerged and subsequently proliferated across the globe, accompanied by a wave of wars.

Andreas Wimmer (Author)

9781107673243, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 November 2012

346 pages, 17 b/w illus. 35 tables
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.55 kg

'Beginning in the nineteenth century, cycles of violent upheaval and world war collapsed empires and dynastic kingdoms, while the nation-state spread to every corner of the globe. This ambitious book provides one of the best accounts yet of this grand transformation of the global political order, driven by the explosive appeal of nationalism and self-rule … Wimmer's major contribution is to demonstrate how the spread of the nation-state generated violence and war. Marshaling carefully assembled quantitative evidence, [he] shows that the incidence of war more than doubled once nationalism gained a foothold in world politics and triggered violent struggles over borders, ethnicity, and self-determination.' Foreign Affairs

Why did the nation-state emerge and proliferate across the globe? How is this process related to the wars fought in the modern era? Analyzing datasets that cover the entire world over long stretches of time, Andreas Wimmer focuses on changing configurations of power and legitimacy to answer these questions. The nationalist ideal of self-rule gradually diffused over the world and delegitimized empire after empire. Nationalists created nation-states wherever the power configuration favored them, often at the end of prolonged wars of secession. The elites of many of these new states were institutionally too weak for nation-building and favored their own ethnic communities. Ethnic rebels challenged such exclusionary power structures in violation of the principles of self-rule, and neighboring governments sometimes intervened into these struggles over the state. Waves of War demonstrates why nation-state formation and ethnic politics are crucial to understand the civil and international wars of the past 200 years.

1. Introduction and summary
2. The birth of the nation
3. The global rise of the nation-state
4. Nation-state formation and war
5. Ethnic politics and armed conflict
6. Can peace be engineered?
7. Conclusion
Appendices.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Comparative politics [JPB], Sociology [JHB], General & world history [HBG]