In anthropology, the work of Eric Wolf and other former students of Julian Steward came close to what I envisioned as an ideal sort of scholarship. And when did the nationalism theme, whether borders, migration or nation-building, when did that come to be a guiding interest?
Relatively early on, because when I did field work in Mexico there was a political movement, in its early stages, among these indigenous groups. It developed under the intellectual leadership, you could say, of critical anthropologists: they redefined the indigenous situation in ethno-nationalist terms. They were seeing these communities as proto-nations that had been robbed of their historical continuity and political autonomy by the Spanish conquest and now reclaimed the mantle of self-determination.
I was in touch with these movements and the Mexican anthropologists who worked on and supported them, and this sort of sparked my interest in studying nationalism. Later on this interest was transformed and I became more of a global comparativist, trying to understand nationalism as a major world historical force that reshaped the state system, as the driving force for wars between states as well as domestic conflict.
Do you see nationalism as something that is fundamentally different in different parts of the world, or do you think it is one thing? Because the way you describe the indigenous response to Spanish colonialism would be very familiar to any scholar of anti-colonialism, whether it is in Europe or in Africa.
I see nationalism as a uniform principle that appears, of course, in different variations. There is lots of variation and nationalism can combine with different political projects. It often combined with conservatives ones, but it also had a long-standing alliance with communist movements in the colonies, and so on.
It is a political ideology that is really versatile, perhaps because of its own intellectual poverty—highlighted by Gellner—in combining with right wing, left wing, fascist, libertarian movements and so on. The unifying theme is the idea of self-rule in the name of a nationally defined people, a political vision that unites all these nationalists across political ideologies, across continents and across centuries.
In my work, I have been more emphasizing this unifying logic than focussing on the differences between the various brands of nationalisms and their ideological inclinations.
It would be worthwhile to do that, if nobody has already done it. In terms of those scholars, who is the person that is closest to your understanding of what makes nationalism not just versatile but also powerful, because you are also interested in its capacity to create war, right, so it is something very powerful.
Who do you look to in that debate for insight? Well I think all of these scholars agreed that nationalism is a powerful world historical force, so in the larger scheme of things they all agree on the political power and consequentiality of nationalism—while many other social scientists, from Marx to contemporary international relations such as Mearsheimer , and many comparative political scientists such as Laitin see it as an epiphenomenon.
The British historical sociologists do disagree, however, on the reasons, on the historical dynamics that gave nationalism its current power. I kind of like Ellie Kedourie, against whom Ernest Gellner was writing.
This is why nationalism brings conflict, war and violence, a very Kedouriean point of view. I disagree with the details of his analysis, where nationalism comes from, that it is basically a deplorable, romantic aberration of western history and so on. But I liked how he defined nationalism as a political ideology, how he situated nationalism in the political sociology of Empires, and how he analysed the transformative power that nationalism had in the modern world without falling into the teleological or functionalist traps of Smith and Gellner.
If it is not bad ideas and bad leaders, what is actually driving it? Well nationalist ideologies, in its various manifestations, are based on the idea of self-rule, they combine in various ways with the idea that citizens should be governed by people who are of the same origin, and they should be governed in a responsible way, in a way that is receptive to the interests and the perceptions of the population at large.
So nationalism is always combined with, at least in the view of nationalists, of better government and a better deal as it were, for citizens in the exchange relationships between governors and governed. And this promise—ok, let me make a historical bracket here, and look at the first nations states, France, the US, Great Britain.
I tend to see it as more of a special case rather than a paradigmatic case. The point I want to make is that these early nation states became the most powerful states in the world, militarily, politically, and also culturally, because they brought the masses into the political arena and because they offered citizens a better exchange relationship than previous regimes had done.
This gained these states the military support of the masses—in the form of universal conscription—and reduced resistance to taxation, both of which greatly enhanced their military and economic might. They thus became the model states that ambitious political leaders around the world tried to imitate. In other words, nationalism is powerful because it is historically associated with political revolutions that offered citizens much better terms of engagement with governments that had been the case before; this made it an attractive model for the masses elsewhere in the world.
Because these states subsequently became cultural, political, and military hegemons, nationalism became an attractive model to imitate for political elites around the world as well. Yes definitely. In my view political legitimacy is crucial for understanding wars. States that violate the like-over-like principle of nationalism are seen as illegitimate.
More precisely, this principle is violated if states are ruled by elites that exclude the leaders of other ethnic communities from any kind of access or representation in government.
I have shown empirically, with co-authors Cederman and Min, that such exclusionary regimes—in the extreme an ethnocracy—where an ethnic minority and their representatives basically control all arms of government, are much more war-prone than more inclusionary regimes, where ethnic groups small and large are represented in central government.
That is definitely a grievance argument. However, I think that the greed versus grievance debate is rather sterile and is pursued mostly because of the attractive alliteration. This only happens where the state is not able to repress any opposition through control of the entire territory, allowing leaders of such groups to organise in an internal sanctuary. Or there can be an external sanctuary, a neighbouring state that allows such groups to do the same. So you need to have both, the grievance and opportunity elements for a rebellion and civil war to actually develop.
To advance our understanding of civil war we need to combine both perspectives and this recent work is just one example of how to do that. This process of transition, from Empire to Nation-State model, is it ongoing and will just continue?
You mention legitimacy, and Gellner, his famous question was what if all linguistic groups in the world were to get their own state, what would this actually mean for the world. Do you see this process as something that is still continuing, with no let-up in terms of the fundamental process that your work is devoted to analysing? I come from Switzerland, a famously multi-lingual country that actually works quite well, if I may say, as a nation-state despite its linguistic heterogeneity.
And there are many other examples: India, China is actually a multi-lingual country, Tanzania and so on. In my new, forthcoming book, I show that political integration within nation-states, or nation building, is indeed easier in linguistically homogenous countries.
But it is not a necessary condition for nation-states to be established. The establishment of a nation-state and nation building within such states need to be distinguished from each other. Most nation-states are linguistically heterogenous.
The process of the formation of nation-states is driven by the break-down of Empires, under the dual assault of international war and nationalist pressures, where usually it is provinces, whether multi-lingual or not, that will then become nation-states, not linguistic communities, hence the linguistic heterogeneity of most states. In any case, this process—the transition from Empire or dynastically ruled states to nation-states ruled in the name of a nationally-defined people—has almost come to its end.
We might see some more transitions from dynastically-ruled countries to more nation-state types, in Saudi Arabia perhaps, in Kuwait, the other Gulf States, Bhutan, and so on. Open with Edge. Short Biography. Andreas Wimmer. Allianz SE Munich Sep 30, Since Andreas Wimmer is chief executive officer of Allianz Lebensversicherungs-AG, the biggest life insurance entity in AZ Group and number 1 life insurer in Germany with more than 10 million customers and an investment portfolio worth EUR billion, thereof approx.
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This enables a more flexible capital investment and thus attractive long-term returns. Verified email at columbia. Articles Cited by Public access Co-authors. Title Sort Sort by citations Sort by year Sort by title.
International Migration Review 37 3 , , American Journal of Sociology 4 , , American Journal of Sociology 2 , , Conflict Management and Peace Science 28 5 , , Articles 1—20 Show more. Help Privacy Terms. Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation—state building, migration and the social sciences A Wimmer, N Glick Schiller Global networks 2 4 , , Why do ethnic groups rebel?
Tastes, ties, and time: A new social network dataset using Facebook. Ethnic politics and armed conflict: A configurational analysis of a new global data set A Wimmer, LE Cederman, B Min American sociological review 74 2 , , Elementary strategies of ethnic boundary making A Wimmer Ethnic and racial studies 31 6 , , Waves of War.
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