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Book Symposium

Waves of WarNationalism, State Formation, andEthnic Exclusion in the Modern WorldCambridge University Press

Andreas Wimmer

Comments on Waves of War

Jack A. GoldstoneWoodrow Wilson Center

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Wimmer has sought to turnaround Charles Tilly’s famousclaim that state-making is tiedto wars; Wimmer instead insiststhat both modern nation-statemaking and wars are the resultof nationalist aspirationsclashing with older imperialstate forms or with competingnationalisms. Yet the analysiscompletely overlooks another ofTilly’s major topics – the role ofrevolutions in history.

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Comments on Waves of War

Mabel BerezinCornell University

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A weakness of analytic modelsand mechanisms is that theytend to be a-historical and a-temporal, that is they attenuatethe effects of context andculture. While Waves of Warcovers the entire modernperiod, the internal processes ofchange and development thatcontribute to thick cultures andcontinuities are not part of theanalysis. As this is a book ofcomparative historical politicalsociology, the absence ofhistory—in the form of contextstands out. As the relationshipbetween war, ethnic conflict andnationalism is the core of thebook, I kept asking myself whatwe might learn if we applied thismodel to Putin and the Ukraine,to Gaza, or to ISIS.

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Author’s Response

Andreas WimmerPrinceton University

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In short, Waves of War showsthat the spread of the like-over-like principle and the formationof nation-states have beendriving forces behind civil andinterstate war...

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...even where the transition tothe nation-state occurredgradually and in a negotiatedand agreed manner, such as inSweden or Botswana, the resultis a profound re-configuration ofthe power structure, broughtabout by the new cross-classalliances that Goldstoneemphasizes. In this broadunderstanding of “revolution”,almost every transition to thenation-state is revolutionary —and the book is indeed aboutthe causes and consequences ofthe national revolution, broadlydefined, around the world.

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Statistical analysis is certainlya-contextual—it has to be toachieve its aims—but thisdoesn’t mean that it cannotuncover cases and groups ofcases in which contextualmatters appear to make historywork differently than “onaverage.”

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