352 book reviews

Wimmer, Andreas. Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While
Others Fall Apart. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. isbn: 691177380.
Language: English.

This significant book is the latest in a tetralogy that started with Andreas
Wimmer’s Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict in 2002. It represents an
attempt to dust off the once fashionable genre of macrohistorical, longue-
durée comparisons among nation-states. Historians may find a hint of prov-
ocation in the title since the term nation building echoes the development
paradigm and the idea that academics should provide world powers with
recipes on how to repair failed postcolonial states. And the book proudly
lives up to its title. Wimmer describes national integration as “a key precon-
dition for economic development” (5) and addresses foreign policy experts
looking for solutions to achieve it. What follows then is a quest to identify the
main factors of successful nation building. Policymakers are advised early
on that there is little they can do as success hinges on long-term processes.
Needless to say, this forewarning does not lessen the interest that the book
presents for historians.
The first half of the book makes descriptive, close comparisons between
three pairs of countries, focusing on a single but different factor in each pair.
The second half complements these paired case studies with correlational
analyses of up to 155 countries, constituting an asymmetrical comparison.
Wimmer chose the six countries as minimal pairs (to borrow a linguistic term);
they supposedly differ maximally with respect to the independent variable
under study but are otherwise as similar as possible. Remarkably, each coupled
comparison comes from a different time period: 1) voluntary organizations in
nineteenth-century Switzerland and Belgium, 2) linguistic and scriptural diver-
sity in early twentieth-century Russia and China, and 3) the ability to provide
public goods in Botswana and Somalia in the 1960s. Wimmer finds that early
alliance formation between political elites across ethnic and linguistic divides
prevented their later politicization in Switzerland. Regarding the Russian and
Chinese empires, he argues for the importance of the Chinese script as a linch-
pin that held together the country despite its great linguistic variety. Making
the seemingly commonsensical assertion that delivering public services can
boost popular attachment to the state, Wimmer traces back the contrasting
performances of Botswana and Somalia to their pre-colonial past.
Having compared the six cases between and across pairs, Wimmer formu-
lates the view that the critical groundwork for viable nationhood had been
laid by 1875 in Europe and its settler offshoots and before the colonial moment
elsewhere. What matters in the first place is whether centralized political

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book reviews 353

structures had emerged prior to that. This finding, which harkens back to the
Engelsian thesis of “historical nations,” projects a grim future for most nation-
states in our region, not to mention the world; although the closing chapter
attempts to undo this fatalism.
Since six cases alone cannot account for everything, Wimmer dedicates
the second half of the book to corroborating his results and testing alterna-
tive hypotheses on large datasets. He first shows that people tend to identify
more with ethnically inclusive homelands. Identification is operationalized
as the answer to the question “How proud are you to be the citizen of your
country?,” while ethnic inclusion is measured, for each year between 1946
and 2005, by the share of ethnic groups without political representation.
Having found the ideal proxy for successful nation building, the rest of the
statistical analyses relate ethnic inclusion to the three factors examined in
the first half of the book as well as other possible determinants suggested in
the literature.
The per capita number of associations and public goods provision (the lat-
ter captured as either the density of the railway network or the percentage of
literate adults) correlate well with ethnic inclusion through these sixty years,
as does linguistic homogeneity in the 1950s and 1960s with today’s ethnic inclu-
sion. Furthermore, Wimmer finds little statistical support for other proposed
explanations, including popular ones. Neither the level of democracy nor the
length of colonial dependence or the overlap between religious and language
boundaries seems to play an independent role. Further analysis shows that out
of the three relevant factors, nineteenth-century state building is the funda-
mental one; it enhanced the capacity of public goods provision and promoted
linguistic homogeneity. But excessive multilingualism can hamper national
integration, Wimmer notes, based on a generalized version of Karl Deutsch’s
model of social communication. According to the so-called exchange theoretic
model, the more resources (in the broadest sense) people exchange, the more
they come to identify with the shared social category.
Tracing the causal chain further, Wimmer explores what could bring about
centralized states by the nineteenth century. He checks several possible expla-
nations, two of which hold up in light of large-N analysis. Tilly’s theory about
the circular dynamics of warfare and state building can explain the formation
of premodern states in Europe and its appendages. Elsewhere, early agrarian
states emerged in areas of rugged topography, as Robert Carneiro’s “environ-
mental conscription” hypothesis supposed.
On page 6, Wimmer defines nation building as the extension of political alli-
ance networks across a territory. Although this understanding of the term may
not always guide the investigations in the book as an operational concept, it

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354 book reviews

has the advantage of being lean and staying clear of the overtones of modern-
ization theories. It also weds the “hard” side of state structures and the “softer”
aspect of people’s loyalties. Yet, critique begins not with the theoretical appa-
ratus but in the details.
The analysis of nineteenth-century Belgium is marred by simplistic interpre-
tations that historians and historical sociolinguists have refuted (e.g., D’huist
2020; Van Ginderachter 2019; Vanhecke and de Groof 2007; Wandenbussche
2004). Belgian governments hardly tried to “teach everybody French” (53); in
fact, they invested very little in education, which remained the purview of the
Church and the municipalities (Van Ginderachter 2019: 27–28). Contrary to
Wimmer’s assertions, the hyper-liberal Belgian state spent little on “delivering
public goods,” at least not in the form of “a centralized state apparatus” (41–42).
More significantly, the contrast between Switzerland and Belgium appears less
clear than Wimmer suggests. He notes a difference in the early emergence of
transethnic elite alliances in Switzerland. But then, the Flemish bourgeoisie –
not “effectively French speaking” (57), but diglossic – was just as integral a part
of elite alliances in Belgium. Nineteenth-century Belgian society and politics
were not segmented along ethnic lines but organized into increasingly “pillar-
ized” ideological camps. The pro-Dutch movement did not upset this structure
but entered the political scene within the Catholic and, to a lesser extent, the
liberal parties.
In the second paired case study, Wimmer widens the optic from the elites to
all literate people. He rightly stresses that early twentieth-century China and
the Romanov Empire were similarly fractured in linguistic terms, and it is cer-
tainly also true that literate Chinese were a more cohesive population than
the subjects of Nicholas ii. But the explanation built around a shared written
code has its limitations since alliances could not be based exclusively on writ-
ing. The other issue is that the Russian Empire only “fell apart” (140) partially,
retaining huge non-Russian peripheries in Siberia, Inner Asia, Caucasia and
Eastern Europe. This chapter contains several historical inaccuracies which
should have been corrected through more careful editing. “Western Belorussia
and Moldavia” did not attain independence (165), and democratic and left-
ist Ukrainian parties did not “dominate the political arena in the Ukrainian-
speaking lands” (153) after 1905; rather, the authoritarian, Russian right-wing
did (Hillis 2013: 204–57). The assertion that “Jews who could also read in
Russian outnumbered those who could read only in Yiddish or Hebrew” (159)
stands in flagrant contradiction with what is argued on the previous pages.
Between the lines, the well-researched comparison between Somalia and
Botswana shows the dialectic relationship between inclusive political identi-
ties (or the lack thereof) and nation-building policies, pointing to the question

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book reviews 355

of agency. Short of a visionary genius, Somali political actors did not rise above
the clan-based competition for state spoils. From the facts assembled here,
nobody in the spheres of power seems to have been seriously interested in
building a common home for all the citizens and fostering cross-sectional soli-
darities. In other words, nobody tried to build a Somali nation.
Of course, the historical use of quantitative methods from political sci-
ence has its inherent weaknesses. Charles Tilly’s derisory remarks on inferring
about ill-defined global concepts based on proxy figures that are only “made
comparable by the magic fact of appearing in parallel columns of a statistical
handbook” come to mind (Tilly 1984: 116). Readers should decide for them-
selves how much skepticism is in order regarding the statistical analyses of
the second part. Wimmer does conduct a review of hypotheses about the pos-
sible determinants of national integration which may be instructive regard-
less of his results. On the negative side, beyond the vagaries of how the data
had been produced, there are also vague and poorly operationalized variables.
A case in point is linguistic diversity, measured here as “the probability that
two randomly chosen individuals speak the same language” and based on
data “assembled by Soviet ethnographers in the 1950s and 1960s” (174, lacking
a more precise reference). Such a measure ignores the constructed nature of
the language–dialect dichotomy, especially in the political field, to say nothing
about the extent of individual bilingualism.
The book also suffers from a wide-ranging problem with temporalities. In
the second part, conclusions that involve the nineteenth century are built on
statistical series that only reach back to the Second World War. More disturb-
ing still is a teleology that informs both halves of the book. Although “the
contours of political alliance networks determine which communities will
emerge as nations” (31), a presentist view reduces the selection of cases to
today’s community of states. While countries that actually fell apart are left
unmentioned, whether they were home to nation-building projects or not,
today’s independent states seem to be projected back in time: “In East Asia
and Europe, most states either remained independent (such as France or
Japan) or had for many generations formed part of the land-based Hapsburg,
Ottoman, or Romanov empires” (35). Although the paired case studies of the
first part are ostensibly about nationness in remote periods, the criterion
again seems to reflect present-day perceptions in at least four out of the six
cases. Early twentieth-century China did not emerge as a success story of
national integration any more than Belgium did as a failed nation. Finally,
it might not affect the analysis, but “public goods provision” is a historically
highly contingent concept. Since Wimmer uses literacy rates as its indicator,
I should note here that it was not until the late nineteenth century that the

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masses had accepted compulsory schooling as beneficial even in Western

Europe.
That being said, the book imparts less disappointment for the historian than
the international relations practitioner. The latter must content themselves
with takeaways in the negative. There is no unknown magic bullet that can save
ailing states. Democracy does not automatically bring a nation together, and in
general, there are limited possibilities to intervene in the short run. Providing
public goods from the outside is certainly not very efficient and, thus, it is bet-
ter to channel resources through national governments and ngo s.

Ágoston Berecz
Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena, Germany
oguszt@gmail.com

Bibliography

D’huist, Lieven. 2020. “Mediating Flemish: Local Language and Translation Policies on
the French – Belgian border.’ In Translating in Town, ed. Lieven D’huist and Kaisa
Koskinen, 91–114. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Eline Vanhecke and Jetje de Groof. 2007. “New Data on Language Policy and Language
Choice in 19th-Century Flemish City Administrations.” In Germanic Language
Histories From Below (1700–2000), ed. Stephan Elspaß, Wim Wandenbussche, Nils
Langer, and Joachim Scharloth, 449–69. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Hillis, Faith. 2013. Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian
Nation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York:
Russell Sage.
Van Ginderachter, Maarten. 2019. The Everyday Nationalism of Workers: A Social History
of Modern Belgium. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wandenbussche, Wim. 2004. “Triglossia and Pragmatic Variety Choice in Nineteenth-
Century Bruges: A Case Study in Historical Sociolinguistics.” Journal in Historical
Pragmatics 5: 27–47.
Wimmer, Andreas. 2002. Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of
Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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