Referee Report

On “Wimmer, A. (2018). Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While
Others Fall Apart. Princeton University Press, ch. 1 (pp. 23-44).”
Enes Özcan
8.12.2021
Modern Political Science
 Relational Theory of Nation Building
◈ Success of a nation-building process rest on three factors that define the relations between the
state and the citizenry:
🞚 (1) State capacity to provide public goods
🞚 (2) Voluntary organizations, civil society
🞚 (3) Communicative facility
◈ These three factors lead to political integration of citizenry crossing ethnic, religious, or
regional fractions.
◈ Political integration, in turn, incentivizes citizens to identify themselves with the nation.
◈ Eventually, the nation-building process ends up successful.

Public goods provision

Political integration
Voluntary organizations Nation-building
National identification
Linguistic facility
 Critique of the theory
◈ There is no clear structure to explain the nation-building process.
The book investigates three factors separately in case studies.
🞚 The absence of one factor impedes nation-building in one case, but not in another.
🞚 Similarly, the existence of one factor helps nation-building in one case but not in another.
◈ For example, the language heterogeneity and the emergence of inclusive voluntary organizations in
Switzerland and Russia, public good provision in Russia
🞚 Overall, three separate factors do not present a clear mechanism.
 Critique of the theory
◈ It is possible to suggest other factors that can equally influence nation-building,
such as ideological/religious doctrines.
🞚 In the Chinese case, the Confucian indoctrination might have helped in the creation
of the «Han nation» ideology.
🞚 Chinese Civil War was a great obstacle in nation-building and it was purely based on
two ideological divisions.
🞚 The Soviet Union might have postponed the dissolution of the Empire, thanks to the
ideology. It dissolved when they saw that the Soviet ideology was no more.
◈ Religion can be considered like an ideology as well, in terms of indoctrination or
state ideology. Rather than a part of ethnicity…
🞚 Ukrainians vs. Poles
 Methodology
◈ Nested method, which combines case studies with overall data analysis
🞚 Case studies are investigated separately based on any of the three factors.
◈ No common mechanism to build a theory
◈ There could be more than three factors to explain nation building
🞚 Statistical analysis shows that these three factors really influence nation-building in
majority of cases.
◈ However, it fails to eliminate other factors even though we see insignificant results.
◈ In some group of countries, some factors might be prominent, but not in others (e.g. wars).
◈ «Fixed effects» and «instrumental variable» regression models are only statistical manipulations to
eliminate such problems, but they cannot provide us insights about the real phenomena.