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Firmer Roots of Ethnicity and Nationalism? New Historical Research and Its Implications for Political Science

Review products

Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000. By SmithHelmut Walser. New York: Liveright, 2020. 608p. $39.95 cloth.

From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe. By ConnellyJohn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 968p. $35.00 cloth.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2021

Kurt Weyland*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin kweyland@austin.utexas.edu
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Extract

Among social scientists, constructivism has long reigned supreme in the study of ethnicity, nationality, and nationalism. Accordingly, scholars have highlighted the role of cultural framing and political choice in the definition of ethnic categories, their fluidity, and their flexible boundaries. Conversely, they have deemphasized the historical roots of ethnicity and depicted nations as the contested products of nationalist movements and political leaders and as (merely) “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). Although constructivism encompasses a broad gamut of theories that differ in the malleability ascribed to ethnicity (Chandra 2012, 19–22, 139–49), recent authors have emphasized its susceptibility to change by highlighting manipulation by political-electoral entrepreneurs (Wilkinson 2012) and focusing on “identity in formation” (Laitin 1998), “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker 2004), and “imagined noncommunities” characterized by “national indifference” (Zahra 2010).

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Type
Book Review Essay
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association