WhyNationsFight

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14. Lebow, Why Nations Fight, 11 (emphasis added). The literature exploring the socially constructed nature of war, and the role of war in the creation of social identity, is rich. Driving much of this scholarship has been a realization that wars of the present and future may be quite different from wars of the immediate past, in terms of how, why, and by whom they are fought-and that this discontinuity is in fact a continuity: the social construction of war remains in constant contestation. Good entry points into this literature include Martin van Crevald, The Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991); John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993); and Herfried Munkler, New Wars (Malden, ma: Polity, 2005). The late Charles Tilly is famous for the critically important insight that, institutionally speaking, "the state made war, and war made the state." See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990-1990 (Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1990) chap. 3; or Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," in Bringing the State Back In, eds., Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169-91. By contrast, the point here is that we need to recognize that in terms of creating identity and meaning, the nation constructs war, and war constructs the nation. This description of nations goes back to Benedict Anderson's 1983 work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991). As Walker Connor noted in 1978, "the essence of a nation is intangible. This essence is a psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all other people in a most vital way .... [W]hat ultimately matters is not what is but what people believe is." Walker Connor, "A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a ..." Ethnic and Racial Studies 1, no. 4 (1978): 379. Initial insights have been pushed in a variety of theoretically exciting directions, reconceptualizing both politics and geopolitics. See, for example, R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). This constructivist understanding has, of course, not gone unchallenged. For both constructivist accounts of nations and nationalism and alternative interpretations see, for example, John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, ed., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); or Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, ed., Becoming National (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Anthony Smith's work has underscored both the contested, constructed nature of identity, and, on the other hand, the path dependence, historical roots, and historicism that influence and shape national identity and nationalism. See, for example, Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). In this vein, see also Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, Remapping Global Politics: History's Revenge and Future Shock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Ferguson and Mansbach develop what may be the most intriguing and potentially fruitful theoretical approach to dealing with this issue with their notion of "nested identities." Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities, and Change (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 393-400. I have offered this general argument elsewhere. See, for example, Richard Mansbach and Edward Rhodes, "The National State and Identity Politics: State Institutionalisation and 'Markers' of National Identity," Geopolitics 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 426-58. Connor, "A Nation Is a Nation," 379. Interestingly, the work of Graham Smith et al. on Soviet and post-Soviet nation-building efforts illustrates the possibility of competing conceptions of national identity within a single polity, based on competing markers-in this case the primarily religious (that is, communist ideological) marker of the Soviet national identity and the primarily linguistic national marker of some of the national groups that eventually emerged politically victorious from the collapse of the Soviet Union (for example, Estonians, Latvians, Georgians, and Uzbeks). See Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr, and Edward Allworth, Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, "The Hispanic Challenge," Foreign Policy 141 (March/ April 2004). Going back at least to Clifford Geertz's work in the early 1960s, social scientists have made the distinction between "civic" nationalism and "ethnic" nationalism (that is, nationalism based on any other markers), noting the dangerous tensions between them and typically arguing that the former is more dangerous than the latter. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, "Primordial and Civic Ties," in Nationalism, eds., Hutchinson and Smith, 29-34. This distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism has been a central theme in analyses of post-Cold War nationalism. See, for example, Charles A. Kupchan, ed. Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995

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