Despite the huge and ever increasing volume of publications on ethnic relations and nationalism produced in the last two decades or so it seems that this research field is still heavily dominated by the ossified debates of 1980s and early 1990s: Are nations and nationalism modern or ancient phenomena? Are ethnic identifications primordial or instrumental? Do ethnic and national differences inevitably lead to conflict? Are nationalism and ethnicity products of elite manipulation, or a genuine expression of popular feelings? Furthermore, notwithstanding the dramatic expansion of the empirical research from different parts of the world, the study of ethnic relations and nationalism for the most part remains intellectually parochial. In other words we now know much more about the ethnic and nation-state formation processes on all continents and nearly every society on this planet. However these empirical publications are characterised by the overwhelming dominance of highly under-theorised single case studies^{Footnote 1}. Of course, there are some highly valuable comparative and transcontinental analyses but they seldom focus on the large number of cases and even more rarely attempt to explore the diversity of particular historical and geographical situations while simultaneously developing new theoretical models.

Andreas Wimmer’s work not only brings a breath of analytical fresh air to these disputes but more significantly moves both the theoretical debates and empirical research in a novel and fruitful direction. Instead of anecdotal examples and singular case studies, Wimmer aims to provide truly global analyses which explore the workings of ethnic relations and nation-state formation throughout the entire world and over long stretches of time. Utilising the most up to date global datasets, the majority of which were created or refined by him and his collaborators, Wimmer offers complex comparative analyses of the ethnic boundary making processes and the relationships between nation-state formation and warfare for the entire world. For example the Waves of War (WW) develops and analyses a dataset that includes all significant wars waged in the world between 1816 and 2001 (484 wars) whereas Ethnic Boundary Making (EBM) uses datasets so large that they include 380 ethnic groups in Europe or thousands of American college students, for example.

Although the two books address different topics, with WW being focused on the macro relationships between nationalism, warfare and state formation and EBM on the more micro-interactional issues of ethnic boundary creation and maintenance, there are several common threads that run throughout both works. Firstly, in both books Wimmer advances similar general arguments that insist on the centrality of political power in the formation and expansion of ethnicities, nation-states and warfare. In this he highlights the significance of both the state and civil society as crucial organisational mechanisms for balancing the politicisation of cultural differences. For Wimmer the taming of ethnic and nationalist conflicts presupposes the existence of strong, legitimate, state and equally robust and vibrant civil society both of which are likely to contain the emergence of “exclusionary ethno-political configurations of power” (WW: 8). Hence when attempting to explain ethnic conflicts and nationalist violence what really matters is not economic inequality, cultural hegemony or military domination of majority ethnicities but the political exclusion of significant minorities.

Secondly, Wimmer’s power configuration approach is conceptually articulated and empirically grounded in a genuinely global fashion. Both books combine quantitative and qualitative methods and sophisticated theoretical models with an aim of providing universalist explanations of ethnic relations and nation-state formation that would equally work well in Northern Europe, Central America, Southeast Asia or Western Africa. This is not to say that Wimmer is ignorant of historical and geographical specificities. On the contrary he rightly argues that it is only when scholars treat ethnicity and nationhood as universal phenomena that one can properly understand what is unique to each case. For example, he is highly critical of the dominant perspectives in US academia that sharply distinguish between ethnicity and race, and project this relatively unique experience, grounded in the US history of slavery, onto the rest of the world.

Thirdly, both books are theoretically and disciplinary syncretic. Wimmer subtly draws on the variety of theoretical approaches including the classics, Weber and Simmel, and the contemporaries such as Bourdieu, Barth, Tilly, Levi-Strauss, Moerman and Brubaker. He also successfully and elegantly straddles several academic disciplines so that sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists as well as nationalism or war studies scholars would equally recognise his work as belonging to their respective disciplines.

While there is no doubt that both books make significant methodological and empirical contributions, what really stands out are their theoretical insights. What started off in Wimmer’s early work as a critique of methodological nationalism and the misplaced general tendency to view nationalism solely as a by-product of modern state-formation has, in these two new books, been taken to its logical conclusion^{Footnote 2}. Hence Wimmer expands his argument that since its inception modernity was built on ethnic and nationalist principles and that these principles continue to shape political action. Nevertheless this does not mean that cultural difference by itself inevitably leads to violent conflict. On the contrary, Wimmer demonstrates convincingly that ethnicity and nationhood are “associated with cultural difference only if the boundary is marked by exclusion” (EBM: 177). More specifically he empirically demonstrates the inadequacy of the popular view that ethnic and national differences are grounded in group shared values. Instead such values become sociologically relevant only when the group boundaries are marked by high levels of social closure. What he aims to show is that ethnic relations and nationhood are neither automatic and inevitable points of social division and identification, nor are they just by-products of other economic or cultural forces. Thus WW makes a case that the dramatic proliferation of warfare in the last two centuries cannot be explained without taking into account the changing character of state formation. More specifically Wimmer extends Tilly’s famous argument about war making and state making to account for the simultaneous expansion of war and the nation-state throughout the globe since the early 19^th century. However, unlike Tilly, he is more interested in explaining the universal direction of this structural transformation: Why did all new states become nation-states? And why have empires crumbled in protracted violent conflicts to be replaced with states that legitimise their existence in nationalist terms? Wimmer’s answer to these questions is complex and nuanced but the gist is that the sudden and dramatic surge of both inter-state and civil wars in the past two hundred years is primarily caused by the changing principles of state legitimation with nationalism trumping imperial and other doctrines of rule. In his own words: “ the shift from dynasticism and empire to nation-state was both the cause and consequence of a new wave of wars […] this new wave, carried forward by the power of nationalist ideologies, reached different parts of the world at different points in time” (4).

Similarly EBM aims to reaffirm the position that ethnicity not only matters in modern life but that modernity is inaugurated and continues to operate through the negotiation and re-making of ethnic boundaries. This is not to say that ethnicity determines social action. Quite the opposite: for Wimmer, focusing on ethnic boundary creation processes allows researchers to clearly differentiate between the ethnic and non-ethnic figurations. The key question here is when and how ethnicity matters in modernity. To answer these questions Wimmer develops an approach that attempts to avoid not only collectivist essentialism (which he terms Herderianism) but also radical social constructivism. Although the group-centric ontologies of ethnicity have been rigorously dissected by Rogers Brubaker, Michael Banton, David Laitin among others there has been less criticism of the excessive constructivist models that now dominate much of academia. Thus Wimmer articulates a more modest and restrained situationist argument that recognises the relevance of ethnic categorisations and ethnically centred understandings of reality by social actors while also debunking the hard collectivist models of social analysis. Such an—almost Aristotelian golden mean—position allows Wimmer to explore how social actors draw ethnic and non-ethnic boundaries and what roles social closure, cultural differentiation, historical stability and political salience play in these processes. Wimmer insists that these are fairly universal processes as there is a limited number of ways of how boundaries can be created, maintained and negotiated. Hence Wimmer convincingly shows that even in highly multi-ethnic contexts, such as Swiss neighbourhoods, ethnicity may rarely or never acquire political salience and the principal mechanism for making social boundaries can emerge from outer sources including the division between established residents and newcomers. Even in situations when the ethnic and “racial” homophily seems palpable and well entrenched, as in the case of same “race” friendship networks among American college students, the cause of this outcome seems to be linked to non-ethnic factors as much as to ethnic ones.

The Weak Spots: Nationalism, Structure and Methodology

There is no question that Wimmer has produced two high quality books which will shape the direction of future research and debates on ethnic relations, nation-state formation and warfare. Nevertheless such a Herculean undertaking aimed at providing conceptual and empirical models able to explain the workings of ethnicity and nationhood for the entire world is bound to be incomplete, disposed to occasional inaccuracies, simplifications and even unequivocal misinterpretations which will invite serious criticism from different academic quarters. Some of these criticisms are likely to focus on the problematic interpretations of individual cases (such as his overly instrumentalist comparison of the Ottoman Empire and early modern France (chapter 2, WW)), his empirical attempts to disprove the democratic peace thesis (32, WW) or his fairly rosy view of civil society as an agent of political stability (which clearly contrasts with the vibrancy of extreme civil society groupings in the Weimar republic or the early 1990s former Yugoslavia). However there are two more substantial problems with Wimmer’s position.

Firstly, Wimmer operates with a very thin, underdeveloped and agency centred model of nationalism. In fact there is a pronounced tendency to conflate nation-state formation with nationalism. Neither of the two books has much to say on the workings of nationalist (or ethnicist) ideologies nor attempts to gauge the popularity of particular nationalist ideas and practices among the populations of the polities it studies. This is particularly visible in WW where one gets a sense that the presence and proliferation of nationalist ideology is simply assumed from the fact that new states have been established. However, in many instances the creation of a new state had very little to do with nationalist aspirations and much more with changing geo-politics (such as decolonisation, substantial military defeat, or collapse of communism). Nevertheless nationalist ideologies would often attain popular support long after the formal declaration of independence (as was the case in much of post-colonial Africa and post-communist central Asia). In this context Wimmer seems to confuse the formal event (a proclamation of state sovereignty) with the more complex sociological reality (when a majority of the population identifies with its nation-state). Just as troubling is his decision to exclude the contemporary states which nominally remain monarchies, theocracies or partocracies from his datasets. For example he does not regard the Soviet Union before 1991, Morocco before 1996 or Bhutan before 1998 as nation-states and contends that “the Middle Eastern kingdoms […] have not yet experienced a transition to the nation-state” (WW: 98). Here again the nominal categorisation is superimposed on the sociological substance: the populations and rulers of pre-1996 Morocco or present day Kuwait are certainly no less nationalist than their non-monarchist neighbours in Algeria, Tunisia or Syria.

Wimmer’s agency centred model also assumes that nationalist leaders create nation-states. This is stated explicitly on several occasions: “nationalists were able to establish a nation-state” (WW: 21) or “my own power-configurational approach assumes that nationalists create nation-states, whether or not nations have already been built” (75). However this seems to be an extremely simplified understanding of highly complex and contingent historical realities. In fact there are very few cases when well-organised nationalist movements have managed to capture state power and establish an independent nation-state. Even in the better studied examples of France or US the revolutionaries were not primarily motivated by nationalist principles but have modelled their action on the hotchpotch of syncretic concepts they borrowed from the pre-modern past—the republican and democratic ideas of ancient Rome and Greece, the egalitarian principles of Enlightenment and the cultural heritage of pan-European ideals of humanism and renaissance. More importantly, Wimmer’s overly intentionalist perspective leaves no room for structural contingencies. Since Skocpol’s, Goldstone’s and Tilly’s early studies, scholars of revolutions have persuasively demonstrated that revolutionary conspirators do not bring about revolutionary outcomes. Instead revolutions arise from the set of relatively unique structural alignments: changed geo-politics, military defeats, weakened state apparatus, peasant discontent etc. As Wendell Phillips famously remarked: “revolutions are not made, they come.” These insights equally apply to nation-state formation and nationalism. Nation-states are rarely made, they come. Nationalist ideologues might have some role in this but they are very rarely the principal force behind nation-state formation. The case of the early 19^th century Balkans illustrates this only too well: the emergence of independent Balkan nation-states had very little to do with elite nationalist aspirations, almost nothing to do with the popular sentiments of, essentially peasant and illiterate, populations and all to do with the interests of the Great Powers^{Footnote 3}.

This underdeveloped model of nationalism leads Wimmer towards too linear a depiction of history which is built on the stark distinctions between nation-states and empires. The argument that proliferation of warfare in the last two hundred years is caused by transition from empires to nation-states assumes the existence of two mutually exclusive forms of polity. However, as much of recent historical and sociological research demonstrates, modern empires and nation-states had much more in common than usually recognised^{Footnote 4} and the “transition” from empire to nation-state was far from being a straight forward and irreversible process. In fact for much of the second half of 19^th and first half of the 20^th centuries several European polities including Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium were simultaneously empires and nation-states. The complexity of this problem is even more visible in the case of South America where early declarations of independence had very little to do with the perceptions and attachments of the majority population. In contrast to Wimmer (and Benedict Anderson) who view Latin America as being “thoroughly nationalized” before Europe (WW: 7) one can counterpoise Centano’s research that shows early 19^th century South American states as resembling culturally diverse and highly hierarchical “mini empires” rather than nationally conscious, homogenous and principally egalitarian nation-states.^{Footnote 5}

Secondly, although Wimmer is quite reflexive about the limits of his methodology, there is less recognition of the inherent tension between his complex, subtle and processual theoretical models and the fairly traditional positivist and, for the most part static, quantitative methods that underpin his main findings. For example, EBM develops sophisticated theoretical arguments that emphasise the malleability and flexibility of social relations and group identification. Yet when attempting to empirically operationalize such models Wimmer is forced to utilise datasets with the traditional groupist and essentialist categories that define ethnicity in the mutually exclusive fashion (i.e. one can be either British or Irish, Bosnian or Serb, Catalan or Spanish, etc.). This problem is even more pronounced in WW when Wimmer aims to test the leading theories of nationalism by “proxy variables.” Thus highly multifaceted and subtle models are reduced to a set of rather crude measurements: the explanatory strength of Gellner’s model of economic modernisation is gauged by counting the length of railway tracks; Tilly and Mann’s theories of political modernisation are tested by calculating government expenditure for the specific territories, and Anderson’s cultural modernisation argument is measured by assembling the data on adult literacy^{Footnote 6}. The main problem with this methodology is not only that it cannot possibly capture the complexity and subtlety of theoretical arguments. More importantly it demonstrates a degree of misunderstanding: the leading theorists of nationalism do not argue that industrialisation, mass literacy, and administrative penetration create nation-states or nationalisms. Instead they clearly demonstrate that these were slow, uneven and gradual processes which only helped nationalise populations either before or after the nation-state was established.

Furthermore there is a degree of tautology which underpins the central argument of WW: the transition from empire to nation-state is understood to be both the cause and consequence of warfare proliferation. Leaving to the side the issue of how the same process can be both a cause and consequence, what is really missing in this interpretation is the lack of recognition that the two processes (the simultaneous expansion of war and the nation-state) might just as well be caused by something else, the third or fourth set of variables: the onset of modernity, new global geo-political dynamics, novel forms of capitalism, mass scale ideological transformations, etc. Obviously war was just as significant a factor in the transformation from hunting gathering bands to chiefdoms and eventually first empires, but nationalist ideologies could not possibly account for this particular transition. Would this imply that the imperial doctrines, religion or mythology would have had decisive impact in the proliferation of warfare in the same way nationalism had for the 19^th and 20^th century wars?

Despite these critical remarks both of these books deserve high praise. Wimmer offers bold, comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated and empirically well-grounded analyses which, despite their shortcomings, will inevitably open new avenues for research and rejuvenate the, currently still ossified, study of ethnicity and nationhood.