Nadav Shelef’s Homelands is an important new book in nationalism studies. It argues that the cartographic boundaries of the national homelands to which people are attached can change over time. This means that the territorial attachments that underpin irredentist challenges to national borders can fade, opening up the possibility of durable peace.
Shelef considers two historic cases, postwar Germany and Italy, where homeland territoriality adjusted to new post-conflict borders. He then moves to a contemporary contested space, Israel-Palestine. Here too Shelef finds a similar shift in Palestinian national political rhetoric from maximalist claims (all Israel) to narrower claims (1967 borders). In addition to the case studies, Shelef uses an innovative large-N strategy to test a generalizable theory of homeland territoriality. Namely, he codes for mentions of homeland territoriality across 162 new international borders between 1945 and 1996. He distinguishes partitions involving the loss of homeland territoriality from other border alterations, such as the Argentina-Paraguay border adjustment. He also distinguishes homeland from non-homeland territoriality as well as claims that are core to conceptions of homeland from those involving territory that has less symbolic importance (i.e., Jerusalem vs. mountains).
The book is one of the few to use large-N methods to test ethnosymbolist theories, which adduce that mass cultural attachments to symbols such as territory are an important driver of nationalism. Too often large-N datasets lack good data on subjective attachments, thereby inclining analysts toward materialist explanations due to the “streetlight effect” of looking where the available data is. Though there are limited cultural measures such as time since last territorial loss, length of continuous ethnic presence on a territory, or the cultural distinctiveness of minorities, these do not measure subjective symbolic attachments directly.
Despite its focus on popular symbolic attachments, the book’s argument allows a role for political elites to nudge populations toward narrower, more realistic definitions of homeland. This takes place through an iterative process of democratic competition in which maximalist and minimalist conceptions of territoriality compete. Moderate politicians engage in a form of constructive ambiguity whereby they defend maximalist and minimalist conceptions of homeland in different venues, at different times. This permits voters to believe nothing has been conceded while giving moderates the green light to sign up to peace agreements that deliver shorter-term benefits such as market access in exchange for a de facto relinquishment of territorial claims. An evolutionary process leads to the narrower, more realistic conceptions of territory winning out over time. The result is a progressive acceptance of actual political borders and a decline in the mention of lost lands (such as German territory lost to Poland) over time.
Shelef focuses specifically on the symbolic value of land, as distinct from the impact of lost territory on links to stranded ethnic kin or access to resources and strategic advantages. Rather than assume that symbolic attachments are fixed, sacred, and non-negotiable, as is implied by some ethnosymbolist theory, he finds that politically salient attachments can evolve over time to make peaceful coexistence possible. Sacred values cannot be bought off with material incentives, but competing symbolic values may evolve in a moderate direction due, indirectly, to politicians stage-managing the process whereby people trade material advantages (via peace agreements) for an attenuation of land claims. This leads into policy prescriptions which hold that peacemakers should examine discourses of homeland territoriality and identify moderate politicians who, even if rhetorically defending maximalist positions, may also display a willingness to endorse pragmatic deals, which have the effective result of habituating the public toward a new territorial status quo over time.
Perceptive readers will note that the quantitative model predicts a decline in mentions of lost lands for a few decades, but that this is followed by a rise in mentions of such territory over the longer term. This “u”-shaped pattern suggests that irredentist claims do not die but may be resurrected in the long term. This latter possibility is not satisfactorily theorized in the book.
In addition, while the book makes a clear contribution by identifying democratic competition as the process whereby territorial claims may converge with actual geopolitical constraints, this deals only with the supply side process and not ultimate causes. The upstream factors that condition electorates to accept pragmatic peace deals and give up on maximalist claims are mentioned but not fashioned into a clear demand-side argument. Such bottom-up factors include demographic shifts such as the depopulation of co-ethnics from lost lands, habituation to a new dispensation, cohort change as those with direct memory of lost lands decline as a share of the electorate, as well as economic and great power pressure to accede to post-conflict borders.
Finally, the book feeds into a broader discussion as to whether politicians must deploy constructive ambiguity and obfuscation (even lying, as Paul Dixon notes) to produce a settlement that people will accept.
Overall, this is an important book for scholars of nationalism, conflict resolution, and International Relations more broadly. Methodologically and substantively, it is truly innovative and deserves to be read by faculty, policymakers, and students alike.
