This is a bold and challenging study of European nationalism based on the following thesis: Nationalism was a phenomenon of state building that predated the eighteenth-century starting point favored by most scholars and whose genesis was elite pragmatism and popular mobilization. Moving the origins of nationalism back to the sixteenth (and even late fifteenth) century allows Anthony Marx to make two arguments, one explanatory and the other evaluative. Of the two, the former seems to be more persuasive.

The explanatory argument—which Marx makes by combining social science comparative method and historical analysis—suggests that we interpret nationalism as a strategy of state building and centralization. Furthermore, he proposes that we reevaluate the role of the elites and popular mobilization and question the canonical idea that deems nationalism a post–French Revolution phenomenon and, therefore, naturally predisposed toward civic and democratic results. The author claims instead that when inclusion and equality started becoming the leading principles of politics (in the second half of the eighteenth century), most of the process of national unification (uniformity of language, religion, and culture) had already been accomplished. Dating nationalism from the late eighteenth century ignores the foundational dirty work performed by the various ruling elites and populaces and makes for the idyllic tale of “civic” versus “ethnic” nationalism: “If inclusive nationalism was built on a foundation of earlier exclusion, then that later consolidation cannot be understood without reference to such earlier processes too often forgotten or seen as irrelevant” (p. ix). The centrality of the state's coercive authority in the making of the nation is a topos in continental political theory and history that runs from Machiavelli to Hegel and Meinecke, to mention only the main authors. Anthony Marx sides with Machiavelli, who first captured the role of state building in politics and taught the new prince to take the incipient territorial states of Europe as his model in order to gain Italy's political independence and freedom.

Marx bases his sociohistorical theory of nationalism upon three successful cases: the attempts of early modern France, England, and Spain “to impose central authority from above and manage popular loyalties from below” (pp. x–xi). In the tradition of Max Weber, religion is Marx's midwife of the modern nation-state. Religion—but actually post-Reformation religious loyalties—was the instrument those three states used to achieve institutional unity and ethnic homogeneity. Spain used the Inquisition, France religious fanaticism, and England antipapist ideology. Differences among them reflected differences of religious identity. One generalization can be made: Where and when Catholicism was hegemonic and substantially unchallenged by the Reformation, state centralization was weaker and, in fact, never fully achieved. As Antonio Gramsci understood, the cosmopolitan character of Catholicism was the main obstacle to the political project of modernity. This diagnosis coincides with Anthony Marx's historical reconstruction of the centuries-old attempt by the Spanish crown to counter the federative thrust of regional powers. Its failure to cohere lay essentially in Catholic uniformity. This argument gives Marx the chance to strengthen his case that nationalism (as the late child of state building) derived from a politics of homogeneity perpetrated through a politics of (internal) exclusion. Indeed, wherever the risk of civil war was deeper, the process of nationalistic unity was more successful. The case of France, where religious conflict between Christians was not just an elite affair, seems to prove Marx right. The fusion of the monarch's strategy of state unification with the fanaticism of the masses sealed the character of French “civic” nationalism. As the case of Caterina de' Medici shows, the French crown had to abandon the pragmatic politics of compromise between Catholics and non-Catholics and to ally itself with the populist religious zealotry of the majority in order to face the divisive challenge of the aristocratic orders. “One King, one law, one faith” demanded the physical elimination of the Huguenots.

Faith in Nation does not tell us how the masses developed their taste for fanaticism, although the author invites us to adopt a realist explanation. Immanuel Kant thought war was the unintended strategy that nature used to disperse people all over the globe and compel them to find a peaceful modus vivendi through the state. Carl Schmitt translated Kant's explanation into a rule that reversed Kant's logic: War, Schmitt thought, is the permanent shaping force of societies, both when it is waged in its violent form and when it is fought in the guise of political antagonism within the state. Marx seems to share Schmitt's view when he claims that exclusion forged the collective subject of the demos-nation. The centuries-old conflict waged by the British monarchs (and later civil society and public opinion) against the pope and the papists, the vilified “blasphemous” Catholics, and the semicivilized southern European countries strengthened Britons' “civic” supremacist patriotism and their loyalty to the state.

As mentioned above, Marx draws an evaluative argument from the explanatory one: European intellectuals and elites fabricated the hagiographic representation of nationalism as a politics of democratic inclusion and liberal toleration in order to celebrate the superiority of their people against all other people around the world. It was used to smuggle the tale of two nationalisms, one “civic” and good (Western) and one “ethnic” and bad (non-Western), the former a factor of civilization and the latter a factor of conflicts, exclusion, and illiberalism.

Space does not permit me to examine all the reasons why this argument, although captivating, is the less convincing. I restrict myself to hinting at what I regard as the more relevant problem, namely, the dualism between the “West” and the “non-West” as homogeneous entities associated respectively with “civic” and “ethnic” nationalisms. Much like the non-West, the West (actually Europe) is a complex phenomenon scholars too frequently identify with a few countries and the victorious project of the territorial state they achieved. Yet if, as Marx suggests, we should understand nationalism as a process of both exclusion and homogeneity, then we should also attend to cases of “weak” state building. The fate of civic and ethnic nationalisms was decided in Germany and Italy, the two countries that, not coincidentally, generated the two totalitarian experiences of the twentieth century. In those countries, state and nation unification were attained together (the latter was not a later evolutionary stage of the former), and ethnic nationalism violently repressed civic nationalism (1849). The former was not a “denigrated” non-Western phenomenon and the latter not merely a French or British (as Western) phenomenon.