This is a loosely linked collection of essays on issues of nationalism in the former Eastern Europe. Charles King is a lucid writer and regional expert. “Extreme” is somewhat of a misnomer in his title, as is “violence” in the subtitle. The book is principally a dialogue with competing theories and approaches to the study of nationalism. Extreme Politics resembles Rogers Brubaker's earlier work, Nationalism Reframed (1996), which covers similar intellectual and geographic terrain. In placing the books side by side, two issues stand out. First, King's work has the advantage of 20 years of additional history and his deep knowledge of the region. Second, nationalism studies became an academic growth industry in the 1990s, spurred on by ethnic conflict and territorial dissolution in Eastern Europe. Yet, even today, analytic issues with respect to the study of nationalism remain unresolved, leaving an author with potentially new things to say and issues to resolve.

King's central points about nationalism are methodological as well as substantive. Beginning with his introduction, the author establishes the frame of the ensuing essays as a dialogue between political science and history. He argues that in the aftermath of 1989 and the unexpected ethnic conflict that ensued, political scientists, in their search to assign causality to events, failed to adequately weigh the historical legacy of earlier nationalist moments. In short, political scientists treated nationalism as an analytic category, rather than a contextually contingent phenomenon that required “historical sensibility” for robust understanding. King argues for a historical approach to the study of nationalism informed by analytic categories from political science. He cautions against cliophilia (Chapter 9), a blind historical determinism that often appears in studies of Eastern Europe. He aims to demonstrate that nationalism's emergence, as well as the scholarly urge to conceptualize and identify it, only becomes salient under specific conditions in specific locales. Temporality, as well as culture, is constitutive of nationalism.

Extreme Politics ranges broadly over theoretical topics as well as the national spaces of Eastern Europe. The book, seven essays buttressed by an introduction and conclusion, is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on theories of nationalism and violence, the second section on empirical accounts of Eastern European and Eurasian politics. King has an ability to neatly synthesize complex literatures. The essays often begin with cogent summaries of complex topics that are extremely useful to the nonspecialist. His review of recent scholarship on “The Micropolitics of Violence” (Chapter 4), as well as his masterful eight-page summary of the immigration literature as it applies to Eastern Europe (Chapter 8), is impressive and informative.

A short review of a collection such as this cannot do justice to all of the essays. Those discussed represent the intersection of space constraints and personal taste. Chapter 2 on “The ‘National Origins’ of Nationalism Studies” is arguably one of the better chapters in the collection. King begins with the observation that the early historians of nationalism were uniformly British. In trying to establish why this was the case, he provides a compelling account of the ways in which national issues determine scholarly interest and production. He offers three reasons for early British dominance of the field. First, many mid-twentieth century British historians were refugees from middle Europe and continued to feel the effects of the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire. Second, nationalism dominated British foreign policy in the late nineteenth century as well as the postwar period. Most cogently, Britain as a national space was a confusing entity. It was from the beginning what we would label today as a multicultural society. Unresolved issues around empire, colonialism, and national boundaries motivated academic inquiry.

King's second chapter loosely follows from the first, in that it takes up the case of Scottish nationalism. Observing that winners write the histories of nationalism, he argues that there is much analytic power to be gained from studying “failed nationalisms.” “Theorizing failure” is an intriguing idea. Yet King's two cases, the American South in the Civil War period and Scotland, can be more parsimoniously explained by lack of institutional support than by any failure of will or mass appeal. The author develops an overly complex model (p. 43) of nationalist success and failure. His categories of “mass appeal” and “international recognition” have little bearing on the cases that he marks as successful. For example, within the category nation-state, the Archimedean point of successful nationalism according to his model, he places Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, and Israel. Aside from the fact that one could add many others to this category, “success” in all of these cases is hardly seamless. Italy in the time of Risorgimento lacked mass appeal across the boot and is still questionable in some quarters. Israel may be recognized as a sovereign state by international law, but it is hardly an uncontested political entity.

The comparative case studies on diaspora (Chapter 7) and migration (Chapter 8) are fascinating, particularly for the nonspecialist. By carefully comparing the diaspora populations from three Soviet successor states—Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakshstan—King demonstrates that the fate of diaspora populations is subject to national as well as international politics, and varies depending upon internal conditions within the homeland nation and on external forces affecting homeland politics and international standing. He effectively demonstrates how these three nation states use different approaches to manipulate diaspora populations for political ends. In the chapter on migration, King takes up the case of trafficking in women from the former Eastern Europe. He makes a compelling case that it is state corruption that facilitates the market for sex workers in some regions rather than others, and not the presence of a criminal class luring naive young women into criminal activity.

King's approach in these essays reveals the dynamism of events that other analysts often miss. As the chapters on diasporas and trafficking demonstrate, history, as well as politics, clearly matters. I would prefer a broader conception of institutions than King deploys. He restricts institutions to the state and neglects a whole matrix of institutions such as law, education systems, the military, and religion that affect the strengths and weaknesses of the nationalist idea. My second caveat is the use of the term extreme as a code for a host of practices that are not always extreme. After all, ethnicity can have positive valences and nationalism can sometimes be coded as patriotism. In post-1989 and post-Maastricht Europe, scholars often wrote as if nationalism was an aberration and the nation-state was on its way to obsolescence. The reassertions of nationalism across the continent in light of the European sovereign debt crisis suggest that nationalism is hard to tame and does not go away easily. In short, this is a timely and important collection of essays.