Andreas Wimmer’s Nation Building is a monumental macro-historical study that explains why individuals in some countries develop stronger identification with their states. It also pushes the historical horizon back across centuries to explain how centralized states, civil societies, common languages, and public goods came about and gave rise to political inclusion and present-day national identification. The multimethod empirics bring together both comparative cases to illustrate the causal links in the theory and large-N statistical comparisons to test whether these associations apply broadly. This is an agenda-setting work that should have enduring significance.

Nationalism, in my understanding, refers to a complex of phenomena. Following on a definition offered by Max Weber, the term brackets causes, conditions, correlates, and consequences of the claim that specific collections of individuals constitute peoples that are repositories of sovereignty (labeled “nations”) that have a right to independent states of their own. Discussions of nationalism touch on such phenomena as individual identities; individual affective and evaluative orientations to specific nations and states (such as pride or xenophobia); the coordination of sentiments to bind individuals together in communities; programs for new states that will allegedly realize a nation’s sovereignty; official ideologies that define an existing state’s nation and its homeland; and policies such as official languages, closed borders, economic protectionism, or territorial expansion that purportedly express the sovereignty of the nation. No single study can embrace all of these phenomena.

Nation Building focuses on macrolevel constraints on microlevel identifications with existing states. This primary dependent variable is described variously as national identification, national pride, and the precedence of attachments to the nation over attachments to an ethnic group, tribe, village community, or religion (pp. 1, 20, 23, 26, 217, 262). The analysis treats the process of extending national pride as nation-building or integration: the creation of a community based on loyalty to co-nationals (p. 23).

Nation Building not only advances our understanding of the historical processes by which pride in states becomes more widespread in the populations of some countries but not others. In equal measure, it sets a broad agenda for significant future research on national identification. First, in Nation Building the interchangeability of the concepts and processes of national identification, pride, precedence, and integration seems warranted. A next step for research is to distinguish these concepts and explore connections among them, such as the process by which identification with a state becomes shared sentiments of loyalties to co-nationals. Community may or may not emerge by adding individuals with similar pride in their state (a process implied but not made explicit in Nation Building); whether and how this becomes loyalty to co-nationals need further explanation.

Second on this agenda is the relationship of political to cultural identification. Nation Building, like much of the literature, treats national identification as the outcome of developments in interethnic relations. Yet, a nation is first and foremost a political category. A nation may emerge autonomously alongside ethnic groups and constrain the development of ethnic categories. For example, the evidence in Nation Building suggests that political Swissness (a “national” identity) began to emerge among politically engaged elites in some cantons quite early, based on a realization of common political practices. This emerging national identification distinguished the Swiss from fellow speakers of German, French, and Italian in neighboring countries. It appears to have preceded and conditioned the emergence of cross-linguistic civil society, the provision of extensive public goods from the central government, and a common means of communication.

Third, Nation Building also draws attention to the need for the next wave of research to explain variation among countries and individuals in the domains within which national identification is salient. As in Nation Building, students of nationalism often ask whether respondents identify more with their country than with their ethnic group, kin group, religious community, or locality (p. 262). Yet, in many countries, the answer to the question to which state one should belong does not offer answers to questions in other realms, such as what language one should speak on the streets, how one should worship, or with whom one should associate. Precedence of national identity across many domains may actually describe a pathological situation in which all aspects of life have become politicized and subordinated to the will of the nation. Future research may seek to expand our understanding of why national identity takes precedence in more domains among some individuals in some countries and at some times. Fourth, Nation Building frames for future researchers the task of identifying the consequences of limited identification with existing states. Specifically, future researchers may help us understand the full meaning of “coming together” versus “falling apart” in the subtitle.

The expansive theoretical model in Nation Building defines a five-step historical process (p. 20). National identification, as the ultimate (or fifth) step in this model, is more likely to emerge among ethnic groups whose elites are included in the government of the state (the fourth step). Multiethnic inclusion is more likely to emerge where three conditions are present: civil society, public goods, and common communication (the third step). A civil society of cross-ethnic voluntary organizations (rather than ethnic patronage hierarchies) makes building cross-ethnic coalitions easier. Broad provision of public goods by the central government to all regions of the country makes the government an attractive exchange partner for citizens. The presence of a common medium of communications makes establishing countrywide political alliances easier. The latter two of these three conditions for national identification were more likely to emerge where a centralized state was established by the nineteenth century (the second step). And early state-building was more common where topography prevented escape of the population (or temperate climate limited debilitating disease), population density provided the economic surplus to sustain a nonproductive elite, and (at least in the West) wars fostered state-building (the first step).

In its historical sweep, Nation Building offers an important alternative historical narrative to other monumental contributions such as the ancient origins theory of Anthony Smith’s (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations or the print capitalism theory of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities, to mention but two. The large number of elements in the theory presented by Nation Building is likely to set the terms for as many as five very fruitful theoretical discussions. First, because the model includes so many moving parts, the precise causal mechanisms at each stage are less well developed (an understandable trade-off). The case studies stand as illustrations of diverging outcomes, but leave an opportunity for future researchers to explicate carefully the logical and causal links at the critical junctures in the theory. Second, because there are so many moving parts in the model, it is left to those political scientists who expect a theory to have a common integrating logic to identify it. Third, because the key elements have been previously identified as manifestations of modernization, analysts still subscribing to modernization theory have an opportunity to explore whether all the developments identified as causes are actually consequences of a common cause associated with modernity (see pp. 250–51). Fourth, ancient nations theorists may ask whether the civil societies, common languages, and strong states were all the consequences of a shared sense of community (e.g., Tswananess or Swissness) that predated many of the intermediate factors identified in the model. And fifth, all may want to debate which of the elements identified in the model are necessary, sufficient, or simply conditioning factors in the rise of national pride. These discussions will enrich our understanding of nationalism. Nation Building has thus framed this agenda for rigorous theory building.

Among the most important issues where the theoretical model could be further elaborated is in explaining the elite–populace link: although the book states that nation-building is “a matter of political alliances between ruler and ruled” (p. 208), the argument focuses on associational life and communication within the elite. For example, it is less clear how the development of a multiethnic political elite that spoke or wrote a common language, even though the population spoke only local languages, led the population at large to develop national consciousness. And under what conditions do members of the political elite who are “bilingual” (speaking, for example, both the Chinese, French, or Russian of the center and the dialect, Flemish, or Georgian of the local population) decide to mobilize their own local populations as separate nations with a right to states of their own?

The empirical evidence of both comparative cases and statistical tests presents a compelling pattern of mutually reinforcing support for the theory. Some of the comparisons seem mismatched, however, such as that between ethnic Chinese and the multiethnic population of the Russian Empire, rather than comparing ethnic Chinese with ethnic Russians or pairing the multiethnic populations of the two empires. Some of the statistical results also use indicators that are subject to competing interpretations. Although debates over these are a natural part of the scholarly disputation process, the mutually reinforcing pattern of confirmation in Nation Building is too compelling to succumb easily to the torture of a thousand small cuts.