About a decade ago, I spent several hours at a conference talking to a self-professed Catalan nationalist. I wanted to know whether the triangular relationship among Serbian, Yugoslav, and Croatian identities was comparable to the cases of Castile, Spain, and Catalonia. After a few hours of back and forth, my hunch that the disputes between Serbian–Yugoslav “centralists” and Croatian “(con)federalists” exhibited uncanny similarities to those between Castilian–Spanish and Catalan elites was confirmed. My final questions were: What is the most that Madrid could do to satisfy Catalan demands? If this transpired, could Madrid count on the Catalans’ loyalty to the state? The answer was unexpectedly disheartening: “It’s not like that. The Catalan question is constantly evolving!”

The memory of this conversation recurred while reading Karlo Basta’s excellent book on multinational states. As Basta argues, the nation-state framework is inadequate for understanding “endemic” multinational states. A culturally cohesive nation can reconstitute the state even after its political breakup (e.g., Germany). By contrast, multinational states contain at least one large territorially concentrated group (usually from 15–30 percent of the total population) that may recognize the state but claims to constitute a separate nation. Catalans or Croats reconciled to a state dominated by a “culturally alien” majority, but their loyalty to Spain and Yugoslavia respectively remained conditional. Escalating demands for autonomy present central state elites—usually disproportionately recruited from the majority group—with governance problems that do not arise in nation-states. Questions about the appropriate degree of fiscal or cultural autonomy, (a)symmetrical federalism or regional devolution, and the symbolic recognition of the state’s cultural pluralism make the policy choices of central state elites more consequential and potentially controversial.

Basta takes the four cases of Canada, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia—discussed in that order in the empirical part of the book (ch. 4–7)—to test the hypotheses outlined in the theoretical part (ch. 1–3). The conclusion (ch. 8) seeks to draw out the study’s broader theoretical implications. Basta justifies his choice of cases on the ground that they share important historical and developmental features: All are (or were) countries of “the Global North” close in “the degree of stateness, the persistence of multinationality, population size, and international standing” (p. 8). In all cases, the second-largest group—Quebecois, Catalans, Croats, and Slovaks—demanded greater autonomy across several historical periods. Methodologically, the choice of cases facilitates variation on the independent variable: state-interventionist versus promarket strategies of accommodating the political-economic demands of peripheral nationalists. Basta hypothesizes that accommodation is easier when central and peripheral strategies of governance are aligned. Thus, the Keynesian policy preferences of Canadian (Ontario) and Quebecois elites facilitated accommodation in the early postwar decades. By contrast, a strategically interventionist center (Serbia/Yugoslavia) misaligned on policy with wealthier promarket regions/nations (Slovenia, Croatia) experienced escalating conflict before reforms resulted in realignment around promarket policies and decentralization.

Basta argues that the overwhelming emphasis in political science on formal institutional arrangements has led to the privileging of “the political economy story” over the “symbolic politics story.” In a typical sequence, in what Basta calls Round One of political contention, the state makes political-economic (e.g., fiscal, tax, administrative) concessions to peripheral nationalists, resulting in (partially) successful compromise. Round Two is more problematic: Instead of being satisfied, peripheral nationalists escalate the demand for symbolic recognition. The attempt to redefine the state (in the majority’s view constitutive of its national identity) as a collection of national communities held together by an evolving agreement typically provokes a majority backlash. The majority’s refusal to redefine the state undercuts moderates on the periphery that, in turn, provokes separatist outbidding and a potential secessionist crisis (Canada, Spain, Yugoslavia). Where majority backlash is absent (the Czechoslovak case), peripheral nationalism remains weak (only 20 percent of Slovaks were for secession). In that case, the misalignment of elite political-economic strategies (promarket in the Czech lands and state-interventionist in Slovakia) became the main cause of Czechoslovakia’s divorce.

The foregoing makes clear why Basta shuns rational choice and historical institutionalist approaches in favor of process tracing and sociological institutionalism: While the former allows for the treatment of longer historical sequences as a single case (accommodation is a long-term process punctured by critical junctures, feedback loops, and partly contingent medium-term outcomes), sociological institutionalism recognizes that state institutions are not mere “instruments for the promotion of interests” but also “symbols” that “express and enact” collective identities (p. 161). Basta’s case histories offer confirmations: Whether in the Canadian, Spanish, or Yugoslav cases, majority backlash occurred in response to symbolic recognition challenges. A compelling reason is that most voters care less about technically intricate policy choices than the “emotionally evocative” struggle over state symbols that threaten a nation’s “core identity” (p. 47).

As a Weberian sociologist, I find it difficult to criticize Basta’s empirically based conversion to sociological institutionalism or his emphasis on the symbolic dimensions of nationalist mobilization. Likewise, his advocacy of meaningful small-n comparisons and recognition of the role of agency within the structural parameters set by earlier accommodationist outcomes, seems compelling to this student of Yugoslavia’s dissolution where it could be argued that a long history of center-periphery relations, medium-term institutional outcomes, critical junctures, and political entrepreneurship all played a role in the escalation spiral that led to the state’s denouement. The creation of a subfield of comparative politics devoted to the study of multinational states seems reasonable, even if Basta’s methodological reasoning implies that comparative cases in this subset would need to be grouped according to historical or developmental affinities.

The last point leads me to the first criticism. While there is nothing wrong with the term “multinational states,” Basta neglects the state-nation concept developed by Stepan, Linz, and Yadav. For those authors, cases like Canada and Spain in which peripheral nationalists hold tenuous allegiance to a democratic state are different from the “pure multinationalism” of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, where ethnic heterogeneity was institutionalized, and socialist republics behaved like states. Secondly, does regime type make a difference? As Basta recognizes, Yugoslavia was the only case in which secessionist crisis occurred in the context of communist authoritarianism. Are Canada and Spain able to hold together better because they are democratic? Thirdly, does rule of law make a difference? In the case of Yugoslavia, constitutional clauses on the right to national self-determination played a critical role in legitimizing secessionism once the communist party lost its function of extraconstitutional power broker. By contrast, in Spain courts stopped the Catalan secessionist drive, and it is not clear how peripheral nationalists can overcome this legal obstacle. Finally, can strategies of accommodation be compared across the capitalist/communist divide? In Yugoslavia, the state remained redistributive by ideological fiat (“socialist solidarity” with undeveloped regions) while the lack of a unified market made ethnically based socialist republics into quasisovereign political-economic blocs. By contrast, in Spain labor migration to more developed Catalonia could dilute peripheral nationalism, while the interests of business elites in cooperation with Madrid rested on stronger economic incentives. In other words, while markets and democratic politics produce cross-cutting cleavages, the rule of law inhibits secession. As these examples show, while Basta’s pioneering study of multinational states may not offer conclusive answers, it stimulates the reader to formulate questions and propose hypotheses that could become part of a new research program in comparative politics.