John Breuilly

Bio: John Breuilly is an academic researcher from London School of Economics and Political Science. The author has contributed to research in topics: Nationalism & German. The author has an hindex of 18, co-authored 106 publications receiving 2067 citations. Previous affiliations of John Breuilly include University of the Basque Country & University of Manchester.

Nationalism and the state

Abstract: Since its publication this important study has become established as a central work on the vast and contested subject of modern nationalism. Placing historical evidence within a general theoretical framework, John Breuilly argues that nationalism should be understood as a form of politics that arises in opposition to the modern state. In this updated and revised edition, he extends his analysis to the most recent developments in central Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also addresses the current debates over the meaning of nationalism and their implications for his position. Breuilly challenges the conventional view that nationalism emerges from a sense of cultural identity. Rather, he shows how elites, social groups, and foreign governments use nationalist appeals to mobilize popular support against the state. Nationalism, then, is a means of creating a sense of identity. This provocative argument is supported with a wide-ranging analysis of pertinent examples-national opposition in early modern Europe; the unification movement in Germany, Italy, and Poland; separatism under the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires; fascism in Germany, Italy, and Romania; post-war anti-colonialism and the nationalist resurgence following the breakdown of Soviet power. Still the most comprehensive and systematic historical comparison of nationalist politics, "Nationalism and the State" is an indispensable book for anyone seeking to understand modern politics.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism

Abstract: PART I: THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONALISM: IDEAS AND SENTIMENTS PART II: THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONALISM: POLITICS AND POWER PART III: NATIONALISM IN A WORLD OF NATION STATES: POLITICS AND POWER PART IV: NATIONALISM IN A WORLD OF NATION STATES: IDEAS, SENTIMENTS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS PART V: CHALLENGES TO THE WORLD OF NATION STATES PART VI: NATIONALIST HISTORIOGRAPHY

Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences

Abstract: Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized main- stream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migra- tion. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d'horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation-state building pro- cesses in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of 'transnational communities' - the last phase in this process - was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodo- logical nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory. After the first flurry of confusion about the nature and extent of contemporary pro- cesses of globalization, social scientists moved beyond rhetorical generalities about the decline of the nation-state and began to examine the ways in which nation-states are currently being reconfigured rather than demolished. That nation-states and nationalism are compatible with globalization was made all too obvious. We wit- nessed the flouring of nationalism and the restructuring of a whole range of new states in Eastern Europe along national lines in the midst of growing global interconnec- tions. The concomitance of these processes provides us with an intellectual opening to think about the limitations of our conceptual apparatus. It has become easier to under- stand that it is because we have come to take for granted a world divided into discrete and autonomous nation-states that we see nation-state building and global inter- connections as contradictory. The next step is to analyse how the concept of the nation-state has and still does influence past and current thinking in the social sciences, including our thinking about transnational migration. It is our aim in this article to move in this direction by exploring the intellectual potential of two hypotheses. We demonstrate that nation-state building processes have fundamentally shaped the ways immigration has been perceived and received. These perceptions have in turn influenced, though not completely determined, social science

Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology

Abstract: The article examines methodological nationalism, a conceptual tendency that was central to the development of the social sciences and undermined more than a century of migration studies. Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation-states by the social sciences. Transnational studies, we argue, including the study of transnational migration, is linked to periods of intense globalization such as the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet transnational studies have their own contradictions that may reintroduce methodological nationalism in other guises. In studying migration, the challenge is to avoid both extreme fluidism and the bounds of nationalist thought.

Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?: New Data and Analysis

Abstract: Much of the quantitative literature on civil wars and ethnic conflict ignores the role of the state or treats it as a mere arena for political competition among ethnic groups. other studies analyze how the state grants or withholds minority rights and faces ethnic protest and rebellion accordingly, while largely overlooking the ethnic power configurations at the state's center. drawing on a new data set on ethnic power relations (EPR ) that identifies all politically relevant ethnic groups and their access to central state power around the world from 1946 through 2005, the authors analyze outbreaks of armed conflict as the result of competing ethnonationalist claims to state power. the findings indicate that representatives of ethnic groups are more likely to initiate conflict with the government (1) the more excluded from state power they are, especially if they have recently lost power, (2) the higher their mobilizational capacity, and (3) the more they have experienced conflict in the past.

The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism

Abstract: Soviet nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists. Lenin's acceptance of the reality of nations and "national rights" was one of the most uncompromising positions he ever took, his theory of good ("oppressed-nation") nationalism formed the conceptual foundation of the Soviet Union and his NEP-time policy of compensatory "nation-building" (natsional'noe stroitel'stvo) was a spectacularly successful attempt at a state-sponsored conflation of language, "culture," territory and quota-fed bureaucracy.

Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India

Abstract: List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments 1. The electoral incentives for ethnic violence 2. Explaining town-level variation in Hindu-Muslim violence 3. State capacity explanations for Hindu-Muslim violence 4. The consociational explanation for Hindu-Muslim violence 5. The electoral incentives for Hindu-Muslim violence 6. Party competition and Hindu-Muslim violence 7. The electoral incentives for ethnic violence in comparative perspective 8. Democracy and ethnic violence Appendices References Index.