28 - Warfare, Nation Formation, and the Legitimacy of States: An Ethnosymbolic Perspective

Summary

Michael Howard maintains that most nation-states that came into existence before the mid-twentieth century were created by war or had their boundaries defined by wars or internal violence.¹ The role of war, however, has been neglected in theories of nationalism, which tend to focus on the rise of nations and nation-states as a recent phenomenon generated by various forms of modernization. This comment does not apparently apply to the work of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, who draw on the historiography of the European early modern “military revolution.”² Military innovations, they argue, meant that success in warfare required an efficient process of fiscal extraction (taxes), which in turn was dependent on the development of a centralized state administration. Even in these accounts, however, nationalism and nations were relatively late derivatives of these modern processes, emerging in response to state centralizing pressures in the late eighteenth century.