Nationalism and Bounded Integration: What It Would Take to Construct a European Demos

Nation-state; European identity; identity; minorities; democratization

Ethnonationalist Triads: Assessing the Influence of Kin Groups on Civil Wars

Although the case-based literature suggests that kin groups are prominent in ethnonationalist conflicts, quantitative studies of civil war onset have both overaggregated and underaggregated the role of ethnicity, by looking at civil war at the country level instead of among specific groups and by treating individual countries as closed units, ignoring groups' transnational links. In this article the authors integrate transnational links into a dyadic perspective on conflict between marginalized ethnic groups and governments. They argue that transnational links can increase the risk of conflict as transnational kin support can facilitate insurgencies and are difficult for governments to target or deter. The empirical analysis, using new geocoded data on ethnic groups on a transnational basis, indicates that the risk of conflict is high when large, excluded ethnic groups have transnational kin in neighboring countries, and it provides strong support for the authors' propositions on the importance of transnational ties in ethnonationalist conflict.</jats:p

The change of tide in political cooperation: a limited information model of European integration

European integration follows a puzzling stop-and-go pattern that traditional international reations theories cannot fully explain. The predominating paradigms only account for either the achievements or the setbacks of the integration process. An information based explanation makes it possible to move beyond structural accounts provided by realist and functionalist scholarship. Such an approach yields solid micro-level foundations of international bargaining and focuses on leaders' use of threats in negotiations about regional cooperation. Situations involving governments agreeing on the necessity of further integration, but disagreeing about its level, create room for strategic manipulation of information asymmetries. This type of uncertainty stems from the manipulator's information and control advantages concerning domestic costs. The analysis of different summit meetings demonstrates the empirical relevance of such maneuvers for the dynamics of European integratio

Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis

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 pas

Square Pegs in Round Holes: Inequalities, Grievances, and Civil War

Much of the recent research on civil war treats explanations rooted in political and economic grievances with considerable suspicion and claims that there is little empirical evidence of any relationship between ethnicity or inequality and political violence. We argue that common indicators used in previous research, such as the ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) and the Gini coefficient for income dispersion, fail to capture fundamental aspects of political exclusion and economic inequality that can motivate conflict. Drawing on insights from group-level research, we develop new country-level indices that directly reflect inequalities among ethnic groups, including political discrimination and wealth differentials along ethnic lines. Our analysis reveals that these theoretically informed country profiles are much better predictors of civil war onset than conventional inequality indicators, even when we control for a number of alternative factors potentially related to grievances or opportunities for conflict. © 2013 International Studies Association

Disaggregating Ethno-Nationalist Civil Wars: A Dyadic Test of Exclusion Theory

Contemporary conflict research usually measures the influence of ethnicity on conflict by capturing ethnic constellations as country-based indices, such as ethnic fractionalization or polarization. However, such aggregated measures are likely to conceal the actual operation of actor-specific mechanisms. In this article, therefore, we introduce a disaggregated model that measures ethnic groups' access to power. We do so by disaggregating both ethnicity and conflict to the level of explicitly geo-coded center-periphery dyads. This procedure allows us to measure the power balance between politically excluded ethnic groups and dominant actors in terms of group sizes, distances between the center and the periphery, and the roughness of the latter's terrain. We rely on geographic information systems (GIS) to compute demographic and ethno-geographic variables. The dyadic analysis enables us to show that exclusion of powerful ethnic minorities increases the likelihood of conflict considerably. In addition, we show that the risk of conflict is positively associated with the extent of rough terrain in the peripheral group's home region and its distance from the political cente

Nationalism and the puzzle of reversing state size

Having increased for centuries, territorial state size began to decline toward the end of the nineteenth century and has continued to do so. The authors argue that processes triggered by ethnic nationalism are the main drivers of this development. Their empirical approach relies on time-varying spatial data on state borders and ethnic geography since the nineteenth century. Focusing on deviations from the nation-state ideal, the authors postulate that state internal ethnic fragmentation leads to reduction in state size and that the cross-border presence of dominant ethnic groups makes state expansion more likely. Conducted at the systemic and state levels, the analysis exploits information at the interstate dyadic level to capture specific nationalist processes of border change, such as ethnic secession, unification, and irredentism. The authors find that although nationalism exerts both integrating and disintegrating effects on states' territories, it is the latter impact that has dominated

Right-peopling" the state: nationalism, historical legacies and ethnic cleansing in Europe, 1885-2020

Many European nation-states were historically homogenized through violent ethnic cleansing. Despite its historical importance, we lack systematic evidence of the conditions under which groups where targeted with cleansing and how it impacted states’ ethnic demography. Rising nationalism in the 19th century threatened multi-ethnic states with right-sizing through secessionism and irredentism. States therefore frequently turned to brutal right-peopling, in particular where cross-border minorities and those with a history of political independence increased the risk of territorial losses. We test this argument with new spatial, time-variant data on ethnic geography and ethnic cleansing from 1886 to the present. We find that minorities that politically dominated another state and those that have lost political independence were most at risk of ethnic cleansing, especially in times of interstate war. At the macro-level, our results show that ethnic cleansing increased European states’ ethnic homogeneity almost as much as border change. Both produced today’s nation-states by aligning states and ethnic nations

Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the Severity of War

Drawing on Clausewitz's classical theory, we argue that the emergence of mass nationalism following the French Revolution profoundly altered the nature of the units constituting the interstate system, thereby transforming the conduct of interstate warfare. To validate these assertions—and thus to test Clausewitz—we rely on quantitative evidence at the macro level, with a particular focus on the global distribution of interstate war sizes, measured in terms of battle deaths, over the past five centuries. Drawing on extreme value theory, we demonstrate that temporal discontinuities in the shapes of the tails of such distributions can be used to draw inferences about the nature of the mechanisms underlying the bloodiest events in world history. This approach allows us to show that the interstate system experienced a fundamental shift in the mechanisms underlying the production of war sizes: a shift that can be dated to the years 1770-1810, and that resulted in a systematic increase in war severity. These same tools also allow us to rule out a number of alternative explanations for this shift (including changes in population sizes and changes in weapons technology), while providing evidence for a specific account of war severity rooted in the mobilizational capacities of state

Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison

Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economic grievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest on questionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups' settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specification