Wimmer Andreas. Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart

Princeton University Press, 2018. — XIII, 347 p. — ISBN 0691177384, ISBN 9780691177380. — (Princeton Studies in Global and Comparative Sociology 3).A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer's theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states' capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.List of Figures
List of Tables
A Note to the Reader on the Online AppendixA Relational Theory and Nested Methods
Voluntary Organizations: Switzerland versus Belgium
Public Goods: Botswana versus Somalia
Communicative Integration: China versus Russia
Political Integration: Evidence from Countries around the World
Identifying with the Nation: Evidence from a Global Survey
Is Diversity Detrimental?
Policy Implications with Some Lessons Learned from Afghanistan
Appendix A: Supplement to Chapter 1 (Online)
Appendix B: Supplement to Chapter 4
Appendix C: Supplement to Chapter 5
Appendix D: Supplement to Chapter 6
Appendix E: Supplement to Chapter 7
Appendix F: Supplement to Chapter 8
NotesFigures
Determinants of nation building
The argument in a nutshell
An inclusionary (left panel) and exclusionary (right panel) configuration of power
Nation building and ethnic diversity around the world, 1945–2010
Nation building and democracy around the world, 1945–2010
Size of the excluded population over time in South Africa and Mexico, 1946–2010
Average pride in country over time in Bosnia and the United States
A simplified genealogical map of Somali clans (without southern agricultural clans)
Languages of contemporary China
Language tree for Sinitic
Predicted size of the excluded population in 98 countries that became independent after 1945
Configurations of ethnopolitical power
Average levels of ethnopolitical exclusion in old and new countries, 1945–2010
Average literacy rates in old and new countries, 1945–2010
Average number of voluntary organizations per capita in the world, 1970–2005
A.1. of the online appendix. Proportion of excluded population in each country over time (online)
A.2. of the online appendix. National pride in each country over time (online)
Example of a nested system of ethnic classification
Sample size and correlations between average responses across surveys
A Boolean model of national pride (individual-level variables not shown)Tables
Distribution of parliamentary seats by ethnic background, 1966–2000
Distribution of cabinet posts by ethnic background, 1966–2005
Ethnic self-identification in 1946, ethnic origins, and contemporary linguistic affiliation (in percent of population)
Distribution of cabinet seats (1960–1969) and Supreme Revolutionary Council seats (1975) over clan families
Licentiate and palace degree holders per province, Qing dynasty
Regional origins of Kuomintang and CCP Central Committee members
Political factions in the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee
Language groups and their main characteristics, 1897
Representation of ethnoreligious groups in the administration and army of the Russian Empire
Russification by language group and type of autonomy, 1959–1989
Historical legacies (generalized linear models of the proportion of population excluded from representation in government)
Cleavage structure, world polity, and political institutions
Testing the political development argument I (generalized linear models of proportion of population excluded from executive government), Panel 5.3A shows Models 1–9, 5.3B shows Models 10–18
Explaining public goods provision, associational density, and linguistic heterogeneity
Explaining levels of statehood in the past (two-stage least squares instrumental variable models on inherited levels of statehood, first stage not shown)
List of country-level control variables and data sources
Multilevel ordered logit regressions on pride in one’s nation
Generalized linear models of proportion of adult literates
OLS regression on railway density
OLS regression on infant mortality rate
Generalized linear models of linguistic fractionalization
Unfavorable views of government, trust in government for dispute resolution, and support for the Taliban in Afghanistan
Logistic regression on primary identity of survey respondents in Afghanistan, 2013–2014
Statehood, nation building, and armed conflict
Descriptive statistics, time coverage, and data sources
Correlation matrix (variables for Tables 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 only)
Country fixed effects version of Model 4 in Table 5.2 (fixed effects regression of proportion excluded population)
Proportional system of representation and parliamentarism measured with the World Bank dataset (generalized linear model of proportion excluded population; replicates Model 5 in Table 5.2)
Parliamentary systems and proportional systems of representation measured with the IAEP dataset (generalized linear models of proportion excluded population; replicates Model 5 in Table 5.2)
Effects of parliamentary systems and proportional representation systems when restricting observations to democracies (generalized linear models of proportion excluded population; replicates Model 5 in Table 5.2)
Ethnopolitical inclusion and ethnic nationalism (measured as refusal to live with a neighbor who speaks a different language; generalized linear model of the proportion of the excluded population)
Ethnopolitical exclusion and ease of imagining the nation (generalized linear model of regression on the proportion of the excluded population)
OLS regression on “willingness to fight for country” (data from World Value Survey)
Placebo regressions on the proportion of the population excluded from executive government (generalized linear models)
Two-stage least square instrumental variable regressions on the proportion of the population excluded from executive government, first stage now shown
List of surveys used
Summary statistics
Exploring candidate country-level control variables (DV: pride in country)
Building a model with country-level control variables (DV: pride in country)
Models 7, 8, and 9 of Tables 7.1–7.3 with controls for colonial rulers
Robustness tests with La Porta’s dataset: OLS regressions on illiteracy, infant mortality, and school attainment
Models 1 and 7 of Tables 7.1–7.3 with four different codings of the diversity variable
Table 7.4 with additional controls for imperial background (generalized linear models of linguistic fractionalization)
A conflict trap? Past ethnic conflicts and ethnopolitical exclusion (generalized linear models of proportion excluded population)