Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914-1923, and: Imperiia i modernizatsiia: Obshchaia model i rossiiskaia spetsifika (review)

The emergence of nations from the ruins of empires was one of the defining political processes of the last century. Since then, scholars have approached the subject with new energy. The collapse of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics drew attention to processes of national formation. The increasing interconnections among states in general and European states in particular have intensified efforts to imagine supra-national frameworks for political life. Finally, the wars of the late 20th century—from the Caucasus to the Balkans to the Middle East—so strongly echo those of great Eurasian land empires that scholars have turned to the history of emergent states to understand the contexts that have produced such conflicts.

The works of the historian Aviel Roshwald and the political scientist Sviato slav Kaspe are two of the more far-reaching efforts to examine relationships of empire and nation. The two books differ in fundamental respects. Roshwald addresses a short period of time, 1914-23, and a vast space—the combined territory of the former Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. Kaspe addresses a vast time frame—nearly a millennium—in the former Soviet space alone. Yet each author in his own way seeks to explain how nations emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries from a Eurasia dominated by vast land empires. Although both demonstrate wide reading in the theoretical literature on nations and empires, they use empirical research to question the emphasis on long-term social and economic factors in explaining the collapse of empires and the building of national states common to that literature. Instead, they point to political and intellectual responses to specific events as catalysts for the development of national states of diverse types. They both refer to modernization as a central element of the development of nations, though with considerable ambivalence in Roshwald's case. Taken together, they make strong cases for the productivity of comparative approaches—geographically and chronologically—in scholarly consideration of the transformation of empires into national states.

Two interests motivate Roshwald's study. First, Roshwald is concerned with "ways of reconciling the principle of civic equality with the ethno-cultural dimension of collective identity" (6). Wisely, however, he does not attempt to trace this tension throughout all three empires over a long period of time, thereby making possible only the most broad generalizations. Second, dissatisfaction with the existing theoretical literature on nationalism prompts him to address World War I and its immediate aftermath. Roshwald argues that most theoretical literature centers on "impersonal, macrohistorical forces such as industrialization, the growth of the state, and the spread of literacy and mass communications" that cause social transformations resulting in the gradual expression of "nationalist forms of political identity" (1). Although Roshwald does not deny the influence of some factors pointed out by theorists of nationalism, he argues that national desires for self-determination were realized not gradually but with great rapidity in World War I and the years that followed. Moreover, the emergence of nation-states in Eastern Europe and Eurasia during and immediately after World War I had long-term effects on the nations in question. The sudden emergence of nations in a time of total war favored the development of rigid ethnic nationalisms rather than more inclusive civic nationalism in the former imperial territories.

Roshwald sets up his comparison by emphasizing a few characteristics common to the three empires. All three were "enormous and unwieldy." Each had taken shape through a gradual process of territorial accumulation under a single dynasty over many centuries. Most of all, however...