Statehood Before and Beyond Ethnicity: Minor States in Northern and Eastern Europe, 1600–2000 (review)

Nationalism and statehood are two topics that have received considerable attention from social theorists, historians and political scientists since the 1980s. Theorists such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly and Anthony Smith turned a more analytical and critical eye towards the history of the development of nationalism and statehood. These theorists developed an understanding of nationalism as a universal value shared by various territories, ethnic groups and states. As a result, the history of any particular nation is often understood as a progression toward the attainment of statehood. The two terms nation and state, therefore, have become intertwined. A state – an internationally recognised autonomous political entity – is seen as simply the culmination of the destiny of a given nationality, often defined as a group of people who share a common ancestry, culture, language or religion. The nebulous concept of ethnicity is often at the heart of the understanding of the history of the nation-state. While nation and ethnicity are often understood as near synonymous terms, there are no examples of nation-states that are ethnically homogeneous – all states incorporate some types of ethnic minorities.

For this reason the editors of this volume asked the contributors to reconsider the history of the nation-state by removing ethnicity from the equation. The editors assert that the state – an autonomous entity, whether this is in the form of a king, an oligarchy, or ‘the people’, which exercises power through the apparatus of the military, bureaucracy, and taxation – predates the concept of the nation-state. The result is an intriguing, albeit uneven, collection of essays that attempt to bring new perspectives to the understanding of the history of statehood. While most scholars who study nationalism maintain that the concept was born with the French Revolution, the notion that statehood predates the birth of the nation-state leads to an expansion of the coverage of this volume to include the early modern period. This is not surprising, given that scholars of the early modern period have long asserted that the Reformation, and the resulting birth of confessionalisation and the concept of the ‘state church’, led to increased military conflict, which in turn created the need for more bureaucracy and taxation, which led to increased state power, whether this was in the form of an absolute monarch, as in France, or the shared power between monarch and parliament, as in Britain.

What is most intriguing about this volume is that the ‘great powers’ of western Europe, such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Great Britain, often considered the cradles of nationalism and statehood, are left out of the discussion. Instead we are presented with essays on places that are typically considered to be on the northern and eastern ‘fringe’ of Europe. They include Sweden, Poland, Transylvania, the Balkans and Greece. This limitation does away with using the ‘great powers’ as the models for the relationship between nationalism, ethnicity, and statehood and allows the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the topic from evidence that ranges over a longer period and a broader geographic area. Some of the essays are stronger than others, and several tend to get bogged down in recounting the narrative history of some of the regions. What seems to be most lacking from this collection is a solid theoretical foundation to hold the various essays together. While the editors’ introduction and Miroslov Hroch’s essay provide a basic theoretical framework for the collection – namely that the state should be given precedence over ethnicity when considering the creation of the modern nation-state, and that it is the struggle for and exercise of power, whether this is by a ‘dominant’ ethnic group over others, or by the centre over the provinces – which tells us much about statehood, it is difficult at times to find these ideas sustained throughout the collection. Perhaps such a creative...