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War, State Formation, and Nationalism

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Handbook of Patriotism

Abstract

This chapter explores how wars shape state formation and what role nationalism plays in this process. In the first part of the chapter, the author offers a critical analysis of the classical and contemporary bellicits theories of state formation. Although bellicits offer persuasive arguments about the relationship between wars, geopolitics, and state formation, they largely neglect to analyze the internal dynamics that mold the nationalist ideas and practices. To counter this analytical omission, the second part of the chapter develops an alternative explanatory framework centered on the historical dynamics of grounded nationalisms and their relationship with war and state formation. The rest of the chapter applies this analytical framework to the case study of the nineteenth and twentieth century Balkans.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Even for much of the nineteenth-century wars in the Balkans were very small resulting in minimal casualties, the only exception is the Greek War of Independence (1821–9), but this war was largely waged by the Great Powers (the UK, Russia, and France vs. Ottoman Empire), and most of its cc 100,000 casualties were civilians who were massacred by various brigand forces (Roudometof 2001; Mazower 2000).

  2. 2.

    Romania was also enlarged by 5%.

  3. 3.

    The Greek and Serbian governments distributed the land to peasants, but in most cases, the land plots were too small and as such economically nonviable for decent living.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Siniša Malešević

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  1. Siniša Malešević
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Correspondence to Siniša Malešević .

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  1. Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Mitja Sardoc

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Malešević, S. (2019). War, State Formation, and Nationalism. In: Sardoc, M. (eds) Handbook of Patriotism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30534-9_59-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30534-9_59-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30534-9

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