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Containing Nationalism. By Michael Hechter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 256p. $29.95.
Michael Hechter focuses on three puzzles about nationalism (pp. 3-4). Why is it only a modern phenomenon? Why is it more acute in some countries than in others? And can its dark side of horrendous violence be contained? The title suggests that his principal concern is with the last question, but the bulk of discussion focuses on the second. One can readily answer the first question by saying that nationalism is strictly modem because it is about mass mobilization. Hence, it is kin to democracy, revolution, and socialism, none of which could arise in large countries before mobilization was possible. The democratic revolutions in the United States and France were about changing the locus of sovereignty from a monarch to the people. This is not strictly Hechter's argument, but it is implicit in many of his claims, such as that nationalism requires the existence of organizations that work for the national sovereignty of their subgroup (p. 125).
This answer, of course, merely pushes the question back to ask why mobilization began to be possible little more than two centuries ago. A quick and probably partial answer is that technology, communication, transportation, and aggregation of workforces enabled mobilization as never before. A second quick answer is that Napoleon changed modern warfare and modern states by organizing vast armies, almost all of them composed of conscripts or volunteers rather than mercenaries. (The Romans, Persians, and others had mobilized large armies, but Napoleon was revolutionary...