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Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. By Rogers Brubaker. Cambridge: University Press, 1996. 202p. $54.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress: The Rise and Decline of Nationalism. By Ernst Haas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 362p. $39.95. Ethnopolitics in the New Europe. By John T. Ishiyama and Marijke Breuning. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. 199p. $49.95.
There seems to be no end to theorizing about nationalism. This is understandable in view of the continuing formation of nation-states, the revival of national consciousness since the end of the Cold War, and the protracted ethnic conflicts around the globe. Ernst Haas's book, the first installment of a projected two-volume study, is an erudite, complex, and ambitious analysis of "liberal" nationalism, which is contrasted with nonliberal varieties. Nationalist ideologies are divided into two basic types: revolutionary and syncretic; these are subdivided into seven subtypes: Jacobin, Whig, Leninist, racist, reformist, traditional, and restorative. Only the first two are truly liberal; they stress individual rights, democracy, and the perfectibility of human beings, and their creed is inclusive and not bounded by a given state.
In his search for the kind of nationalism that is "compatible with both international and national happiness" (p. 18), Haas deals extensively with the nationalisms of five countries: France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. All have arrived at "liberal" forms of nationalism, although by different routes and at different speeds. Haas rejects the "primordialist" approach to collective identity in favor of an "instrumentalist" one. A nation, he argues, is "a socially mobilized body of individuals who believe themselves united by some set of characteristics that differentiate them from outsiders and who strive to maintain and create their own state" (p. 23). Nationalisms are social constructions that lead to integration and state-building, but only liberal nationalism is a vehicle for modernization and progress. Haas's instrumentalism leads him to adopt a "voluntarist" definition of the nation-state: "a political entity whose inhabitants consider themselves a single nation and wish to remain one" (p. 23). He doubts whether the "cultural building blocks" of national identity-language, religion, and race-are sufifcient to define a nation. He points to India, where diverse linguistic and/or religious identities are subordinated to a common Indian nationalism,...