Andreas Wimmer.

Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the

Modern World. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013.

Andreas Wimmer has written an immensely impressive book. Waves of War is impressive not
only in its ambition, but also in its breadth. The book, based on a series of articles written over a
period of ten years, aims to address a broad interdisciplinary literature and audience in
comparative historical sociology, comparative politics, and international relations about
nationalism and war. It is intended to remedy the defect in current scholarship on war and peace
which overlooked the political power of nationalism in shaping the contemporary world and in
shaping our thinking about the causes of war and peace. What underpins the books analytic
framework is the issue of how power, legitimacy, and conflict relate to each other and how they
are intertwined with the politicization of social categories such as nations, ethnic groups, and the
like. It brings three traditions in political sociology and comparative political science together:
relational structuralism, an institutionalism focused on questions of legitimacy, and a power-
configurational approach.
1
He posits war springs from three different sources. First, war is more
likely to break out if sections of a population are politically excluded. Second, conflict is more
likely to escalate if such political exclusion violates the principles of political legitimacy.
2
Third, war is more likely to break out if the rivals aim at removing the form of the regime due to
the high stakes involved.
3


To accomplish what he sets out to do with the book, he develops complicated statistical
modeling that relies on a dataset with 484 distinct wars, including 77 wars of conquest, 111 inter-
state wars, and 296 civil wars, 109 of which were secessionist and 187 non-secessionist. The
dataset includes 156 territorial units, 140 of which were incorporated into an empire at some
point (92 between 1816 and 2001), and 150 of which experienced nation-state creation. And he
uses the 2001 grid of states to determine the units of observation. The thrust of the books
argument is that nationalism is a major force that has shaped world and domestic politics over
the past 200 years, including many of the inter-state and civil wars fought during this period. In
other words, the shift to nation-state is the major cause of war in the modern world.
4


In an early work, Wimmer critiqued methodological nationalism, which he faulted for stifling
social theory: The social sciences have become obsessed with describing processes within
nation-state boundaries as contrasted with those outside and have correspondingly lost sight of
the connections between such nationally defined territories
5
. By expanding on that, he takes the
argument to its logical conclusion and shows that modernity, since its inception, was built on
ethnic and nationalist principles of legitimacy and that these principles continue to shape
political action.

Waves of War is one of the most fascinating and exasperating books so far written on war.
Having laid out what I think to be fascinating about it like his attempt at grand theorizing by
combining comparative macro sociology with micro sociology of nation-state formation by
utilizing large datasets and rigorous statistical analysis. One source of my exasperation is the
undue over-reliance on quantitative research on vexed issues such as nationalism and war that
might be better studied at micro-level with the help of careful ethnography and historical
interpretation. It does not seem to leave enough space for particularities.

Another source of my exasperation over this work is the lack of analytic clarity and the
prevalence of conceptual obfuscations that one finds throughout the book. Even if at times he
goes to great lengths to make analytic distinctions among empires, nation-states, and dynastic
kingdoms, he fails to attain the same degree of analytic clarity in respect of such terms as
ethnicity, nation, nationhood, nationalism, ethno-nationalism, nation-building, and empire-
building. There is a list at the end of the book that contains names of states with their
corresponding year in which they attained nation-statehood. He assigned the year 1993 for
Eritrea, 1974 for Ethiopia, 1960 for Somalia, 1956 for Sudan, and its interesting to see that
South Sudan is missing from the list because its independence was declared in 2011, a decade
after the end of the dataset. The dataset covers 145 entities between 1816 and 2001. The problem
with that is he is using readily available historical dates that mark changes in the form of
regimes, but not in the typology of the polities, i.e. from empire to republican form or became
independent of their colonial masters.

In order to help you appreciate the point I am getting at, take, for example, Ethiopia. He listed
Ethiopia as having attained nation-statehood in 1974. He conflates the notion of the nation-state
with a republican form of government, as if national cohesion were not an indispensable element
of nationhood. Somalia became an independent republic in 1960, but it was a far-cry from being
a nation-state. Although Ethiopia has been around for over 2000 years, but it is hard to point out
as Wimmer did a certain moment in time when it attained nation-statehood. 1974 represents
little more than the overthrow of the last emperor. The project of nation-building that was started
by Emperor Tewodros was continued by the military regime that supplanted the imperial rule.
The Ethiopian Empire, like nearly all empires, took shape through continuous conquest and other
forms of integration, as a multiethnic polity. This originated in the early centuries CE as attested
by the epigraphic inscriptions. The ethnic basis of the monarchy and ruling elite, starting with the
Agaziyan, kept shifting from Aksum southward. But the Aksumite polity was already referred to
as Behere Ityopiya (the Ethiopian Nation) by 6C CE. The way to move forward in understanding
Ethiopia is to look at the evolution of the center-periphery relations of the political core from
empire and thence state, beginning with Emperor Tewodros and greatly advanced by Haile
Selassie I and Derg, and at separate and merging ethnies, the most crucial part of which being the
story of the Oromo migration.
6


What Wimmer does not seem to appreciate is that the modern political form of the nation-state
took shape along two independent lines, the state and the nation. This model is structurally
analogues to how Max Weber envisioned the development of capitalism, along two lines: the
cultural framing of capitalist enterprise (Protestant Ethic, NW Europe), and the bureaucratic
organization of capitalism (Roman law through France and the Prussian state.) Their separate
developments are related, interpenetrating, but independently variable. Somalia and Ethiopia
stand out as two thumbnail versions of the Horn of Africa Somalia as a nation looking for a
state and Ethiopia as a state looking for a nation.


What he offers as a short definition of empires, nation-states, and other polities turn out to be
unhelpful. He claims "empires are characterized by centralized bureaucratic forms of
government, the domination of a core region over peripheries, an ethnically or culturally defined
hierarchy between rulers and ruled, and claims to universal legitimacy". In regard to nation-
states, he states they "are also based on centralized bureaucratic forms of government, but are
ruled uniformly without an institutionalized differentiation between core and periphery, embrace
the principle of equality of citizens (replacing hierarchy), and govern in the name of a bounded
national community rather than some universal principle." With respect to what he calls
"dynastic kingdoms," he says, they "also govern through centralized bureaucracies, but lack the
center-periphery structures and the universalist forms of legitimacy of empires. In contrast to
nation-states, such absolutist states are not based on the equality of all citizens, and ruled in the
name of dynasty, rather than a nation. Feudal states, tribal confederacies (e.g. the Sanusi of
Libya), city-states (e.g. Switzerland before 1848), and patrimonial empires (e.g. Tukulor or
Mongol empires) all lack centralized bureaucracies."
7
The definitions themselves raise further
question as to what he means by such terms as core and periphery. More importantly, the term
nation-state loses its analytical utility.

Though Wimmer has not acknowledged it, it appears that his idea that nationalism (self-rule or
self-determination) is the legitimating principle for modern nation-states is borrowed from
Rupert Emersons germinal book, From Empire to Nation, (R. Emerson, 1961). For Wimmer the
logic of the nation-state is necessarily ethnic and nationhood is simply a subtype of ethnicity.
Though nation-state formation has historically been intertwined with ethnicity, but the logic of
the nation-state is above all statist.

Given his disenchantment with current scholarship on the political economy of war, Wimmer
unsurprisingly concludes It is thus a genuinely political understanding of war in which
economic interests or military-technical feasibility play a secondary role. war does not result
from the anarchic nature of the international system , from the rise and fall of global
hegemons, or from revolutionary class conflict, but from the struggle between competing
projects of state-building based on different principles of political legitimacy.
8
Nevertheless, he
seems to be taking away with the other hand what he gave you with the one hand when he writes,
[i]ndeed, much empirical research finds that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is one of
the most robust factors in predicting civil war onsets.
9


He faults much of the literature on ethnic conflict for offering hardcore political economy
accounts, such as the greed and opportunity, leaving little room for nuances. He claims that his
research findings stand in opposition to the greed-and-opportunity school, which discounts
ethnicity and more specifically ethnic exclusion and grievances as relevant factors in explaining
civil war. Even scholars who point to state collapse or political instability or the relative
strength of rebels are not impervious to his critique. Moreover, he asserts to have gone beyond
the minority-grievance model by showing that ethnic mobilization and conflict do not
exclusively involve discriminated minorities fighting for their rights. He makes a further
unsubstantiated claim that armed rebels are more likely to emerge from excluded majorities, not
minorities, and groups in power instigate an important number of armed conflicts.
10
These are
just claims that can be readily refuted by producing counterfactuals from the history of armed
rebels around the world such as the TPLF in Ethiopia, Nuer-based-SPLA-faction led by Machar
in South Sudan, and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Overall, instead of attempting to overcome the deficit in current scholarship on war that is
dominated by hardcore political economy factors as the only serious candidates for explaining
the phenomenon of war as he claims, Wimmer appears to elevate grievances borne out of
political exclusion as the prime driver of violent conflicts to the exclusion of other important
factors, such as conflict entrepreneurship, elite opportunism, state capacity for repressing
rebellions, and resources for minority mobilization. The way to move forward in understanding
the causes of violent conflicts is to synthesize the findings of the different schools in a manner
that paints the complete picture, rather than the different parts as in the Buddhist tale in which a
number of blind men report on different parts of the elephant. The book is also remarkable for its
sweeping critique of the democratic peace theory in both its monadic and dyadic forms and
overly-pessimistic attitude towards the possibility of institutionally engineering peace.

Waves of War leaves much to be desired. Despite his acute awareness of the limitations of
quantitative research and the associated ambition of scientism, the experience of reading it leaves
one wondering whether Wimmer himself believes he has succeeded in accomplishing what he
set out to do, i.e., to overcome the deficit in current scholarship on war and peace, in spite of the
elegance and sophistication of the mathematical models deployed.

Alemayehu Weldemariam, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason
University

Notes

1 Wimmer, Waves of War, p. 11
2 Ibid, p.16
3 Id
4 Ibid, p. 23
5 Wimmer, A., and Glick Schiller, N. (2002), Methodological nationalism and beyond: nationstate building,
migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 4, p.307.
6 For a detailed account of the evolution of Ethiopia as a cohesive multiethnic polity, see Donald N. Levine, Greater
Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society, 1974[2000], University of Chicago Press; for a historical account
of the center-periphery cleavage in the political and legal development of Ethiopia, see my Legal Pluralism in
Contemporary Ethiopia, Saarbrucken, Germany, 2010
7 Wimmer, Waves of War, pp. 113-114
8 Ibid, 115
9 Ibid, 119
10 Ibid, 172