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Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent?Siniša Malešević aa University College DublinPublished online: 25 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Sinia Maleevi (2013) Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent?, Nationalism and EthnicPolitics, 19:1, 12-37, DOI: 10.1080/13537113.2013.761894

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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 19:12–37, 2013Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1353-7113 print / 1557-2986 onlineDOI: 10.1080/13537113.2013.761894

Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent?

SINISA MALESEVICUniversity College Dublin

This article analyzes the complex and contradictory relationshipsbetween nationalism and organized violence. The author chal-lenges the approaches that see nationalism as being inherentlylinked with violence and demonstrates that nationalist ideologyby itself is rarely a main cause of hostile acts. The article focuses onthe different forms of organized violence including wars, revolu-tions, terrorism, and genocide. It aims to show that the relationshipbetween violence and nationalism cannot be properly captured bythe dominant intentionalist, naturalist, and formativist perspec-tives. Instead the case is made that the emphasis should be givento the long-term historical processes and the relative modernity ofboth nationalism and organized violence. The author argues thatit is very difficult to generate sustained and organized violent na-tionalist action. The mutation of nationalist doctrines into violentacts is generally a product of unintended structural circumstancesand is characterized by its temporary nature and volatility. Morespecifically, this process is usually generated by the coercive bu-reaucratization, centrifugal ideologization, and their capacity tobe embedded in the networks of microsolidarity.

INTRODUCTION

It seems it is quite difficult to provide a vivid representation or graphic depic-tion of nationalism that does not include acts of violence. From the famousnationalist paintings of Delacroix, Manet, Goya to Hollywood blockbusterssuch as Braveheart, Top Gun, The Patriot, 300, or Captain America, national-ism is stereotypically portrayed through the prism of excessive violence. De-spite the historical and geographical varieties, there is a tendency to associatenationalist discourses with images of bloodshed, killing, dying, martyrdom,

Address correspondence to Sinisa Malesevic, UCD School of Sociology, Newman Build-ing, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. E-mail: sinisa.malesevic@ucd.ie

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Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent? 13

suffering, and destruction. The birth of American and French nationalismis traditionally articulated through the images of violence unleashed by thetwo revolutions. South American nationalist aspirations, exemplified in thestruggles of Simon Bolivar, are deeply linked to the experiences and sharedmemories of the bloody wars of independence from Spanish and Portugueserule. Both the National Socialist and the Hutu Power radical nationalismsare usually seen as the root cause of the Holocaust and the Rwandan geno-cide respectively. When discussing so-called minority nationalisms, includingthe Chechen, Basque, or Tamil, there is a propensity to identify such ideolo-gies with violent insurgencies and terrorism.

Academics, too, are not immune to making such associations. Eventhough there is widespread recognition that not all forms of nationalismare violent, most scholarly analyses operate on the principle that there is,what Weber would call, a strong elective affinity between nationalism andviolence. This article challenges such views and attempts to show not onlythat there are no natural linkages between nationalism and violence, butmore importantly, that the connections between these two phenomena canonly emerge under specific historical conditions. In particular, I focus onthe significance of organizational, ideological, and microsituational factors,whose coalescence is necessary for making nationalism seem intrinsicallyviolent and, violence appear to be inherently nationalist. The first part of thearticle critically reviews the three dominant interpretations that insist on theintrinsic link between the two phenomena whereas the second part developsan alternative heuristic model that emphasizes the historical contingency ofthe relationship between organized violence and nationalism.

ASSUMING CAUSALITY: INTENTIONALISM, NATURALISM,AND FORMATIVISM

Although most scholars clearly recognize that not all forms of nationalism arevirulent, there is a tendency to assume that nationalism more than most otherideologies is prone to violent outbursts. The fact that throughout historymany radical nationalists have openly advocated the use of violence hasreinforced the view that nationalism and violence often constitute each other.For example, the Italian nationalist poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, interpretedhistory through the prism of perpetual violent struggle between nations:“Civilization is nothing but the glory of incessant struggle. When man is nolonger a wolf for other men, a nation will and must always be a lioness toother nations.”1 In a similar vein, a German nationalist historian, Heinrichvon Treitschke, argued that “war is the mightiest and most efficient moulderof nations. Only in war does a nation became a nation” and hence “onlybrave nations have a secure existence, a future, a development: weak andcowardly nations go to the wall, and rightly so.”2 These and many similar

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public pronouncements of nationalists have reaffirmed a view, already sharedby a number of scholars, that nationalism and violence are closely relatedphenomena. This tight connection between the two was generally taken forgranted and the focus has shifted towards questions such as the following:Who engenders nationalist violence? Is violent nationalism rooted in theactions of specific individuals, groups, or social structures? And do strongnationalist bonds ultimately lead towards violent action or is it the otherway around, that is, that violent contexts generate and enhance nationalistidentifications?

There are three influential and quite distinct perspectives that aim toprovide answers to these questions: (1) The intentionalist models, that seepowerful individuals as generating much of nationalist violence; (2) the natu-ralist approaches that view universal ethnocentrism and nationalist ideologiesas the primary cause of violent behavior; and (3) the formativist positionsthat focus on the context of violent experiences that enable the emergenceof nationalist doctrines.3

The intentionalist accounts have traditionally dominated journalistic andother popular interpretations of violent nationalist conflicts. Nevertheless, in-tentionalism has experienced a significant revival in the recent academic anal-yses of fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.4

In these approaches, most forms of organized violence including genocides,wars, and terrorism are traced directly to the intentions and actions of power-ful statesmen and ideologues. Thus, personalities and stern ideological com-mitments of Adolf Hitler, Shamil Basayev, Velupillai Prabhakaran, MehmedTalaat, or Slobodan Milosevic are regularly identified as the key variables inexplaining the origin of the Holocaust, the suicide terrorist actions againstcivilians, or the genocidal slaughters of Armenian and Bosniak populations,respectively.5

However, intentionalism has been rightly criticized for ignoring the com-plexity of sociological and historical processes that created the conditions forthe emergence of such powerful nationalist leaders willing to use violence.Without denying the culpability of individual leaders who made the crucialdecisions to use violence on a mass scale, a number of recent studies haveemphasized that, in most instances, the transition to organized violence wasmediated by contingent social processes often beyond individual control. Incontrast to the popular views that see revolutions, wars, and genocides ascalculated and well-planned events, many macrosociological studies showotherwise. Therefore, we now have concrete evidence that revolutions arerarely the product of deliberate, predetermined, planning; instead they oftenresult from the breakdown of the above caused by dramatically changedgeopolitical conditions.6 Similarly, much of modern warfare is too complexand too contingent to be initiated by the free wills of individual leaders evenin the context of highly authoritarian states.7

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Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent? 15

Nor do genocides follow this simple top-down formula. Rather thanrelying on the prearranged and clearly developed scenarios that are simplyexecuted when conditions are ripe, most genocides develop through thegradual process of radicalization when other possibilities fall short. In Mann’sview, murderous ethnic cleansing is often a by-product of organizationalfailure to implement other options. It is

a kind of Plan C, developed only after the first two responses to a per-ceived ethnic threat fail. Plan A typically envisages a carefully plannedsolution in terms of either compromise or straightforward repression. PlanB is a more radically repressive adaptation to the failure of a Plan A, morehastily conceived amid rising violence and some political destabilisation.8

The key point is that while powerful nationalist leaders certainly matter,they are not sufficient to turn nationalist ideologies into mass-scale violentbehavior. There have been thousands of nationalist ideologues who advo-cated the use of violence, but very few of these, even when in positions ofpower, have embarked on violent rampages. One should distinguish clearlybetween the rhetoric and the practice of nationalist violence.9

In contrast to intentionalists, the naturalist approaches devote less atten-tion to individuals and much more to the culture or biology of the group.Thus, historians such as Burleigh, Keegan, and Goldhagen among others seenationalism as an ancient and omnipotent cultural force that by itself is capa-ble of—and prone to—spawning large-scale violent actions.10 For Burleigh,the cultural foundations of Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland have givenbirth to terrorist violence. In Keegan’s understanding, warfare is not a polit-ical phenomenon but is entirely cultural whereby entrenched and mutuallyexclusive nationalist passions lead to violent confrontations. In this view,there is no significant difference between the contemporary wars such asthose in the former Yugoslavia and those fought in antiquity. Keegan deemsthem all “ancient in origin,” “fed by passion and rancours” and inspired bynationalist ambitions. So in his view, the violent conflicts of Serbs and Croatsin the 1990s resemble the Greco-Persian wars of fifth century BCE where“the Greeks took pride in their freedom and despised the subjects of Xerxesand Darius for their lack of it [and] their hatred of Persia was at root na-tionalistic.” In a similar fashion, Goldhagen interprets the Holocaust as beingdeeply rooted in the “eliminationist mentality” of anti-Semitic beliefs andcultural practices of German population since medieval times.11

The naturalist approach also has a biological, neo-Darwinian, version.In sociobiological accounts, both nationalism and violence are seen as be-ing ingrained in human nature and shaped by genetic imperatives. The keyargument is that all animals, including human beings, are biologically pro-grammed to be nepotistic creatures who favor kin over non-kin and close

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kin over distant kin. In this context, nationalism is understood to be justa form of a universal phenomenon that is ethnocentrism—an extension ofkinship. Violence too is conceptualized as a universal phenomenon: Anoptimal means to maximize one’s chance for survival.12 All neo-Darwinianapproaches insist that the link between violence and nationalism stems fromthe incessant competition of genes, and thus species, over scarce resources.As the originator of modern sociobiology, E. O. Wilson argues: “war is astraightforward example of hypertrophied biological predisposition . . . . Theforce behind most warlike policies is ethnocentrism, the irrationally exagger-ated allegiance of individuals to their kin and fellow tribesmen.”13

The naturalist theories of nationalism and organized violence have beenrigorously criticized for their biological or cultural determinism. More specif-ically, Brubaker, Banton, and Malesevic have identified the major problemswith the groupist and essentialist analyses that tend to reify group member-ship and to assume that cultural or biological differences by themselves au-tomatically translate into collective action.14 Both sociobiologists and culturalnaturalists wrongly presume that the mere fact of sharing the same language,common descent, or religion will inevitably and unproblematically generategroup solidarity. Nevertheless, nations and ethnic groups are not fixed andstable entities but dynamic networks of individuals. Since Weber, it has be-come apparent that group membership does not emerge from biological orcultural similarity but from prolonged political mobilization. Not only thatgroup solidarity cannot be taken for granted but the cultural and biologi-cal markers that define groups also tend to vary substantially. As Brass andBreuilly among others have shown, nationalist mobilization often entails ar-bitrary selection of cultural or biological markers whereby, in some historicalmoments, shared language matters more than religion, common descent, orshared physiognomy and in other times it is the other way around.15 Finally,the assumption that one’s biology or shared culture somehow presupposesviolent intergroup confrontation is empirically unfounded. As Laitin demon-strates, even in the African continent, often seen as the epicenter of violentethnic conflicts and nationalist wars, violence is used only sporadically: “thepercentage of neighbouring ethnic groups that experienced violent commu-nal incidents was infinitesimal—for any randomly chosen but neighbouringpair of ethnic groups, on average only 5 in 10,000 had a recorded violentconflict in any year.”16 If there was a simple causal relationship between vio-lence and nationalism, this planet would experience many more genocides,revolutions, and wars than it actually has.

Whereas the intentionalist and naturalist positions tend to be popularoutside of academia, it is the formativist perspectives that have the upperhand among mainstream social scientists. Formativism largely dismisses theviews that nationalist violence is a product of individual pathology or thatcultural and biological similarities foster violent conflicts. Moreover, manyformativists are skeptical towards the view that nationalist ideologies by

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Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent? 17

themselves encourage violent action.17 Instead their focus is on the oppo-site side of this relationship; rather than nationalism causing violence, theyargue that the experience of violence is likely to engender strong nationalistattachments.

Although there are a number of distinct formativist perspectives, in-cluding the neo-Durkhemian, instrumentalist, and realist approaches, theyall insist that instead of being a cause of violence, nationalism is a by-product of confrontation and violent social action.18 Thus, realist accountssee the emergence of nationalism through the prism of anarchical inter-national order.19 The argument is that the geopolitical instability creates a“security dilemma” whereby the lack of mutual trust leads individual nation-states towards ever increased military build-ups that ultimately foster andare enhanced by resurgent popular nationalisms. In this context, nationalismbecomes an important military asset: “States or stateless groups, drifting intocompetition for whatever reason, will quickly turn to the reinforcement ofnational identity because of its potency as a military resource.”20 For theinstrumentalist approaches, nationalist solidarity is a direct outcome of coor-dinated self-interest.21 In this view, extreme events such as revolutions, wars,or terrorist attacks undermine regular market situations, bring greater inse-curity, diminish mutual trust and shift the patterns of competition. Whereasstable environments promote individual competition, violent contexts stim-ulate group conflict. In times of war and other forms of organized violence,individuals can gain more by amplifying their cultural, biological, or politicalmarkers. In other words, from this perspective, nationalism is a product ofself-interest–driven collective action in which individuals utilize their sharedmarkers in times of profound crisis.

Neo-Durkhemian accounts differ from realists and instrumentalists inone sense as they focus much less attention on the direct impact of violenceand more on the significance of past, violent events when accounting for theformation of present day national identities.22 More specifically, they arguethat nationalist ideologies are built from the shared imagery of “blood sac-rifice,” that is the common myths and commemorations of past revolutions,wars, genocides, and other traumatic events. Since neo-Durkhemians con-ceptualize nationalism as a form of civil religion and nations as moral, sacredcommunities, they see the commemorations of violent martyrdom (such asthe monuments to the “glorious dead”) as crucial in maintaining a sense ofnational identity. From this interpretation, the rituals of collective remem-brance that celebrate the victimhood or heroism of past wars, genocides,revolutions, or terrorist attacks establish ethical parameters for the entire na-tional community and, in this way, bind posterity in an ethical obligationtowards those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. Simply put, nationalismis an upshot of the shared and periodically remembered violent pasts.

There is no doubt that the formativist perspectives contribute a greatdeal to our understanding of the complex relationships between violence

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and nationalism. Security dilemmas, individual self-interest, and publiccommemorations of past, and violent events all play a significant role in link-ing nationalism with violence. However, the fact that all these factors add tothe social contexts where violence becomes nationalized does not mean thatthey inevitably create a causal relationship between the two. Whereas ritualsof collective remembrance, the shared social action of rational actors, andmilitary strength are functional to national solidarity in times of crisis, suchprocesses by themselves do not create nationalism. Not all security dilemmaslead to greater popular nationalist expressions. The experience of war, rev-olution, or terrorism does not necessarily result in greater homogenization;instead, it can just as often shatter the existing national identifications as wasthe case in 1918 Germany, or mid-nineteenth-century Mexico or Peru. Simi-larly, not all instances of commemorative ritualism of a violent past enhancenational identification, as is fairly obvious when comparing and contrast-ing the pre-Weimar and contemporary Germany or pre- and post-WWIIJapan.23

Furthermore, the leading formativist approaches cannot explain howexactly violence becomes nationalized and nationalism violent. If nation-alism is conceptualized as a relatively recent historical phenomenon andviolence as having a much longer past, it is not clear when, how, and whyviolent actions engender nationalist beliefs and practices. How is it that or-ganized violence can foster the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenthand twentieth centuries but not in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries? Whycan political leaders and ideologues mobilize popular support for wars andrevolutions in the modern age but not before? Why is it more difficult topopularly justify the use of violence in imperial conquests than in insurgen-cies, wars, revolutions, terrorist attacks, and even genocides that are wagedin the name of national liberation? To answer some of these questions andto better understand the relationship between nationalism and violence, it isimportant to decouple the two phenomena, to explain their historical originsand development, and to see under which conditions they encourage eachother.

To sum up, despite the prevalence of perspectives that nationalism andviolence are conceptual twins, there is nothing inherently violent in nation-alist ideologies. Although political leaders can give direction and stimulatethe transformation of nationalism into violence and vice versa, the individualagents, regardless of how powerful they are, usually cannot create national-ism or violence ex nihilo. Likewise, although different cultural practices, bi-ology, geopolitics, shared historical experience, and individual self-interestsall can contribute to the formation of both nationalist doctrines and violentacts, nationalism is neither the direct cause nor the consequence of orga-nized violence. Thus, the key focus must be on when and how nationalismmetamorphoses into organized violent action and when and how violencebecomes infused with nationalist discourses.

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Is Nationalism Intrinsically Violent? 19

NATIONALISM AND ORGANIZED VIOLENCE: DEFINITIONS ANDORIGINS

Before attempting to provide an answer to the questions raised above, it isimportant to define the key terms as both nationalism and organized violenceare contested concepts. Definitions of nationalism vary and range from thosethat identify nationalism with separatism and state break-up, those that focuson the distinct cultural and discursive practices present in cultural, economic,or political nationalist movements, and those that analyze nationalism as auniversal phenomenon present in all modern states.24 I define nationalismas an ideology that is grounded in the popularly shared beliefs and practicesthat conceive the nation as the most important unit of human solidarity andpolitical legitimacy. Such units are also envisaged as sovereign, independent,and free. Nationalist doctrines appear in a variety of forms but they generallyshare the perception that a nation is the self-evident and natural form ofhuman organization defined by its inimitable characteristics. In the view ofnationalists, all human beings inevitably belong to a specific nation and anyexpressions of disloyalty to one’s nation are understood to be a form ofgrave moral shortcoming.25

The concept of violence is even more contentious, with scholars sharplydisagreeing whether violence should be understood in a narrow or a widesense. This dispute is particularly visible when discussing organized forms ofviolence (often termed also as political violence, social violence, or collectiveviolence). While some scholars operate with very wide definitions of collec-tive violence that encompass many forms of unequal relationships betweenhuman beings, others restrict socially violent action to the use of physicalforce. For example, Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic violence and Galtung’s no-tion of structural violence both conceptualize collective violence in a broadsense.26 For Bourdieu, symbolic violence is a form of coercive dominationenforced through cultural reproduction that involves imposition of culturallyarbitrary “pedagogic action” on the subdued individuals. Galtung goes evenfurther and defines structural violence in terms of structural constraints onhuman beings to realize their full potential. In his view, this can include thelack of political power and unequal access to resources, education, health,or legal protection. Others such as Tilly, Collins, or Pinker limit social vi-olence to physical harm.27 My view is that the former understanding is sowide that it renders the concept of violence meaningless while the latteris too narrow to capture the processes that involve coercive action but donot necessarily result in intended physical injuries. For example, collectiveforms of violence can include such phenomena as the ever-increasing co-erciveness of the criminal justice system or the coercive criminalization ofinterpersonal relationships.28 Thus, by “organized violence,” I mean the rel-atively ordered, structured, and coordinated social action that intentionallyor unintentionally inflicts physical damage, injury, or death or results in

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coercively forced behavioral change. Such social action can take severalforms including warfare, revolutions, armed uprisings, genocides, ethniccleansing, terrorism, insurgencies, violent rebellions, civil strife, riots, or gangfights, among others.29

What is immediately clear from these two definitions is that national-ism does not presuppose the use of violence nor does organized violentaction entail reliance on nationalist discourse. Indeed most forms of vio-lent action—from the peasant jacqueries and imperial conquests of previ-ous periods to contemporary intergang clashes and Salafist terrorist suicidebombings—have little or nothing to do with nationalist ideologies. Similarly,most expressions of nationalism, including the cultural agitations to stan-dardize or institutionalize particular vernacular languages, the propagationof consumerist practices that stimulate the purchase of “national products,”and the calls for political autonomy for a distinct national community, gen-erally do not result in violent conflicts.

To fully understand why nationalism has often been linked to violence,it is crucial to trace the origins and development of both. This general mis-perception owes a great deal to the widespread view that strong nationalidentifications and, even more so, violent actions come naturally and easilyto human beings. Hence, if being violent is not difficult and being attached toone’s nation is natural, then it seems obvious that whenever there are com-peting national interests at stake that nationalism will lead to violence andvice versa. However, much of the recent scholarship has convincingly shownthat human beings as such have little propensity towards either violence ornationalism.

The classics of nationalism studies have made it clear that rather thanbeing a primeval and natural condition of human beings, nationalism is ahistorically contingent and novel phenomenon brought about by unprece-dented structural changes over the past three centuries.30 As both Gellnerand Anderson emphasize, nationalism could not emerge in the world of em-pires, city-states, or composite kingdoms as they all, unlike their modern-dayorganizational progeny nation-states, utilized cultural differences in a strictlyvertical sense. In other words, whereas in nation-states shared culture isused in the horizontal, trans-class, sense that helps homogenize populationsand distinguish, for example, French from Germans or Russians, in the pre-modern universe, culture served to reinforce the distinctions between thearistocracy and the illiterate peasantry. More importantly, the profoundlyhierarchical and stagnant economic and political structure of the premod-ern world made no room for the politicization of cultural differences andan overwhelming majority of individuals tended to identify in local (village,kinship, town) or transnational terms (religion, imperial doctrine, mythol-ogy). Hence, there is no nationalism without standardized vernaculars, fullliteracy generated by the state-sponsored educational systems, the societywide “high culture,” advanced division of labor, centralized constitutional

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state, the developed infrastructural capacity including state wide transportand communication networks, and a substantial degree of urbanization andindustrialization. Bluntly put, despite the romantic imageries offered by na-tionalists, there is nothing natural and self-evident in privileging nations overother forms of group identity.

While there is now a degree of consensus among most historical sociol-ogists that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, this is not the case whenorganized violence is discussed. For one thing, most accounts still treat vio-lent action in a Hobbesian tradition as something that inevitably accompanieshuman relations and in that sense is a timeless phenomenon. From this per-spective, if not constrained by an external power, individuals will quicklyand easily slide into a war of all against all. These views underpin the “greedversus grievance” debates on civil wars and revolutions, the sociopsycholog-ical profiling of genocide perpetrators, and the behavioralist interpretationsof terrorist motivation, among others. However, as Collins has powerfullyargued and documented, it is very difficult to initiate violent action. Despitethe boundless boasting, human beings are generally wary, fearful, and in-competent at violence. Moreover at the micro-, interpersonal level, most actsof violence are messy, of short duration, and riddled with tension and fear.The key finding of this research program is that for violence to be effective itrequires organization. In other words, as Collins emphasizes: “if it were notsocially well organised, wide-participation fighting would not be possible.”31

For another thing, if violence is conceptualized in these terms, it meansthat organized action is at the heart of most forms of violent deeds. Nev-ertheless what is significant about this type of violence is that it too hasdeveloped very late in human history. Despite the views shared by manyacademics that wars, revolutions, genocides, and terrorism are as old as thehuman race, much of recent archaeological, anthropological, and sociolog-ical research indicate that there was very little if any organized violenceon this planet until the early Mesolithic period. Our predecessors, huntergatherers, lived in very small, nonsedentary, and highly mobile groupingswith flexible membership and weak social ties. They inhabited an extremelysparsely populated planet and spent most of their life scavenging, gather-ing fruits and seeds while fearing and trying to escape the large predators.Hence, for 99% of our existence on this planet, there were no organiza-tional means, need, or interest to engage in protracted violent conflicts.32 AsOtterbein, Kelly and Ferrill among others show, the institution of warfareis only around 10,000 years old. The simple hunter gatherers did not (and,among the surviving such groups, most still do not) fight wars.33 It is not anhistorical accident that war and civilization emerge at the same time in hu-man history because war, just like other forms of organized violence, entailsthe presence of complex social organizations.34 Furthermore, once warfarebecame fully institutionalized, it remained a prerogative of the small, elite,sections of different societies. Thus, until the modern era, most wars were

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limited, resulted in relatively small casualties and involved not much morethan ritualistic skirmishes between aristocrats. It is only in modernity thatwars start to subsume large sectors of the population and that they becametruly massive events and processes that affect entire societies.

This is even more the case with most other forms of organized violence.Revolutions are social phenomena that proliferate in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries and “seem not to have occurred at all before the seven-teenth [century].”35 Similarly, although there were instances of mass murderthroughout recorded history including the Roman annihilation of Carthagein the second century BC or the religious pogroms against Jews and Mus-lims (Moors) in fifteenth-century Spain, the fully fledged genocidal projectsemerge only in the late nineteenth century.36 Even terrorism is a distinctlymodern phenomenon. Despite the rare historical precedents such as the Jew-ish Zealots of first century Judaea, the eleventh-century Hashshashin order ofSyria and Persia, or the British Gunpowder plot of the early seventeenth cen-tury, terrorist activity becomes a mass phenomenon only in the modern era.37

Hence, the fact that both nationalism and organized violence appear onthe historical scene at the same time is not coincidental. There are soundstructural reasons for this that need to be carefully unpacked. Neverthelesstheir near-simultaneous origin and development has created an optical il-lusion that the two are mutually interdependent and that one is bound tocause the other. This, however, is not the case. Such illusory correlationbetween nationalism and organized violence stems from the fact that theyboth, like many other social phenomena, emerge and develop through simi-lar long-term historical processes. Thus, rather than focusing on nationalismor organized violence per se, it is crucial to tackle the sociohistorical pro-cesses that have given birth to both phenomena and that have inadvertentlybrought them closer together.

MAKING NATIONALISM VIOLENT AND VIOLENCE NATIONALIST:THE LONG-RUN VIEW

Cumulative Bureaucratization of Coercion

As I have argued in my previous work, to understand the workings of con-temporary social and political orders, states, nationalisms, wars, and manyother large-scale phenomena, it is necessary to take a longue duree per-spective and to trace their developments over long stretches of time. Morespecifically, it is paramount to engage with three such processes: the cu-mulative bureaucratization of coercion, centrifugal ideologization, and thesocial envelopment of microsolidarity.38

By cumulative bureaucratization of coercion, I mean an open-endedhistorical process that encompasses the constant increase of organizationalpower and competence for coercive action and the ability to internally pacify

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the social environment under one’s control. This ever-increasing organiza-tional capacity is reflected in the activities of both state and nonstate ac-tors. States tend to monopolize the use of force over the territories theycontrol, whereas nonstate actors utilize their organizational might to suc-cessfully dominate their membership and to inflict symbolic or real damageto the state’s coercive and ideological monopolies. Despite occasional upsand downs throughout history, the coercive power of social organizationshas been cumulative, as it kept substantially increasing over the past tenthousand years. Moreover its organizational power—including the unprece-dented infrastructural reach, deep societal penetration, and wide territorialscope—has dramatically intensified over the last two centuries.39

These organizational advancements were vital for the transformation ofwarfare and for the proliferation of revolutions, insurgencies, terrorism, andgenocides. It is the extensively increased organizational capabilities of statesthat were fundamental in making wars more protracted, more destructive,and more frequent in early modern Europe.40 The bureaucratization of war-fare was reflected in the greater organizational ability of states to implementthe policies of mass conscription, to deploy the new industrial, technological,and scientific inventions for military purposes, and to coerce the populationto provide a productive impetus for the war effort. Despite the hints of rev-olutionary zeal, the military successes of the French and American republicswere firmly rooted in their organizational and coercive advancements: meri-tocratic principles of promotion, capacity to successfully recruit, to train, toarm, to feed, to clothe, to deploy, and to coordinate huge numbers of sol-diers, the organizational capacity to police and shame unwilling recruits, thesubstantial improvement in logistics, communication, and transport, and soon.41 As Tilly, McNiell and Giddens have shown, it was preparations for warand the conduct of warfare that were at the heart of fiscal reorganizationand concentration of administrative resources of states. Increased organi-zational capacity was a precondition for the industrial, technological, andscientific developments that fostered the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryphenomenon: the industrialization of warfare.42 Although the expansion ofcapitalism was pivotal in providing means for the industrialization of war (themass production of armaments, military uniforms and equipment, cannedfood, barbed wire, the railway, telecommunications, etc.), it was the cu-mulative bureaucratization of coercion that played a decisive role in thisprocess. The enhancement of organizational powers stimulated (and wasfurther stimulated by) the centralization of the state, the professionalizationof the military and civilian structures, the introduction of regulated systemsof recruitment and promotion, the standardized recognition of educationalcredentials, the reorganization of the officer corps, and the further integra-tion of military campaigns. The cumulative bureaucratization of coercion hassignificantly contributed to the emergence of the total wars of the twentiethcentury in which all resources, including entire populations, transport, trade,

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industrial production, and communications were placed at the disposal of thenation-state at war. Mass production, mass politics, and mass communica-tions were all mobilized for mass destruction, as total industrialized warfareeliminated much of the distinction between state and society, military andcivilian, and the public and private spheres.

The cumulative proliferation of organizational power was equally instru-mental in the advent of genocides. As both Mann and Bauman make evident,premodern polities lacked the organizational and technological know-howto implement mass murders on the scale witnessed in the Holocaust, theArmenian, or the Cambodian genocides.43 “The final solution” entails theexistence of sophisticated administrative machinery, complex, and ordereddivision of labor, advanced science and technology, potent industrial capac-ity, clearly established hierarchies, and the vastly expanded infrastructuralreach of the state. Hence, for Bauman, the bureaucratic, dull, and business-like routine that is ordinarily associated with modern-day civil services, bigcorporate organizations, or mass-producing factories was just as discerniblein the extermination camps of the Nazi empire:

Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings andthe end product was death, so many units per day marked carefully onthe manager’s production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of themodern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burninghuman flesh. The brilliantly organised railroad grid of modern Europecarried a new kind of raw material to the factories.44

The key point here, as Shaw emphasizes, is that genocides are always or-ganized and executed by the repressive apparatuses of the state includingmilitary and police often aided by paramilitary units, political parties, andintelligence services.45 Hence, without complex social organization, that isthe modern state, genocides could not have happened. It is not a historicalaccident that the twentieth century has witnessed more genocides than anyother time in human history.

In a similar vein, revolutionary violence requires the presence of thestate. Jeff Goodwin puts it bluntly:

[P]rior to the emergence of consolidated national states, social revolutionsas we now understand them . . . were simply impossible. Until the modernera . . . there existed no institution with sufficient infrastructural power toremake extensive social arrangements in fundamental ways.46

In other words, any systematic attempt to use revolutionary means to over-throw or seize the state is premised on the existence of such an entity in thefirst place. While human history is littered with cases of riots, rebellions, anduprisings, it is only in the modern era that one encounters the phenomenonof social revolution—an organized and forcible transfer of state power. The

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historical sociologists have convincingly demonstrated not only that “revo-lutions are not made, they come,” as Skocpol and Phillips put it, but alsothat revolutionary action depends heavily on the organizational might of thestate. As long as there is no profound conflict between political elites and thegovernment is in full control of its military and police apparatuses, the possi-bility of a successful revolutionary takeover of state power is minimal.47 BothSkocpol and Goldstone have documented that the advent of revolutions isregularly linked with the weakening of state capacity. This can be triggeredby a comprehensive defeat in war, natural disasters, economic collapse, sud-den food shortages, or some other catastrophic events. For Goldstone, mostrevolutions emerge as an outcome of three interdependent processes: the fis-cally and organizationally drained state incapable of collecting revenue andother resources, the presence of deep conflict between ruling elites and bud-ding popular discontent. In his view, these three processes often transpirein the context of a substantial demographic boom.48 Hence, it is temporaryorganizational breakdowns and, I would add, the augmented organizationalcapabilities of nonstate actors that are likely to create an opportunity for rev-olutionary action. Once the state authorities are unable to collect taxes, toprovide employment, or to provide educational opportunities to their ever-increasing populations, they will not be in position to pay their civil servants,police, military, and judiciary. The fact that successful social revolutions arequite rare and temporary phenomena indicates that despite periodic histor-ical reversals the bureaucratization of coercive power continues to operateas a cumulative process.

Finally, terrorism too requires advanced organizational capacity. Sincethe key aim of most terrorist organizations is not to crush their (usually muchstronger) opponents but to communicate a particular message in a spectac-ular way, their success is premised on their organizational and coercivemight. What characterizes most successful terrorist activity is the presenceof well-coordinated, highly disciplined, secretive, and hierarchically ordered,but very flexible, social organizations. To counter the force of the modernstate, terrorist organizations have tended historically to imitate and adopt theorganizational and technological advancements pioneered by states. Thus,emergence of the first terrorist activities in the late nineteenth century co-incided with the invention and availability of dynamite that provided anopportunity for small numbers of highly committed individuals to inflict fearthrough random bombing campaigns and assassinations of political lead-ers.49 The organizational potency of terrorist groups has substantially grownthroughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From Euskadi TaAskatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom; ETA) and the Tamil Tigers toFuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forcesof Colombia; FARC) and Al Qaida, radical organizations have developedcomplex and reliable systems of recruitment, professional training, financing,and promotion based on one’s skill, competence, and the degree of ideolog-ical commitment. Furthermore, to evade the omnipotent state apparatuses,

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terrorist organizations have developed highly hierarchical and centrally co-ordinated network structures that foster autonomy, self-reliance, inventive-ness, and flexibility of individual cells. As Pape and Sageman convincinglyshow, the most effective terrorist organizations rely on knowledgeable andextremely self-disciplined volunteers who employ an elaborate division oflabor and extensive planning of their missions.50 Most such groups are com-posed of highly skilled and well-qualified experts, with a predominance ofengineers, who exhibit goal-driven patterns of behavior and utilize the mostadvanced organizational and technological mechanisms to achieve their po-litical aims.51 More recently, the expansion of the Internet and new socialmedia has proved particularly useful in increasing the organizational capac-ity of terrorist networks. Hence, in this case, too one can clearly identify thesignificance of the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion.

Centrifugal Ideologization

Although neither violence nor nationalism could be sustained for long with-out the grip of social organizations, bureaucratic power in itself is not enoughto produce or maintain either. Since human beings are creatures endowedwith, and constantly thirsting for, social meanings, there is no large-scalemodern social organization that can be successful without a degree of popu-lar legitimacy. Political legitimacy can be, and historically has been, generatedin a variety of ways. However, over the last three centuries, it was the massideological doctrines that played the crucial role in justifying the existence ofmost powerful social organizations such as the nation-state. To historicallycontextualize how the majority of modern-day individuals have become re-ceptive to ideological messages, it is necessary once again to take a longueduree view. More specifically, I conceptualize this long-term historical trans-formation through the notion of centrifugal ideologization.52 This conceptrefers to an organizationally generated, mass-scale process whereby specificideological doctrines gradually, but almost entirely, start to permeate diversesocial strata in different societies. The ultimate outcome of this process isa greater ideological unity among disparate individuals inhabiting the samesocial or political space. This historically contingent, uneven and contestedprocess is expressed in the way that different social strata became highly re-ceptive not only to ideological justification of particular forms of social actionbut also for ideological mobilization in the pursuit of such action. Althoughthis process is initiated by cultural and political elites, it gradually developedinto a mass phenomenon involving civil society networks, organized politi-cal parties, social movements, and many state and parastate organizations allpursuing specific normative vistas and advocating particular blueprints of thebetter future. Therefore, to understand the development of different formsof organized violence, such as terrorism, war, revolution, and genocide, it is

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paramount not only to look at their organizational growth but also to brieflyexplore their ideological underpinnings.

While there is no doubt that the institution of warfare precedes the mod-ern age, there is a substantial difference between wars waged before andafter modernity. Whereas in the premodern world, (as noted above) mostwars were fought by aristocratic elites who generally were not expectedto acquire popular justification for their violent adventures, in the modernage, all wars require some kind of popular legitimacy. In other words, mil-itary successes in contemporary wars are premised on the ability of statesto secure mass mobilization and popular justification for their war effort. Inthis sense the Napoleonic wars, the Anglo Boer wars, the Crimean war, andmany nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial military adventuresin Africa and Asia were all waged relying extensively on popular support onthe “home front.” This ideological support was often articulated in the formof imperial civilizing missions, Darwinist inspired supremacist beliefs, or spe-cific nationalist doctrines. In some instances, such as the second Boer war orRusso-Ottoman war, the highly ideologized public opinion was ahead of therulers in advancing the belligerent foreign policy and in spreading militaristicmessages.53 However, the key point here is that modern wars did not createideological citizens ex nihilo. Instead the centrifugal ideologization of themasses was a gradual process that developed much more in times of peacethan war.54 Ever-increasing organizational powers created the conditions formass ideologization; the substantial increase in literacy rates, the introductionof compulsory primary education, the availability of affordable mass media,and the expansion of civil society networks were all instrumental in mak-ing ordinary citizens receptive to a variety of ideological messages includingdiverse nationalist doctrines. If this was not the case, modern wars, unliketheir traditional predecessors, would not be able to trigger the already devel-oped and well-established nationalist sentiments. Simply put, the outbreakof war does not create nationalism but rather it just provides conditions forthe mass-scale expression of popular ideology developed in times of peaceover long periods of time.

Gradual mass-scale ideological transformation often preceded revolu-tionary upheavals too. The ideas of the Enlightenment that framed the rev-olutionary outcomes in France and the United States and shaped their newconstitutions were heralded at least a century before these violent events tookplace. Similarly, the communist and Islamist ideals that underpinned the 1917October Revolution and the 1979 Iranian revolution, respectively, developedmany years before they were instituted as the dominant normative ideolo-gies in the two states. As Skocpol shows, the Iranian revolution owes a greatdeal to the oppositional and essentially nationalist, ideological discoursesthat united the excluded Shia clergy and the traditional bazaar merchantswho, inspired by the Shia mythology that counterpoises the willing martyrHussein against the unscrupulous usurper caliph Yazid, spearheaded the

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mass revolt against Reza Pahlavi. In this ideological narrative, Pahlavi becamethe modern equivalent of Yazid and the revolutionaries identified themselveswith the martyrdom of Hussein. Although the revolutionaries drew on tra-ditional religious mythology, their ideological zeal was profoundly modernand nationalist in its totalist ambition that made no room for ideologicalcompromises.55 In this sense, there are clear parallels between the viewsof Jacobins and the Shia Islamists. The French revolutionaries insisted on“inflexibility of justice” and the necessity of exporting the revolution abroadarguing that “we cannot be calm until Europe, all Europe, is in flames.”56 Ina very similar fashion, the Iranian revolutionaries saw themselves as fulfillinga specific ideological blueprint that quickly found its way into the new con-stitution that advocates the principle of “extending the sovereignty of God’slaw throughout the world” on Iranian, nationalist, terms.57

These uncompromising ideological vistas are even more pronouncedin the context of genocides. As Bauman, Levene, and Mann demonstrateconvincingly, genocidal projects entail not only a substantial degree of orga-nizational development but also highly articulated ideological blueprints.58

The organized attempts to annihilate “kulaks” and other class enemies inthe Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia were often based on similar ide-ological vistas to those doctrines that fostered the genocides of Herrerosand Namas, Armenians, Jews, or Tutsis. In all of these cases, one encountersthe Enlightenment- and Romanticism-inspired utopian outlooks that espousestrong engineering ambitions and advocated the creation of a new and per-fected social order that would establish a class, ethnicity, or race basedpurified polity. For Mann, murderous ethnic-cleansing policies are unlikelyto happen without coherent ideological doctrines that invoke the democraticprinciples of popular rule whether in the form of demos or ethnos. Never-theless, although cumulative bureaucratization of coercion and centrifugalideologization provide conditions for the proliferation of different ideologi-cal doctrines and the organizational means to implement a genocidal project,they do not by themselves cause genocides. For if this was the case, genocidewould not be such a rare occurrence. Simply put, for genocide to materialize,one needs advanced social organizations and mass ideologies but the verypresence of these two will not automatically generate a genocidal situation.

Terrorism too is a product of ideological advancement. The most suc-cessful terrorist organizations justify their existence and mobilize public sup-port through direct reference to specific ideological doctrines from national-ism, anarchism, socialism, Islamism to liberalism. The ideological messagesplay an important part in mobilizing individuals to join terrorist organizationsand most such organizations stimulate their membership to acquire greaterknowledge of their respective ideological doctrines. Moreover, as the pro-cess of centrifugal ideologization advances, the terrorist networks tend to bedominated by well-educated middle class individuals. For example, the activemembers of Al Qaeda usually came from middle or upper class backgrounds.

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The extensive empirical research on the profile of an average terrorist indi-cates that most have higher education with the predominance of degrees inscience, medicine, and, most of all, engineering.59 In many cases, the firmideological commitment emerges in the context of a secular or secularizingsociety. Most nationalist organizations that are traditionally characterized asterrorist such as ETA, the Tamil Tigers, or the Provisional IRA are governedby secular and modernist, Enlightenment-enthused, ideological principles.The significance of the secularizing and modernizing social environment isjust as visible in the development of religiously framed terrorism. For ex-ample, the obsession with religious ideological purity so prominent amongSalafist groups often emerges as a direct response to, what they believe tobe, the unprecedented secularization and modernization of their societies.Hence, many Islamist suicide bombers grew up in distinctly secular familieswhere they were exposed early to different ideological worldviews.60 Nev-ertheless, while ideology is crucial in recruiting individuals to join terroristorganizations, there is no direct link between strong ideological commitmentand violence. For example the Black Tigers, the elite units of Tamil Tigers,who were responsible for the most spectacular cases of suicide bombing be-fore 9/11, were not ideological zealots. Although they were fully loyal to thecause of Tamil nationalism, their membership was not based on the strengthof one’s ideological commitment. On the contrary, the individuals involvedin assassinations and suicide missions tended to be chosen from amongthose who exhibited strong self-discipline, a degree of asceticism, personalresponsibility, and the strategic understanding of the terrorist mission.61

Microsolidarity

The cumulative bureaucratization of coercion and centrifugal ideologizationfurnish the structural conditions for the development of both nationalismand organized violence. Without the workings of these two long-term histor-ical processes, it would be difficult to imagine how thousands, and in somecases millions, of individuals would be legitimately compelled to fight, tokill, to die, or to provide the support for such actions in wars, revolutions,genocides, insurgencies, or acts of terrorism. Moreover, without these twolongue duree processes, it is highly unlikely that an overwhelming majorityof individuals would see their nations as the most significant units of iden-tity, solidarity, and sovereignty. Nevertheless, as human beings generallyare not puppets of historical tides but are self-reflective creatures capableof free and meaningful action, neither nationalism nor violence can tran-spire without tackling this microcontext. As I have argued previously, tofully understand how human beings become receptive and responsive toorganizational demands and ideological appeals, it is vital to explore thesocial dynamics of microsolidarity.62 Large-scale social organizations such asnation-states or business corporations are formal, anonymous, bureaucratic,

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and essentially cold entities. In contrast the small-scale, face-to-face groups,such as families, lovers, friendships, kinships, or neighborhoods, are char-acterised by informality, familiarity, and a sense of close attachments. Mostindividuals attain fulfilment, comfort, security, and love in such small-scale,intimate groups that thrive on direct interaction. Hence, in order to succeed,social organizations have to emulate these microgroupings and to utilize thesocial energy generated in the pouches of microsolidarity. In other words,the ultimate success of specific social organizations depends on their capac-ity to ideologically and organizationally penetrate the microworld and to linkdisparate pockets of microsolidarity into a relatively coherent, all embracing,macronarrative of ideological unity.

Studies on the behavior of soldiers on the battlefield clearly show thatwhile ideology and coercive power are indispensable in mobilizing indi-viduals to join military organizations and to support the war aims, it is themicrosolidarity with their comrades that incites their willingness to die, tokill, or to fight in these wars.63 Moreover, empirical studies indicate that,once on the battlefield, the willingness to kill or die does not come fromstrong nationalist feelings, or any other ideological commitment, but prin-cipally from the sense of responsibility and attachment to one’s platoon orregiment.64 As both Dollard and Graves demonstrate, during WWII, mostAmerican and British soldiers on the frontline openly conveyed their dislikefor the expression of patriotic sentiments that were often seen as “remote”and were “at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners.”65 Similarfeelings were just as present among the Wehrmacht soldiers who fought tothe bitter end not for Nazi ideals but out of a sense of loyalty towards theirfriends and family.66 It is only when these strong emotions of solidarity withone’s immediate groups are harnessed by social organizations such as mili-taries and nation-states that ideologization and bureaucratization manage toenvelop entire societies. Furthermore, as Kalyvas demonstrates, expressionsof malicious nationalism during civil wars should not be taken at face valuesince such rhetoric is often used to settle personal scores and to expressprivate grievances: “rather than reflecting the politicization of private life,civil war violence often privatizes politics.”67

The significance of microsolidarity is even more discernible in the con-text of revolutions. Although the revolutionaries are driven by specific ide-ological ambitions and their success is largely determined by the quality oftheir organizational muscle, there is no effective revolutionary action withoutin-group solidarity. The conspiratorial character of most revolutionary orga-nizations is built on, and tends to reinforce, feelings of attachment, loyalty,trust, and exceptionalism among revolutionaries. As Billington shows, theearly revolutionary movements such as Italian Carbonari or Greek PhilikiHetairia were composed of secret fraternities of young men who devisedcomplex rituals of initiation and devoted their lives to what they saw to be anoble cause. They tended to share a utopian, romantic worldview but their

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motivation was maintained and enhanced by joint social action and “by theexperience of camaraderie within their own small groups.”68 However, beingan active member of a secret revolutionary nationalist cell does not automat-ically indicate that an individual will embark on a lifelong violent career.Neither does it imply that strong nationalist commitment will generate thatviolence. For one thing, as made plain by Skocpol, Goodwin, and Collins,revolutions are not made by highly determined and secretive conspirators;they happen for a variety of structural reasons. Hence, while microsolidaryis important to keep revolutionaries together, it in itself is not the root causeof revolutions. For another thing, as several meticulous studies demonstrate,the violence produced in revolutionary uprisings is generally a by-productof unintended consequences and is undertaken by a very small number ofindividuals.69 Despite the prevalence of belligerent rhetoric among revolu-tionaries, an overwhelming majority of conspirators never engage in actualviolent acts. Furthermore, notwithstanding the loud nationalist pronounce-ments of such movements as Philiki Hetairia or Carbonari, the members ofsuch groups had little or no understanding of what nations and nationalismsare about and the vocal links made between nationalism and violence wererarely if ever translated into concrete social action.70

Even the perpetrators of genocide derive much of their motivation fromthe hubs of microsolidarity. There is no doubt that mass participation ingenocides, such as those in Rwanda and the Holocaust, could not hap-pen without the presence of powerful and coercive social organizations andwidespread mass ideologization. However, the actual social mechanics ofgenocide implementation on the ground depends on the small-group dy-namics. As Collins and Klusemann convincingly show, much of the killing ingenocides is a product of collective action by well-integrated small cohortsof perpetrators who in addition to organizational supremacy manage to es-tablish emotional dominance as well. Since killing other human beings isnever easy, the tendency is to create specific situational emotional dynamicswhere the perpetrators utilize their emotional dominance and solidarity tofirstly emotionally and organizationally overpower their victims and then toutilize this microsolidarity to commit mass killings. Klusemann’s study onthe behavior of Serbian forces in Srebrenica clearly shows the significanceof that microgroup dynamic:

In the Srebrenica case, we saw an emotional flow over time with a build-up phase and a situational trigger when the peace-keeping commandershowed himself paralyzed in the face of an implicit threat to kill both U.N.troops and refugees, and the defeated Muslims themselves turned passive.It was at this moment that the local commander gave the order for themassacre. Locally given orders to kill, where they occur, are themselvesthe result of micro interactions and their emotional outcomes.71

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In-depth interviews with genocidaires in Rwanda also stress the significanceof local, microdynamics for killings. Browning’s study on the behavior ofordinary Germans demonstrates how the process of radicalization is con-tested and develops gradually whereby the microgroup dynamics fosters thetransition from the reluctance to kill towards routinization of mass murder.72

Similarly Mann’s studies on the social profile of genocide perpetuators indi-cate that their decision to take part in the mass murder was not principallydriven by strong nationalist convictions.73

Since terrorist activities by definition involve a small number of clandes-tine activists the centrality of microgroup dynamics is even more prominent.Both the decisions to join the terrorist organizations and the execution of ter-rorist activities generally have less to do with deep ideological commitmentsand much more to do with microgroup solidarity. As Sageman’s meticulousstudies on Salafist-inspired terrorism demonstrate, peer groups and familynetworks have proved vital in recruiting individuals for suicide missions.74

This seems to be the case with other terrorist organizations too, includingnationalist-inspired movements such as ETA, the Tamil Tigers, or Chechenseparatist organizations. In all of these cases, it is the microuniverse of fam-ily, friends, neighbors, peers, and one’s locality that has proved critical inmaintaining a sense of belonging to a wider terrorist network.75 In mostinstances, the process of radicalization is a collective, rather than an indi-vidual, phenomenon as becoming a terrorist nearly always involves joiningthe organization together with significant others—friends, peers, or familymembers.

This small-group social cohesion is further reinforced through the terror-ist actions and isolation from the mainstream society: “The relative isolation ofthe individuals from the surrounding society beforehand appears to play animportant role in creating group cohesion, solidarity and a sense of commonpurpose.”76 Moreover the intensified feelings of microsolidarity contributesubstantially to a sense of personal responsibility towards one’s microgroupand the willingness to use violence tends to stem much more from this senseof personal obligation than from strong nationalist commitments. As Hop-good documents for the Tamil Black Tigers, “a heightened sense of personalresponsibility” was crucial for their willingness to volunteer for the suicidemissions. The intensive training for such missions increased “the sense of be-ing ‘chosen’, of being one of the elect with others, and therefore of having aspecial obligation to one’s own comrades to uphold the honour of the unit.”77

CONCLUSION

So what makes nationalism violent and violence nationalist? The simple an-swer to this complex question is that both phenomena are the product of

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similar historical processes. In other words, rather than focusing on the ques-tion of which comes first and whether there is a causal relationship betweenthe two, it is more fruitful to explore their parallel historical trajectories.The fact that both nationalism and organized violence develop quite late inhuman history tells us more about the atypical character of both of thesephenomena. Neither nationalism nor organized violence come naturally tohuman beings. Instead, they both emerge as an outcome of the intercon-nected long-term historical processes that are the cumulative bureaucratiza-tion of coercion, centrifugal ideologization, and the social embeddedness ofmicrosolidarity. Furthermore, these ongoing structural processes remain vi-tal in maintaining and reproducing both organized violence and nationalismthroughout the globe. Notwithstanding the centuries of coercive bureaucraticpressure and mass ideologization, individual human beings remain largelyunenthusiastic about killing or dying for abstract nationalist principles. Evenwhen individuals couch their willingness to die or kill for the nation, be-hind this rhetoric one will regularly find that their genuine commitmentreally extends no further than people they know, love and care about andwhose approval they seek: their family, friends, lovers, or neighbors. If itwas not for the continuous, and largely uninterrupted, presence of coerciveadministrative and ideological apparatuses able to penetrate the intimaciesof micropersonal worlds, there would be neither nationalism nor organizedviolence.

The fact that the two phenomena emerge through the same structuralprocesses and both intensify at the same historical moments in time has ledto the widely shared misperception that nationalism and organized violenceare intrinsically linked. Nevertheless, as argued in this article, the relationshipbetween the two is indirect and for the most part, weak. For, if this was notthe case, there would be many more instances of nationalist-inspired wars,terrorisms, genocides, and revolutions than there actually are. In fact, it is verydifficult to make nationalism violent and violence nationalist. The politicalleaders of nation-states and social movements have to put in a lot of effortto make this happen. Even after decades of organizational and ideologicalwork, there is no guarantee that in times of grave calamity, such as duringwars or revolutions, nationalist sentiments will generate violent action andvice versa. The relationship between organized violence and nationalism isalways fragile, and, even when states or social movements are successfuland manage to mobilize large number of individuals to fight, to kill, or to diein wars, revolutions, genocides, and terrorism, this connection does not lastfor long. Once revolution is achieved or war won, no state authority requiresnationalist-inspired violent groups. Even when genocide and terrorist acts arecommitted, there is no need to keep the perpetrators of these violent acts ona permanent nationalist footing. Once the structural support is removed, thisalready tenuous relationship between nationalism and organized violencequickly evaporates.

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NOTES

1. Gabriele D’Annunzio, “Letter to the Dalmatians,” in Adrian Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascism: FromPareto to Gentile (New York: Harper & Row, 1973 [1919]), 185.

2. Heinrich von Treitschke, Selections from Treitschke’s Lectures on Politics (London: Gowans &Gray, 1914), 39 and 11.

3. Sinisa Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Sinisa Malesevic,“Nationalism, War and Social Cohesion,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25(2): 143–51 (2011).

4. Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 2003); Roger Griffin, Modernism andFascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); BruceHoffman Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

5. Thomas Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, CO: WestviewPress, 2000); Eatwell, Fascism, 24–47; Sabrina Ramet, “Explaining the Yugoslav Meltdown,” NationalitiesPapers 32(4): 33–78 (2004); Neil De Votta, Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, andEthnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

6. Randall Collins, Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-versity, 1999); Jack Goldstone, Revolutions and Rebellions in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1991); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,1978).

7. Jack Levy and William Thompson, Causes of War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010).8. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.9. Malesevic, Nation-States, 28–45.

10. Michael Burleigh, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) 287–345; John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1994), 192; DanielGoldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1996); and Daniel Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the On-GoingAssault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).

11. Burleigh, Blood and Rage, 287–345; Keegan, History of Warfare, 192; Goldhagen, Hitler’sWilling Executioners, 15–17.

12. Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); J. van derDennen, The Origin of War (Groningen: Origin Press, 1995); J. van Hooff, “Intergroup Competitionand Conflict in Animals and Man,” in J. van der Dennen and V. Falger, eds., Sociobiology and Conflict(New York: Chapman and Hall, 1990), 23–54.

13. Edward. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).14. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004);

Malesevic, Nationalism, War, 144–50; S. Malesevic, “The Chimera of National Identity,” Nations andNationalism 17(1): 272–90 (2011); S. Malesevic, Identity as Ideology: Understanding Ethnicity and Na-tionalism (New York: Palgrave, 2006); and Michael Banton, The Sociology of Ethnic Relations 31(7):1267–85 (2008).

15. Paul Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage, 1991); andJohn Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).

16. David Laitin, Nations, States, and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–5.17. A. Wimmer’s recent work is a partial exception here as he argues that nationalism is both

the cause and the consequence of wars, mostly generated by the imperial breakdowns. See AndreasWimmer, The Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Andreas Wimmer and Wesley Heirs, “Is Nationalismthe Cause or Consequence of the End of Empire?,” in J. A. Hall and S. Malesevic, eds., Nationalism andWar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

18. S. Malesevic, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2010), 184–91.

19. Barry Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” International Security 18(2):80–124 (1993); R. Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30(2): 167–214 (1978).

20. Ibid., 122.21. Laitin, Nations, States, 48–60; R. Wintrobe, Rational Extremism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2006); Michael Hechter, “Explaining Nationalist Violence,” Nations and Nationalism 1(1):53–68 (1995).

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22. Anthony D. Smith, Ethnosymbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (London: Routledge,2009); Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);John Hutchinson, “Warfare, Remembrance and National Identity,” in A. Leoussi and S. Grosby, eds.,Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 42–54; C. Marvin andD. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

23. Malesevic, Nationalism, War and Social Cohesion, 147–51; Malesevic, The Sociology of Warand Violence, 187–90.

24. Umut Ozkırımlı, Theories of Nationalism (New York: Palgrave 2010); Anthony D. Smith, Na-tionalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998).

25. Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms, 70; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 2.

26. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1990); Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167–91(1969).

27. See Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003); Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro Sociological Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);Steven Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).

28. Sylvia Walby, “Violence and Society: Introduction to an Emerging Field of Sociology,” CurrentSociology 61(1): 6 (2013); C. Hoyle and A. Sanders, “Police Response to Domestic Violence,” BritishJournal of Criminology 40(1): 14–36 (2000).

29. Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms; Malesevic, The Sociology of War.30. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964); Ernest

Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Commu-nities (London: Verso, 1983); Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 8–46; Michael Mann, The Sources ofSocial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Volume 1.

31. Collins, Violence, 11.32. John Horgan, The End of War (New York: McSweeney’s, 2012); Malesevic, The Sociology of

War, 89–102; Douglas Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2007).

33. Keith Otterbein, How War Began (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004);Raymond C. Kelly, Warless Societies and the Origin of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2000); and Arthur Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (London: Thamesand Hudson, 1985); Fry, Beyond War, 32–56.

34. Malesevic, The Sociology of War, 21–44; W. Eckhardt, Civilizations, Empires and Wars: AQuantitative History of War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992).

35. Jeff Goodwin, “State-Centred Approaches to Social Revolutions: Strengths and Limitations of aTheoretical Tradition,” in John Foran, ed. Theorising Revolutions (London: Routledge, 1997), 14.

36. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of Nation-State (London: I. B. Taurus, 2005); Alex Hinton, AnnihilatingDifference: The Anthropology of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

37. Riaz Hassan, Suicide Bombings (London: Routledge, 2011); Marc Sageman, UnderstandingTerror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Martha Crenshaw, ExplainingTerrorism (London: Routledge, 2010).

38. Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms; Malesevic, The Sociology of War; Malesevic, Nation-alism, War and Social Cohesion; S. Malesevic, “Obliterating Heterogeneity through Peace: Nationalisms,States and Wars in the Balkans,” in J. A. Hall and S. Malesevic, eds., Nationalism and War (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5–8.

39. Malesevic, “Obliterating,” 262–63; Malesevic, The Sociology of War, 5–8, 92–130.40. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Charles Tilly,

“War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol, eds.,Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

41. A. Forrest, “The Nation in Arms I: The French Wars,” in C. Townshend, ed., The Oxford Historyof Modern Warfare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 55–73; Michael Howard, War in EuropeanHistory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

42. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 66; William McNiell, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1982); Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1986).

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43. Mann, The Dark Side, 27–98; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge:Polity, 1989).

44. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 8.45. Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organised Killing in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity,

2003).46. Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14.47. Peter Calvert, Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1970).48. Theda Skocpol, “Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Theory and Society

11(3): 265–83 (1982); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jack Goldstone, Revolution andRebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

49. Michael Burleigh, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (New York: Harper Collins,2009).

50. Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House,2006); Sageman, Understanding Terror, 18–54.

51. Diego Gambetta and Steven Hertog, “Why Are There So Many Engineers among IslamicRadicals?”, European Journal of Sociology 50(2): 201–30 (2009); Pape, Dying to Win, 24–33.

52. Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms, 15–19; Malesevic, The Sociology of War, 8–11 and130–31.

53. J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901).54. Malesevic, Obliterating; Malesevic, Nationalism, War and Social Cohesion.55. Skocpol, Rentier State, 271–74.56. William Doyle, The French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 52.57. Con Coughlin, Khomeini’s Ghost (London: Macmillan, 2009), 167.58. Bauman, Modernity and Holocaust, 65–79; Levene, Genocide, 112–136; Mann, The Dark Side,

1–36.59. Gambetta and Hertog, “Why Are There So Many Engineers,” 36–56; Pape, Dying to Win, 10–25;

Sageman, Understanding Terror, 3–45.60. Hassan, Suicide Bombings, 8–34; Sageman, Understanding Terror, 28–66.61. Steven Hopgood, “Tamil Tigers 1987–2002,” in D. Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide

Missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).62. Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms, 14–18; Malesevic, Nationalism, War and Social

Cohesion, 142–161; Malesevic, The Sociology of War and Violence, 179–200.63. Collins, Violence, 24–68; Joan Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta, 2000);

Richard Holmes, Acts of War (New York: Free Press, 1985).64. Malesevic, The Sociology of War and Violence, 219–32; Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

(New York: Doubleday, 1957); John Dollard, Fear in Battle (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977).65. Graves, Goodbye to All That, 157.66. Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying (New York: Knopf,

2012); Edward Shills and M. Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wermacht in World War II,”Public Opinion Quarterly 12(2): 280–315 (1948).

67. Sthatis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006), 14.

68. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of Revolutionary Faith (New York: BasicBooks, 1980), 130.

69. Collins, Violence, 24–68; John Foran, “The Comparative Historical Sociology of Third WorldSocial Revolutions: Why a Few Succeed, Why Most Fail,” in J. Foran, ed., Theorising Revolutions (London:Routledge, 1997), 227–67; Richard Lachmann, “Agents of Revolution: Elite Conflicts and Mass Mobilizationfrom the Medici to Yeltsin,” in J. Foran, ed., Theorising Revolutions (London: Routledge, 1997), 73–101.

70. Malesevic, Nation-States and Nationalisms, 56–77; Victor Roudometof, Nationalism, Global-isation and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans (Westport, CT: Praeger,2001).

71. Stefan Klusemann, “Micro-Situational Antecedents of Violent Atrocity,” Sociological Forum25(2): 272–95 (2010); Collins, Violence, 59–88.

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72. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 2006); Chris Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solutionin Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

73. Mann, The Dark Side, 1–36; M. Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).74. Sageman, Understanding Terror, 40–58.75. Hassan, Suicide Bombings, 40–48; Collins, Violence, 36–49; Hopgood, Tamil Tigers, 72–79; and

Luca Ricolfi, “Palestinians, 1981–2003,” in D. Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2005), 77–129.

76. Hassan, Suicide Bombings, 40.77. Hopgood, Tamil Tigers, 76.

Sinisa Malesevic is a Professor and Head of the School of Sociology at UniversityCollege Dublin. He is also a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His recent booksinclude Nation-States and Nationalisms (Polity, 2013), The Sociology of War andViolence (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and a volume coedited with JohnA. Hall, Nationalism and War (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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