International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   As Walker Connor has long maintained, a significant obstacle to the progress of nationalism studies has been the lack of consensus on its fundamental concepts (1978; 1994). Thirty years after his well-known examination of this problem, studies of nationalism and related subjects have multiplied exponentially, and some of the early conceptual debates in the field have seen important advances. Nevertheless, it is clear that despite the fact that many scholars now take certain shared assumptions for granted, we are a long way from unanimity. The purpose of this essay is to review some of the basic conceptual debates in nationalism studies under the broad and interrelated categories of “ethnicity,” “nations and nationalism,” and “classification of nations and nationalism.” The sheer volume of literature produced on these subjects, particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, poses a major challenge, but the present selective focus using key and influential texts as examples should provide the reader with a solid foundation for further research. The essay has three sections, organized as follows. The first, on ethnicity, provides a brief history of the term and an overview of what is usually described as the debate between “primordialist” and “instrumentalist” accounts of ethnicity, but suggests that this characterization ... log in or subscribe to read full text