The state—let alone the nation-state—was not at the center of attention of Western social scientists for the quarter century that followed the end of the Second World War. The defeated fascist powers seemed so close to nationalism and to statism that these forces received a bad name. The fact that victorious Western powers championed a postwar order organized around liberal ideas thereby set th...

Why did the nation-state proliferate across the world over the past 200 years, replacing empires, kingdoms, city-states, and the like? Using a new dataset with information on 145 of today’s states from 1816 to the year they achieved nation-statehood, we test key aspects of modernization, world polity, and historical institutionalist theories. Event history analysis shows that a nation-state is ...

Most studies of nationalism are based on an understanding of the nation as a cultural collectivity that can be located in historical terms in the passage from the pre-modern to the modern era. Rather less attention is paid to spatial considerations. In this light, the paper argues that we cannot fully understand nationalism and its relationship to the nation unless we take into account territor...