Nation-Building through War

Abstract

How do the outcomes of international wars affect domestic social change? In turn, how do changing patterns of social identification and domestic conflict affect a nation’s military capability? We propose a “second image reversed” theory of war that links structural variables, power politics, and the individuals that constitute states. Drawing on experimental results in social psychology, we recapture a lost building block of the classical realist theory of statecraft: the connections between the outcomes of international wars, patterns of social identification and domestic conflict, and the nation’s future war-fighting capability. When interstate war can significantly increase a state’s international status, peace is less likely to prevail in equilibrium because, by winning a war and raising the nation’s status, leaders induce individuals to identify nationally, thereby reducing internal conflict by increasing investments in state capacity. In certain settings, it is only through the anticipated social change that victory can generate that leaders can unify their nation, and the higher anticipated payoffs to national unification makes leaders fight international wars that they would otherwise choose not to fight. We use the case of German unification after the Franco-Prussian war to demonstrate the model’s value-added and illustrate the interaction between social identification, nationalism, state-building, and the power politics of interstate war.

Lost in Translation: Social Identity Theory and the Study of Status in World Politics

“…Some promising work already adopts this approach. Building on research by Sambanis and Shayo (2013) that connects SIT to ethnic conflict, as well as earlier work by Shayo (2009) on attitudes toward economic redistribution, Sambanis et al (2015) argue that victory in war increases the status of the state and thus the likelihood that individuals will identify with it more strongly than with substate groups. This, in turn, strengthens the state's extractive capacity.…”

“…No other framework has as much influence. Of the sixteen pieces that do not apply or endorse Larson and Shevchenko's version of SIT, eight are not aimed at explaining how states seek status (Dafoe, Renshon, and Huth 2014;Onea 2014;Jones 2014;Wolf 2014b;Dolan 2015;Lanoszka and Hunzeker 2015;Renshon 2015;Sambanis et al 2015). The rest apply a mix of theoretical perspectives rooted in a variety of mechanisms and hypotheses.…”

“…Another way to understand the influence of Larson and Shevchenko's framework is to limit attention to work that applies SIT. Of the twenty-seven articles about status in international relations that have appeared since the beginning of 2014, eight explicitly use SIT as their primary explanatory framework (Larson and Shevchenko 2014b;Clunan 2014;Malinova 2014;Miller et al 2015;Bezerra et al 2015;Evans 2015;Sambanis et al 2015;Lee 2016); two consider but reject it as an explanatory framework (Renshon 2016;Barnhart 2016). Of the eight pieces that adopt SIT, seven use the Larson and Shevchenko 3 On the significance of status for Chinese foreign policy, see Deng (2008) and Wolf (2014a); on Russian foreign policy, see Clunan (2009Clunan ( , 2014, Forsberg (2014), Heller (2014), Malinova (2014), and Tsygankov (2012 translation.…”

The construction of national identities

“…Another set of theoretical contributions that explicitly deals with the formation of national identities emphasizes the role of interstate and modern mass warfare in triggering nation‐building behavior by states. Alesina et al () explore how changes in warfare technology incentivized mass armies by conscription, which in turn pushed states to create a sense of national belonging that increased the willingness to fight for the country Sambanis et al. (), building upon Shayo () and Sambanis and Shayo (), argue that rulers who want to nation‐build may find it optimal to promote war against an external power, as expectations of victory increase the international status of the country.…”

Becoming White: How Military Service Turned Immigrants into Americans

“…While the classic insight from works that highlight the relationship between warfare and the state is that mass mobilization for warfare can be conducive to state-building (Tilly 1990;Bensel 1990), progressive institutions (Scheve and Stasavage 2016), and democracy (Levi 1997;Ferejohn and Rosenbluth 2016), this paper shows that this phenomenon runs much deeper: mass mobilization for warfare can fundamentally reshape our social identities. In this respect, this paper builds on Sambanis, Skaperdas, and Wohlforth (2015) who argue that warfare can increase national identification among the general populace. This study, however, places the focus on the direct effect of the military itself rather than the overall context of war.…”