Nation-State Building

Main idea: Tilly was right, with a twist: states made nations and nations made states. The two projects are complements, and treating them separately misreads how modern states actually form.

This is a short note on a working paper with Chris Bidner. Full paper (PDF).

Two projects, usually studied apart

Political economy tends to split the making of the modern state into two stories. State-building is the fiscal-military project: raising taxes, fielding armies, building an administration that reaches the territory. Nation-building is the identity project: a shared language, a common curriculum, a sense of “us” that spans the territory the state claims.

Charles Tilly gave us the famous line for the first: war made the state, and the state made war. Our contribution is to insist that the second story isn’t a separate track, the two are complements, and each raises the return to the other.

The complementarity

The mechanism is intuitive once stated. A stronger fiscal-administrative state makes nation-building cheaper and more effective, you cannot run mass schooling or a common language policy without administrative reach. And a more cohesive nation makes state-building cheaper, a population that identifies with the polity is easier to tax and mobilize, and less costly to police.

So investments in one project raise the payoff to the other. That complementarity generates path dependence: societies that get both moving reinforce each other and converge on the strong nation-state; societies that stall in one tend to stall in both.

Why it connects to Contested Unity

This paper sets up a question I take further in Contested Unity: if nation-building is co-produced with the state’s budget, who decides how much to invest, and whose identity does the “nation” end up encoding? Nation-State Building is the complementarity result; Contested Unity is the distributional fight over it.

Comments welcome at eizadi@uvic.ca.