Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The following paragraphs are not intended to give a review of theories of nation building. Rather their aim is to highlight the most salient features of the modernist and primordialist position on nation formation. The central assumptions of a couple of influential theories will serve only as an illustration of these features and are supposed to help the reader obtain a clearer picture of the two positions, without the pretension to compare or contrast different theories of nation formation. The first step, however, will be an effort to give an exact assessment of the context of the modernist‘-primordialist dichotomy.