After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States

Extract

After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States. Edited by Lowell W. Barrington. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 306p. $75 cloth, $29.95 paper.

As the editor states clearly in the introduction, the central question taken up in this useful volume is “What happens to nationalism after independence?” Its premise is that most scholarship on nationalism has attempted to trace or explain the emergence of the popular sentiments of solidarity that account for the formation of national consciousness, the rise of nationalism as a modern and highly potent political ideology, and the contribution of nationalism to the proliferation of states. Although there are excellent case studies of postindependence nationalisms in individual countries, less comparative and theoretical attention has been paid to conceptualizing and explaining variation in the intensity and character of nationalism in newly independent states.