Nationalism and the transformation of the state

Abstract While it is often assumed that the core debates about nationalism were settled by modernist scholars already in the 1980s, there are reasons to question this theoretical ‘consensus’, especially because it fails to anticipate the wave of nationalist geopolitics that is currently sweeping through the world. Contemporary studies of nationalism typically refrain from conceptualising politics in spatial terms, while overstating states' ability to shape ethno‐national identities irrespective of their ethnic roots and offering little empirical validation. To overcome these limitations, it is useful to analyse how nationalism transforms the state, rather than the reverse. This article reports findings from an EU‐funded research project that uses historical maps covering borders of states and ethnic groups to show how nationalism causes increasing congruence between these borders and how a lack thereof makes conflict and border change more likely. This risk is further increased by ‘restorative’ narratives bemoaning supposedly lost independence and unity. Further research traces the spread of reactive nationalism through modernisation processes driven by railroad expansion until the early 20th century. Yet this does not mean that state partition offers the only, or the best, solution to nationality problems. Power sharing can pacify at least as well as ethno‐nationalist border change.