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Nation-Building through War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2015

NICHOLAS SAMBANIS ,
STERGIOS SKAPERDAS  and
WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH
NICHOLAS SAMBANIS*
Affiliation:
Yale University
STERGIOS SKAPERDAS*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
*
Nicholas Sambanis is Professor of Political Science, Yale University, P.O. Box 208301, New Haven, CT 06520-8301.
Stergios Skaperdas is Professor of Economics and Political Science and Clifford S. Heinz Chair, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 ([email protected]).
William C. Wohlforth is Daniel Webster Professor of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 ([email protected]).
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 109 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 279 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2015 

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