In this edited volume, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and the other contributors examine the intersection of the global and the national at a moment when the latter seemed to have trumped the former. These concepts seem antithetical, but were in fact deeply interconnected, as Núñez Seixas points out in his introduction. There he states that the Irmandades da Fala, Galician “language brotherhoods”, were partly the outgrowth of local efforts in the nineteenth century but were also “a ‘local’ byproduct of a transnational phenomenon: the wave of national self-determination that accompanied the course of the Great War” (p. 1). (A conference on these Brotherhoods resulted in the present volume.) Despite Spain being a non-belligerent in the war, or France and Britain being victors, all experienced greater and sometimes – in the case of Spain and Britain especially – more violent nationalist agitation after the war than before. That the Great War had a deep and bloody impact on Europe’s “nationality question” has been well demonstrated, and transnational factors have also been investigated, but primarily in Central and Eastern Europe.1 In contrast, this book offers a broader perspective on how “nationality” became embedded in modern politics in much the same way as all “isms”: through, as Núñez Siexes noted, the identification of local causes and concerns with increasingly globalized currents of thought and lines of argument, and then the (re)localization of all the whole process someplace else.2

The breadth of perspective is also found in the approaches taken to the subject matter, which in addition to history incorporate political theory, anthropology, and data science. The book’s eleven chapters are divided into three parts, of which part one “The First World War and the Principle of Nationality” is the longest. Part two is entitled, “Local Dynamics”, while part three is “The Legacy of the First World War and the Nationality Question”. Individual contributions to these parts examine a wide range of different aspects, while the war and its aftermath, particularly Wilson’s political interventions, remain the central point of organization. In general, the loose organization works, and the book provides a useful update on where the history of the nation is at present. However, this is work whose contributions show their intermediate quality, by which I mean that these are the revised product of a conference, with the work still in progress and thus rougher than might have otherwise been the case. I found myself on more than a few occasions searching in vain for footnotes addressing claims made by the authors, and the divergence of topic and approach between different contributors makes it hard to draw overarching conclusions.

A few essays are worth singling out to make some general remarks, however. For a general audience, part one’s first chapter, “Cultural Mobility and Political Mobilization: Transnational Dynamics, National Action”, by Joep Leerssen is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book. Leerssen points out that “methodological nationalism” hitherto excluded the possibility that nationalist political movements could be transnational, brought on in part by the nationalist political interests of historians but also created by the structural realities of national archives “often curated by the state” (p. 18). His contribution emphasizes the “diffusion, profusion, and condensation” – to borrow his subtitle – of nationalist politics, rather than by examining the “direct knock-on impacts”. To use a recurring example, Leerssen argues the Easter Rising had direct knock-on effects for Irish nationalism but its impact in Galicia or elsewhere was much more often of the softer, undirected sort.

In part two, Francesca Zantedeschi furthers this exploration by looking at the “micronationalisms” of post-World War I Galicia, while drawing comparisons to the regionalist movements of France at the same time. “Micronationlisms” is used throughout the volume, but Zantedeschi here gives it a useful minimalist definition, as an ideology “whose claims were predominantly cultural as opposed to political… [and which] had very limited social and political impact[s]” (p. 146–147). Rather than political reactions to modernization (per Stanley Payne, as cited by the author) or the prelude to a Habsburg-style collapse into its “component” pieces, the Galicians and others saw themselves as part of a broader effort to reinvigorate the nation after a devastating war and apparent cultural collapse – something that went beyond the combatants in the war. While not originally the intended recipients of the US President’s concept of “self-determination”, minority communities like the Galicians responded in unexpected and creative ways to this infusion of ideas.

The breadth and depth of the nationalist fallout after the war is the focus of the last part of the book, with Lourenzo Fernandez-Prieto and Miguel Cabo’s “Agrarian Movements, the National Question, and Democracy in Europe, 1880–1945” showing how both the war and the national question fit within a longer running campaign of agrarian politics – also an important component of Irish and many Eastern European nationalisms. Their analysis, which is deeply embedded in both historical and anthropological approaches to agrarian studies, emphasizes how politics about farming could also be about the nation. Their essay points to how issues of tariff policy or the politics of the socialist Second International were entangled with both agrarian as well as national questions, how “ruralism” infused political movements with idealizations or even fantasies of the countryside, and how the various forms of association taken up by agrarian activists might take on a national character. All this further reinforces one key point made throughout the book: that monocausal explanations seeking to pin down the essence of a thing – be it the nation, the working-class, or whatever – misses the way any of these concepts are just one vector of historical reality.

It is this point that would most engage the general reader. To take a final example, Malte Rolf’s essay on “Nationalizing an Empire”, regarding the complex construction of Soviet nationality policy after World War I, shows how nationalist and revolutionary socialist ideas were blended in the Bolshevik attempt to overcome the Tsar and the Whites before being further instrumentalized under Stalin. That the latter subsequently persecuted said nationalities is beside the point, as Rolf argues, because the nationalities institutionalized in the 1920s and 1930s formed the basis for the later territorial break-up of the Soviet empire. The reality of Soviet socialism or of the ethnic nationalism it engendered are not opposing forces, as once proposed, but mutually constitutive. Rolf’s essay is worth singling out because it builds on Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire which helped break open this myth of an opposition at its very heart.3 For a long time after this important publication, the conversation still seemed to be much more about defining the Nation, in looking for an essence. During the time elapsed between Martin’s publication in 2001 and this volume, that conversation has evolved – fruitfully, I think – towards defining a nation. That is, rather than the story of people discovering (or failing to discover) their inherent nationality, the broader field to which Núñez Seixas and the other authors are contributing now examines what made particular people, in particular times, see themselves as a community best described as a nation.

Notes:
1 For a recent example of this, see: Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, New York 2017.
2 Regarding how political currents overlapped and reinforced one another from the 1870s through World War I, see: Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags. Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, London 2007. Leerssen cites Anderson’s Three Flags in their contribution to this volume.
3 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Ithaca 2001.