For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism, and War

By Stephen M. Saideman and R. William Ayres

The collapse of an empire can result in the division of families and the redrawing of geographical boundaries. New leaders promise the return of people and territories that may have been lost in the past, often advocating aggressive foreign policies that can result in costly and devastating wars. The final years of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, the end of European colonization in Africa and Asia, and the demise of the Soviet Union were all accompanied by war and atrocity.

These efforts to reunite lost kin are known as irredentism ? territorial claims based on shared ethnic ties made by one state to a minority population residing within another state. For Kin or Country explores this phenomenon, investigating why the collapse of communism prompted more violence in some instances and less violence in others. Despite the tremendous political and economic difficulties facing all former communist states during their transition to a market democracy, only Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia tried to upset existing boundaries. Hungary, Romania, and Russia practiced much more restraint.

The authors examine various explanations for the causes of irredentism and for the pursuit of less antagonistic policies, including the efforts by Western Europe to tame Eastern Europe. Ultimately, the authors find that internal forces drive irredentist policy even at the risk of a country's self-destruction and that xenophobia may have actually worked to stabilize many postcommunist states in Eastern Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231514491

Book preview

Introduction to the 2015 Edition

THIS BOOK FOCUSES ON AN IMPORTANT PUZZLE: Why do some states adopt aggressive foreign policies toward their neighbors, bent on reclaiming lost kin, while others do not? This phenomenon, known as irredentism, is generally associated with war since countries do not give up their territories easily. When we initially wrote For Kin or Country , we were looking back on a time of tremendous upheaval in the 1990s, precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. It is common knowledge that the origins of both world wars involved irredentist claims, so there were some valid concerns that with the end of yet another empire we might see violent efforts to alter existing boundaries. And we did, though perhaps less than was expected. We explained why there were efforts at creating a Greater Armenia, a Greater Croatia, and a Greater Serbia, but not similar irredentist efforts by Hungary, Romania, and Russia. Much to everybody’s consternation, Russia has moved from the restraint column to the aggression column, as it revived an old territorial claim and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. As we write this introduction, there is an ongoing war in eastern Ukraine over the fate of the Russian-speaking peoples who live there. The conflict is being fueled by a newly aggressive Russian foreign policy, one which may or may not be bent on reuniting other external territories with the Russian homeland.

These events remind us that irredentism remains a threat to international peace and stability. Irredentist claims and conflicts are not unique to Eastern Europe; they serve as key points of tension in the Middle East, between India and Pakistan, between China and Taiwan, and in Africa as well. We address some of these in chapter 7.

In this book, we argue that a few crucial dynamics drive or inhibit irredentism. As we hint in the title, what matters most is not what is best for the country but what is best for the politicians. Do they rely on political support from those who strongly identify with the people inhabiting the desired territory? How tolerant are these supporters of others from outside the country joining the political community? Do the relevant constituents depend on international economic ties or could they benefit from international isolation? We discovered that the actual plight of the kin abroad does not matter very much, despite what Russian president Vladimir Putin has argued.

Given what we published in 2008, how do we make sense of Russia’s newly energized irredentism in 2014? Can we make sense of this case as well as the others we studied? In this new introduction, we shall briefly consider Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 2000s and how much and how little has changed since the 1990s.

Our original effort focused on comparing silent dogs (states that had the opportunity to pursue irredentist claims but chose not to) with barking dogs (states that had similar opportunities and chose to pursue them aggressively, usually with warfare). Looking across the range of cases we examined from the 1990s, most of the silent dogs are still silent as of 2015, and most of the barking dogs are still barking. Hungary, Romania, Ireland, Albania, and Greece continue to remain in the silent category. Despite some internal political changes, the conditions that kept these states on the sidelines of aggressive irredentism (spelled out in our hypotheses in chapter 1) still hold.

Some of the conflicts we wrote about initially are still frozen, despite outcomes that almost nobody likes. Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a jumbled mess, not quite a unified country but not quite a divided state either. The looming twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords calls attention to the issues that were never really resolved since the last great irredentist war of Europe. Likewise, the Armenian pseudo-annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh remains in place with occasional violence despite years of talks and diplomatic efforts.

Similarly, the aggressive cases we examined from the 1990s and earlier eras have continued to press those claims, notably Armenia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Here, two cases of reasonably successful irredentism (Armenia’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh and Turkey’s continued support of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) are largely frozen despite periodic international efforts to negotiate a different outcome. Pakistan continues to poke India over Kashmir, a policy that will probably continue regardless of which party or even what form of government rules in Islamabad. As with the silent dogs, these more aggressive cases continue to enjoy the same conditions as before: contested legitimacy of contested boundaries, lack of restraint from international organization membership processes, and (in the cases of Armenia and Turkey) the reinforcing power of success. So long as these circumstances remain unchanged it is difficult to imagine any of these states moderating their policies and negotiating different deals with their adversaries.

A small handful of cases have changed significantly, however, and these provide the most interesting test of whether our theory holds up over time: Croatia, Serbia, and Russia. There is also one country that could have been expected to become more aggressive but has not: Hungary. In the rest of this introduction, we briefly consider these four puzzles.

Two of the loudest barking dogs in the 1990s were Serbia and Croatia. Both nations pursued extremely aggressive irredentist efforts in nearby territories, mostly in the newly created state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the issues in those territories are not entirely settled, neither Serbia nor Croatia is actively pursuing their irredentist claims anymore. While we argue in the book that external constraints such as the NATO and EU membership processes are overrated, some forms of international involvement are more powerful than others. Since the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, there has been a continuous outside military presence in Bosnia, designed to prevent the renewal of fighting. The size of this force has dwindled—by 2014 it was down to just six hundred troops—but the continued involvement of NATO and the European Union places higher barriers on a return to irredentism for either Serbia or Croatia.

In both Croatia and Serbia, there is greater interest in integrating with the institutions of the West than there was in 1992 when the conflict began. At that time, the peoples of Yugoslavia were just emerging from decades of relative isolation from the economies of Western Europe. While Westerners thought that the benefits of joining the EU should be obvious, the populations of Serbia and Croatia were not yet sold. There were going to be many people paying the costs of transitioning to a globalized world, so isolation did not appear to be a bad option. Twenty years later, many have paid the price with lost jobs, deflated pensions, and all the rest. Consequently, there is much more interest in both countries in integrating their economies with the EU. After a decade-long application process, Croatians voted nearly two to one in 2012 in favor of joining the EU, and Croatia became the twenty-eighth member state in 2013. Serbia began talks on accession in early 2014 and may soon follow Croatia into the fold. And while we have argued elsewhere (Saideman and Ayres 2007) that these membership processes in and of themselves do not restrain irredentist tendencies, the fact that Serbians and Croatians are now much more interested in joining with the West shows a shift in attitudes towards economic integration with the outside world. That shift—embodied in our sixth hypothesis regarding material interests—helps explain how the once-raging irredentisms of the Balkans have substantially calmed and show few signs of rekindling.

In Croatia, the nationalists have been undermined by their own behavior while in office. The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) lost power in 2011 after a series of corruption scandals led to the resignation, brief disappearance, and then arrest of its leader, Ivo Sanader. It got worse: On the very eve of the elections, the HDZ, as a political party, was indicted for drawing money from public enterprises and pouring it into its own slush fund (Šoštari 2011). At least in the short term, the balance of political power in Croatia is currently against any serious irredentist efforts. However, Croats outside of Croatia, including those in Bosnia, continue to have significant heft in Croatian elections (Ragazzi and Balalovska 2011). This means that nationalist parties still have an audience and a constituency from which to build.

Serbia faces a plethora of problems in the aftermath of Slobodan Miloševi ’s fall, including how to deal with the departure of Kosovo. Given the centrality of Kosovo to Serbian national identity, irredentism towards Bosnia and Croatia has taken a backseat. Nationalist parties have successfully cast the retention of Kosovo as the top priority of Serbian politics, making it apparently impossible for the other major parties to abandon it (Vachudova 2012). This had led to a focus on the trade-off not between various targets of potential irredentist efforts but between acting against Kosovo and integrating with the European Union (Obradovi -Wochnik 2012), with the latter winning as of late. Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vuči has been far less interested in the dream of a Greater Serbia than he was long ago and is more focused on joining the EU (Zonis 2014).

While nationalism is still quite alive and powerful in both Croatia and Serbia, the politics has changed. Parties associated with the irredentist past have been losing to those that highlight other priorities. While this can change, the status quo, complete with NATO troops in Kosovo and European Union soldiers in Bosnia, makes irredentism unattractive for these countries as a whole and, perhaps more importantly, undesirable to politicians who must try to appeal to narrower audiences.

The dynamics these days in Russia, on the other hand, are far less favorable to international stability. In the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia had many of the prerequisites of aggressive irredentism in place. Its boundaries with its fellow Soviet republics were of dubious legitimacy, having been drawn and redrawn by successive Soviet governments for various internal political purposes (our first hypothesis). There were substantial numbers of Russians in the near abroad, some of them highly concentrated and potentially under threat from their new ruling governments and a few of them (Crimea, in particular) actively seeking reunification with the motherland (our seventh hypothesis). Russia also enjoys a substantial power advantage over its neighbors (a rival hypothesis). In the 1990s, therefore, the puzzle was why Russia was not pursuing irredentist claims against its neighbors.

Part of our explanation (see chapter 6) was that the Russian diaspora, and indeed the Russian nation as a whole, is too diverse to sustain a clear nationalist agenda. There are too many different definitions of what it means to be Russian—some based on language, others on religion, still others on history or blood ties. Many Russians in the near abroad had little in common, therefore, with their kin back home, which led to a lack of effort on their part as well as to rather little concern on the part of the Yeltsin government.

Indeed, one factor that was relevant in the 1990s—discrimination against and mobilization among Russian speakers in Ukraine—had become much less salient by 2014 than it was shortly after the Soviet dissolution. In the early days of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, there was a concerted effort by Russians in Crimea to push for the motherland to come rescue them. But Russia ignored their pleas, and subsequent Ukrainian governments in fact treated Crimean Russians and those in its easternmost provinces fairly well. Russian speakers in Ukraine, especially in Crimea, enjoyed a fair amount of linguistic, cultural, and even political autonomy (Kolstø 2014).

The irony is that as conditions have improved for the Russians abroad, Russian leaders have become more energetic in their defense. For instance, Anatoly Makarov, director of the ministry responsible for Russians abroad said in the fall of 2014: We are carrying out a line so that Russian compatriots regardless of where they live are guaranteed all rights and freedoms … and have the opportunity to preserve the culture and traditions of their historical Motherland (Fisher 2014).

The Russian government presently claims that it is rescuing its kin across the border in Ukraine, in the aftermath of a regime change that did include some virulent Ukrainian nationalists. Yet it is not at all clear that in early 2014 those kin wanted—or needed—rescuing. Indeed, there were other ways to safeguard Ukraine’s Russians, such as advocating for federalism or seeking outside observers such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the like to monitor the political transition and elections, but none of those options were considered.

Most of these factors are much the same in 2014 as they were twenty years earlier. So what changed? One of the arguments we make in chapter 6 is that Russian economic circumstances in the 1990s inhibited irredentism, both because the dismal decade of economic decline reduced available resources and because the key players in the new Russian economy were more interested in economic integration with the West than with adventures abroad (echoing our sixth hypothesis). Combined with a political structure that placed most of the power over foreign policy in the hands of the presidency, this produced a situation where the dominant president of the 1990s (Boris Yeltsin), backed by integrationist-minded oligarchs, was largely uninterested in pursing an irredentism agenda despite the opportunities for doing so. Underneath all of this lies the complexity of the Russian identity, which made an appeal to Greater Russia much more difficult and problematic than appeals to Greater Serbia or Greater Croatia were.

By 2014, both the economic and political landscapes had changed substantially. The Russian economy bottomed out around 1998 and starting picking up substantial steam especially after 2002, with sustained growth rates well above 4 percent right up to the Great Recession of 2009 (Adomanis 2012). This recovery, driven in part by the sustained rise in oil prices, gave President Vladimir Putin a great deal more to work with than Yeltsin had. However, the global recession of 2009 grounded this growth to a halt, shrinking the Russian economy by 7.8 percent that year. Since then, the Russian economy has slowed; IMF data show 3.4 percent growth in 2012 and only 1.3 percent growth in 2013, and project 1 percent or less for the next couple of years (IMF 2014). This changed the resource picture for Putin’s government substantially. The growth in the first decade of the twenty-first century took Russia out of crisis mode and enabled more strategic action, while the downturn and subsequent weakness in the Russian economy created the motivation to divert Russian public opinion away from now-frustrated economic expectations.

It is this last dynamic in which the economic becomes political. The Russian post-Soviet political system, as we note in chapter 6, leans heavily on the position of the presidency. Research on Putin’s popularity (and thus, his ability to govern the country largely unopposed) indicates that his approval ratings have been largely based on public perceptions of economic performance, which are in turn driven by objective economic conditions (Treisman 2011). As the Russian economy expanded at a substantial clip through 2008, Putin’s approval ratings continued to climb. But the subsequent economic downturn drove those approval ratings down considerably—right up until early 2014. Between the Sochi Olympics in February and the annexation of Crimea in March, Putin’s approval ratings shot back up to levels not seen since prior to the economic crisis, and have remained high through the ongoing crisis with Ukraine (Knott 2014).

The temptation to engage in external distraction to Russia’s internal economic problems has been coupled with changes in the nature and influence of the economically powerful constituency within the Russian economy. In the 1990s, the rise of the Russian oligarchs was largely a free-for-all outside of Yeltsin’s control. Many members of that newly wealthy class were interested in real and deep economic integration with the West, to the point that Putin in 2000 (early in his presidency) even spoke about the possibility of Russia joining Western institutions like NATO (Rosenberg 2014). As Putin’s regime further consolidated, however, the political power and range of allowable action of the oligarchs have been substantially eroded. The most prominent example of the Kremlin’s effort to redirect the political agenda of the oligarchs was the ten-year imprisonment and subsequent effective exile of Mikhail Khordorkovsky. Yet this was only part of a much wider effort to reign in this powerful class and reestablish Kremlin control over the key sectors of the economy, especially oil and gas—what one author referred to as Putin’s war on the old oligarchs (Barrett 2013; see also Schwartz 2012).

This effort not only shifted economic power in a less pro-Western direction, it also placed a heavy emphasis on those sectors of the economy (energy in particular) that were less in need of global integration by Western rules. This change created a key constituency less interested in fuller economic integration with the West and more willing to support irredentist adventures abroad. Coupled with the need to change political course in the face of growing dissatisfaction among the Russian public at large, these changes created an environment in which irredentism, actively avoided by Yeltsin in the 1990s, now makes political sense.

Most importantly, Putin has created a network of political supporters enriched via favorable deals with the government. He encouraged these insiders to shift out of investments in the West, reducing Russia’s vulnerability to external pressure. As the economic sanctions have started to bite, Putin has shifted contracts to compensate those who are his staunch loyalists. For example, when the Bank Rossiya, referred to as the ‘personal bank’ of the Putin inner circle by the Obama administration, was targeted by sanctions, Putin directed the Russian electricity business to be handled by this bank. It is now set to earn an estimated $100 million or more in annual commissions (Myers, Becker, and Yardley 2014).

In the chapters that follow this introduction, we identify a key dynamic that people overlooked when they thought about globalization in the early 1990s: there are those who benefit from international isolation. Putin’s tactics of 2014 illustrate what can happen when a politician’s key constituents either do not mind losing ties to the international economy or actually benefit thereby. Whether these people genuinely desire irredentism or not, they will find common cause with those that do because irredentism inevitably produces an international backlash.

This new Russian irredentism provides yet more evidence of something we report in chapter 2: nationalism is not such a powerful force that the masses want to sacrifice much for it. Much like how Miloševi promised irredentism on the cheap (58), Putin has sought to minimize the costs of such actions as the enthusiasm for protecting Russians abroad would be vulnerable if Russia were to bear significant casualties (Sherlock 2014).

Unsurprisingly, Russia is now in a position that other irredentists—even successful ones—have been in before; it must suffer the economic costs (both direct and those imposed by the outside world) in exchange for reuniting with lost territories. Despite predictable Kremlin rhetoric about the ineffectiveness of Western sanctions, former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin argues that Russia is indeed suffering from these irredentist efforts—a cost that only compounds Russia’s ongoing economic troubles (Kelly 2014). These costs are above and beyond the global political capital amassed by the largely successful hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, which was lost less than a month later with the annexation of Crimea. This is very similar to the conundrums suffered by other irredentists, both successful ones (Armenia, Turkey) as well as failures (Serbia, Croatia). But, as we argue throughout this book, this is exactly the choice that irredentists make: to pursue reunification with ethnic kin in response to domestic political dynamics, at the cost of the interests of the country as a whole.

Herein lies another irony. The conditions that have given rise to Russia’s newly aggressive irredentist efforts have been building since 2009. But the spark that energized these conditions into action is the very thing that the West has thought would tame and discourage war in Europe: the lure of European integration. In both the Georgian case over Abkhazia and South Ossetia and especially in Ukraine, Russia’s aggression has come only after there were serious threats of those countries joining with Western institutions (the EU and NATO, in particular). For the West, Russia remains an unsolved puzzle: how can the West bring about the peace and security benefits of integration for European states without provoking Russia into decidedly un-peaceful action?

This ironic observation reinforces our central conclusion that Russia’s irredentist efforts towards Crimea and eastern Ukraine are driven largely by internal political forces. This can clearly be seen in the lack of similar efforts toward other neighboring countries. Ukraine is hardly the only country with a significant population of Russian speakers; as we write in chapter 6, there are sizeable Russian minorities in the Baltic states, which have from time to time become politically mobilized. But Putin’s latest moves do not represent an ethnically defined drive towards a Greater Russia so much as a response to changing internal political and economic dynamics—an argument we have made elsewhere as well (Ayres and Saideman 2014).

Once again, the surprising dog that has not barked is Hungary, which we address in chapter 4. Hungary tended to be optimally obnoxious—assertive enough to please domestic audiences but not quite aggressive enough to lose much capital internationally. Since we published the first edition of this book, Hungary has regressed politically. It is now far more authoritarian; a key election in 2010 gave Viktor Orban’s Fidesz Party enough votes to allow it to rewrite the rules of the political system, including the electoral laws themselves. We document in the Hungary chapter how the Fidesz Party used nationalist appeals and stances to outbid the Socialists previously, which led to assertive stances on the Hungarians abroad.

Now that this nationalist party, which can appear moderate thanks to the ultranationalist Jobbik Party, has developed a stranglehold on government, one might expect it to engage in irredentism. The rhetoric has been clear in this direction, but the action less so. Orban has commented that the ‘Magyar race’ was in ‘serious danger,’ implying a role for Hungary to protect its endangered kin abroad (Schuster 2014). In a speech to Hungarians in Romania, he said: The Hungarian community in the Carpathian Basin should not lose heart: Since anything is possible it’s quite possible our time will come (Schuster 2014). This vague promise also suggests an irredentist agenda.

However, thus far it has been all talk. The same force that limited Hungarian irredentism in the 1990s still exists today: xenophobia. Any effort to reunify the lost territories would lead to many non-Hungarians being incorporated into Greater Hungary. As we discuss in the book, especially chapter 5 on Romania, there are multiple targets for nationalist rhetoric, and a xenophobic nationalist could appeal to the public by focusing more on excluding others and less on including kin living nearby. Indeed, Orban has focused much of his animus on immigrants, announcing that his goal is to cease immigration whatsoever (Guylas 2014). Thus, Hungary continues to be obnoxious on the issue of the kin abroad, with Orban siding with Putin over Ukraine’s treatment of minorities, but not aggressive.

In this new introduction, we have one last clarification to make. Since the book’s initial publication we have also seen that aggressive irredentism may be less a binary choice than a continuum. Russia’s quasi-annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008 and 2009 raised many questions about whether this signaled a new step towards a Greater Russia project, whether admitted or not, and started a new debate about Russia’s foreign policy motives (Allison 2008). Formally, Russia recognized these states’ independence—a move followed by almost no other nation-state in the world. But the practical links forged between Russia and these two new pseudo-states suggests a level of control somewhere in between complete independence and formal annexation.

Similarly, several countries have chosen policies aimed at the kin abroad but have come short of irredentism. Hungary is not alone in granting some rights and even citizenship to their kin abroad. Indeed, there is now a cottage industry of scholars of East European politics focusing on these policies (Csergo and Goldgeier 2013; Polgonyi 2011; Waterbury 2010, 2014). These efforts may or may not improve the plight of the kin abroad, but they do have two effects that nationalist politicians at home desire. First, these policies can improve their political fortunes by giving voting rights to those more likely to vote for nationalist politicians. Second, for domestic audiences, these policies are nationalism on the cheap: politicians appear to be good nationalists without imposing any significant costs on their constituents. This allows politicians to try to play with nationalist identities without alienating those who might have to pay a price for more aggressive foreign policies.

These changes in irredentist behavior in the last few years reinforce, rather than undermine, the conclusions we reached when we first wrote this book back in 2008. Irredentism remains largely self-destructive to the interests of the state as a whole, yet the costs are not sufficient to deter such behavior. Neither is vulnerability to internal secessionist movements—the adage that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones continues to have little effect on what states do in their foreign policy. Instead, domestic political dynamics drive foreign policy decisions: are irredentist efforts helpful or harmful to those currently in power? Leaders with the opportunity to chase after ethnic kin nearby face this continual choice: for kin or for country? The answer to that question can change over time, but the fundamentals driving that answer largely do not.

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Introduction

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

—WILLIAM RALPH INGE

WHEN EMPIRES DECLINE AND FALL, WAR SEEMS inevitable. Boundaries shift, families are divided, political and economic systems fall into disarray. Such events give rise to leaders who promise to return that which has been lost—peoples and territories. Aggressive foreign policies may then follow, leading to devastating wars that are always costly, usually of only marginal success, and frequently self-destructive.

The end stages of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires triggered a series of wars, including, ultimately, two world wars. Violence ushered the end of European colonization of Africa and Asia, and violence accelerated after the departure of the Western powers. The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of its domination of Eastern Europe were accompanied by war and atrocities not seen in Europe since the Second World War.

These aggressive efforts to change boundaries in order to reunite lost kin are a phenomenon known as irredentism.¹ Broadly defined, irredentism refers to territorial claims made by one state that are based on ethnic ties to an ethically related minority population that resides within another recognized state.² Nationalism—the desire to create a state to match one’s nation (Gellner 1983)—can manifest itself in many ways.³ Irredentism is perhaps one of the most virulent and damaging forms.⁴ Irredentist wars produce tremendous costs for both aggressors and defenders, with considerable danger for the state attempting to regain lost territories and populations.

Why, then, do some countries engage in irredentism, when it can lead to their self-destruction? Why do others assert ethnic claims—perhaps in ways short of conquest—that risk the interests of the state in the international community? Is irredentism unavoidable?

If so, why have other states, given similar opportunities, refrained from the practice? Why do they remain silent dogs that do not engage in aggression? Some of the biggest surprises of the post–Cold War era are the wars that did not occur. While Armenia, Croatia, and Serbia engaged in expensive conflicts to enlarge their countries and incorporate kin living in neighboring territories, most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union remained largely at peace. Hungary nursed its grievances over territories lost after the First World War, but did not engage in aggression against Romania, Slovakia, or Serbia after the end of the Cold War. Romania, undergoing a very troubled transition, refrained from annexing Moldova, despite the existence and popularity of its Greater Romania Party. The end of the Soviet Union left twenty-five million Russians outside of Russia, and a political system ripe for nationalist rabble-rousers, but there has only been some talk of reunion with Belarus, far short of what could have been expected.⁵

Most studies of irredentism tend to consider only the most aggressive efforts (Gagnon 2004). To truly understand how irredentist wars develop, however, we have to consider the cases in which it could be expected, yet does not occur. Are there factors that cause one country to pursue a difficult and risky foreign policy of invasive war, and another state to stay way from such a self-destructive path, given similar opportunities?

The answers to these questions lie in the domestic politics within each country, specifically with the issue of what it takes for politicians to gain and stay in power. By looking at the impact of the domestic situation on foreign policy and studying cases that range across the spectrum—doing nothing, following assertive foreign policies on behalf of kin, and going to war—we can obtain a more coherent picture of the causes of war and the incentives for peace between states that share complex histories and ethnic groups.

In taking such an approach, we find a crucial irony played by nationalism in today’s (and yesterday’s) international politics: xenophobia—fear or hatred of all things foreign, and a central component of many extreme nationalisms—can serve as a brake on irredentism. Hate may actually produce peace, as troubling as that may sound. This is easiest to consider if one imagines irredentism as producing a massive wave of immigration. Any effort to enlarge a country’s boundaries would result in the inclusion of two kinds of foreigners in the new state—ethnic kin who reside nearby and other groups of people who do not share ethnic ties with the populace of the aggressive state. While some citizens (though not all) would prefer their kin to be members of their country, most would seek to exclude the other foreigners. Understanding that this dynamic might be in play requires us to take seriously what it means to be a successful nationalist, that is, a politician that is able to attract support via nationalist appeals,⁶ inasmuch as the answer is a bit more complicated than one might expect. By getting into the content of nationalisms—what does it mean to be a nationalist in one context versus another—we can understand why some nationalists seek territorial expansion while others would prefer to avoid it.

While the dynamics of xenophobia and nationalism are interesting in themselves and highly relevant for students of comparative politics and of Eastern Europe, they are primarily important here because