Abstract
Nationalist Movements Explained: Comparisons from Canada, Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland, by a distinguished sociologist of nationalist movements, focuses on explanations of such movements. It considers cases in four countries, emphasizing developments across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The first three—Canada, Belgium, and Spain—exhibit varieties of the movements in question. The fourth, Switzerland, largely does not. The book is an attempt to use these cases to refine existing theory.
Author Maurice Pinard constructs a scaffolding of theoretical concepts, so-called “determinants” of mobilization. These conceptual buckets recapitulate perspectives that scholars of social movements, including nationalist movements, have developed over some decades. If together they can be distilled to a suitable set of categories, then the question becomes how these categories can be fit together into a coherent theory of such movements. Pinard aims to accomplish this through considering his four cases in relation to the concepts he has assembled from the literature.
He offers concise overviews of the histories of nationalist mobilization and conflict in the four cases. These cases exhibit considerable internal heterogeneity (there are, for example, important differences between Basque, Catalan, and Galician movements in Spain, and Pinard essentially treats them as cases unto themselves). The book seeks to understand the patterns of change within and differences across the cases. That means there is much to explain, perhaps too much for one slender volume, because the processes in question wind through history along complicated paths.
Pinard works through the conceptual buckets, elaborating each, and considering his cases in relation to them. He begins with several kinds of what he calls social psychological factors. Motivations, he reminds us, are often complicated. Individuals attend to self-interest, to group interests, to grievances, and to moral obligations, among other possible motives. He reviews a number of theorists’ accounts of grievances (economic, political, and status-related) and finds them all limited, leaving us with the sense that motivations, including grievance-based motivations, for nationalist mobilization are highly diverse. Rather than a simple model of motivations, Pinard’s approach seems to lead back to complexity, indeterminacy, and ambiguity. A useful organizing idea, though, drawn from some of Pinard’s previous work, is that motivations always have internal, external, and success-expectancy components. These cases exhibit considerable differences in terms of motivations, across countries and movements and over time.
Pinard next discusses frames, since frames are meant to shape motivations. “Motivation starts when framing comes to an end” (p. 101), he writes. Framing, in a long tradition of sociological theorizing, consists basically of shared representations of problems, their causes, and ideas about how they could be changed. Individual motivations can sometimes be defined within such frames. Successful movements coordinate on shared frames. Yet it is difficult to draw sharp distinctions between such frames and the motivations linked to them. Where exactly is that point where “framing comes to an end”?
Pinard then presents values and beliefs as an additional set of social-psychological or cultural factors. The beliefs category “includes communal collective identities, solidarities, and loyalties, as well as nationalist beliefs and ideologies” (p. 107), whereas by “values” he has in mind the kinds of public opinion items measured in the World Values Survey. And yet once again, the categories seem to overlap, and this grouping seems like a conceptual grab bag, a residual category for cultural stuff. How, conceptually, do we separate such values and beliefs from the frames in which they are embedded? And why, we might wonder, are solidarities and loyalties in the same bucket as beliefs and values?
Pinard also discusses cycling processes under the broader category of social psychological factors. He has in mind here venerable works that emphasize recurrent patterns in which a movement, or support for a movement, grows, flatlines, and then declines. There is no doubt that social movements of various kinds, including nationalist movements, show trends of growth and decline over time. When these recur, it is reasonable for us to call them “cycles.” But it’s not apparent that these are factors that help explain movements so much as descriptions of the temporal sequencing of movements that need to be explained. Pinard has a long section in which he considers whether Inglehart’s theory of post-materialist values or Brand’s theory of cultural change better account for apparent cycles of nationalist mobilization, ultimately siding with the latter.
Pinard then turns his attention to his second major explanatory conceptual grouping, so-called “structural factors.” Broad transformations include all the intertwined processes that scholars used to call “modernization,” including the rise of growth-oriented economies, the modern state, formally open stratification, secularization, and many other such long-run trends. They also include demographic trends, such as the baby boom, and the macroeconomic performance of the societies in question. There is no doubt that all movements are situated in the contexts made by long-run historical trends and that in a certain sense those trends set the stage for the movements. The long-run trends, though, vary relatively little across the cases considered, to the point that Pinard focuses only on Quebec here. This suggests that for the kinds of questions he is asking these factors have little explanatory power.
Opportunities are another topic that has been much discussed in the literature on movements, treated here as another conceptual bucket, another structural factor or determinant. At a certain level, it is obvious that political opportunities shape the development of movements. As with some of the other concepts discussed, though, it’s possible to expand the idea of “opportunity” to the point that it encompasses most of the other factors. Pinard registers this critique, which others have made (p. 139). In his account, at least implicitly, political opportunities seem usually to be limited to opportunities emerging through shifts in formal political institutions (e.g., electoral openings or changes in institutional design).
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book focuses on what some would call meso-level structures. A key variety is what Pinard calls segmental structures. Here he has in mind relational patterns of separation versus integration of the kind that students of inter-group relations have considered for many years. He also includes organizational and resource mobilization structures as part of the mix. The overarching point is that for nationalist movements in particular, degree of segmentation is highly relevant, and that it interacts with the many other kinds of factors discussed. Once again, these interactions are complex and context-dependent.
Pinard’s book is an admirable effort to advance the theory of nationalist movements by using the conceptual pieces afforded by the last several decades’ literature on these and related questions. There is much to learn from it, about the cases and about the various concepts that have usefully been deployed by scholars. Yet the emergent theory is only as strong as the full set of concepts assembled allows it to be. From this reading, it’s not entirely clear that recent research on these questions—which seems like an intellectual tradition that has grown more by conceptual accretion than refinement or replacement—has yet converged on a fully coherent set of categories to facilitate the parsimonious explanation of nationalist movements. Indeed, the chapters that apply factors to cases in the end seem to offer not the neat dissection of movements into their component parts, but rather a series of partially overlapping lenses for considering aspects of the movements. This yields insightful glimpses and learned narratives, but not yet a fully satisfying theory of nationalist movements.