Brubaker The Reframing Of Nationalism Summary

Starting with the title, Brubaker speaks of the reframing of nationalism. What is it that he means by reframing nationalism? In the context of the contents of Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, reframing can be taken in both a literal and figurative sense. Starting with the later, Brubaker reframes the developmentalist approach towards nationalism. Brubaker finds that nationalism is not something that exists or creates the nation, but that is a category of practice. To understand this, it becomes necessary to understand that the nation exists not in and of itself, but as an institutionalized form. What is then meant by this is that the nation exists not as a substance of itself, but institutionally,
The book’s layout works well for the ideas that Brubaker tries to get across to the audience, and is well organized in terms developing and presenting the themes in an orderly manner. My one complaint about this type of organization is that there is a lot of repetition throughout the chapters in Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, as the themes play important parts in the understanding of each case study Brubaker deeply analyzes. While the book itself does not drone on and on in length and exposition as one might be led to believe from the previous statement. Rather, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe is not a long book at all, and it never gets tedious in its reading and flow. However, I will say that the repetition within the book does interfere with some of the analysis of the case studies, in particular the case study of chapter three, in which Brubaker looked at the breakdown of Yugoslavia. If it was not for the detailed accounts, analyzes and comparisons within the other chapters, I would have not said anything directly and would have just assumed that the theory was a bit more important than the case studies to which the theory is applied. My complaint about chapter three might be unjustified as it is in a chapter that is in part one of the book, which Brubaker himself stated in the introduction focuses more on the theory, and the detailed case studies would come in the second part. But in my defense, the chapter before the chapter involving Yugoslavia and the development of the understanding on national minorities and homeland nationalisms does provide a detailed account of Soviet policies towards nations and