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Rating: 
Summary: somewhat unconnected and jargon-filled series of essays
Review: Rogers Brubaker, Professor of Sociology at UCLA and part-time teacher at the Central European University in Budapest, has written six decent essays on nationalism here which don't really comprise a full book. Originally published in such journals as 'Daedalus' and 'Ethnic and Racial Studies', the essays present some interesting new concepts for the study of nationalism like 'nationalizing states' (a process which Benedict Anderson might call 'official nationalism') and 'homeland nationalism' (where a nation-state has significant numbers of its cultural community located outside its borders, i.e. Germany between the world wars and Russia today).Yet Brubaker sometimes dips a bit much into jargon-filled sociological theory: for example, drawing from Pierre Bourdieu (who has a blurb on the back of the book), Brubaker defines a national minority as 'a dynamic political stance, or, more precisely, a family of related yet mutually competing stances.' Furthermore, he credits institutionalization too much for nationalism in the former USSR (i.e. Central Asia), calling nationalism a political phenomenon and thus not drawing enough attention to culture, language, religion, etc. Nonetheless the essays are worth a quick read, especially the one comparing Weimar Germany and contemporary Russia.
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