Building Nations from Diversity explores the question of whether the Canadian "mosaic" has differed from the American "melting pot" and provides an informative comparison of both countries' historical and present-day similarities and differences. Garth Stevenson examines the origins of Canada and the United States and their past experiences with incorporating selected immigrant groups, particularly Irish, Chinese, and Jews. Establishing the foundational ways in which they placed new groups within their societies, Stevenson then outlines how the US and Canadian systems developed immigration policy and handled difference, detailing their treatment of "enemy aliens" during both world wars, their experience with minority languages, and recent Islamophobia. He also studies the introduction of multiculturalism into the lexicon and policy of the two countries and presents a nuanced analysis of how its meaning is understood differently on opposite sides of the border. An accessible and illuminating work, Building Nations from Diversity highlights the substantial differences between the US and Canada but ultimately concludes that they are more similar than most realize and are probably becoming more alike.

A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer’s theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states’ capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.

Papers written as special lectures and seminar presentations between 1986 and 1995.

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.

What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this innovative work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups - individuals perceived as an ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state - are influenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups. Through a detailed study of the Balkans, Mylonas shows that how a state treats a non-core group within its own borders is determined largely by whether the state's foreign policy is revisionist or cleaves to the international status quo, and whether it is allied or in rivalry with that group's external patrons. Mylonas injects international politics into the study of nation-building, building a bridge between international relations and the comparative politics of ethnicity and nationalism.

This book argues that in a globalising world in which nation-states have to manage population flows and intensifying cultural diversity within their borders, multicultural policy and approaches have never been more important. The author takes an extended case study approach, examining Australia’s experiments with pragmatic forms of multiculturalism and multicultural policy since the early 1970s up to the present. The Public Life of Australian Multiculturalism challenges some larger assumptions about multiculturalism – either that it undermines national identity or that it is, and should strive to be, a post-national approach to identity issues. Instead, it argues that framing multiculturalism by inclusive national identity has been the key to multiculturalism’s continuity and general success in Australia. The book also directly challenges the claim that we have entered a post-multicultural world, making a case instead for the continuing relevance of pragmatic approaches to multiculturalism. Students and scholars researching in sociology, politics, migration, multiculturalism, ethnic and racial studies, nationalism, and identity studies will find this study of interest.

Nation-building imperatives compel citizens to focus on what makes them similar and what binds them together, forgetting what makes them different. Democratic institution building, on the other hand, requires fostering opposition through conducting multiparty elections and encouraging debate. Leaders of democratic factions, like parties or interest groups, can consolidate their power by emphasizing difference. But when held in tension, these two impulses—toward remembering difference and forgetting it, between focusing on unity and encouraging division—are mutually constitutive of sustainable democracy. ​Based on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork conducted in 2012–13, The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa explores various themes of nation- and democracy-building, including the emotional and banal content of symbols of the post-apartheid state, the ways that gender and race condition nascent nationalism, the public performance of nationalism and other group-based identities, integration and sharing of space, language diversity, and the role of democratic functioning including party politics and modes of opposition. Each of these thematic chapters aims to explicate a feature of the multifaceted nature of identity-building, and link the South African case to broader literatures on both nationalism and democracy.

In the face of global challenges and changes - some may even say because of them - one major dilemma looms large for citizens and leaders worldwide: how can we ensure that our countries address these challenges successfully? This book demonstrates that the answer can be found in a better match between the nature of modern bureaucracy and the spirit of modern democracy, as well as by improving methods and ideas for what the author terms 'cleaver governance' and better governability. Moreover, it suggests potential directions for improving governability and public management against the backdrop of the tension between bureaucracy and democracy that has given rise to increasing mistrust of and lack of confidence in public institutions. Building Strong Nations enriches the discussion about moving modern nations forward despite major problems such as the clash of ideologies, the overburdening of and expectations from public administration, and the growing instability in world economics and international relations.

"Some anthologies seem slapdash or opportunistic; others are labors of love, informed by a mastery of a particular field and a passion for sharing the heterogeneous richness of their documents. "Building the Nation" is happily one of the latter. . . . Vastly useful."--"Preservation"

Building the Nation draws from foreign-policy reports and interviews with U.S. military officers to investigate recent U.S.-led efforts to "nation-build" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heather Selma Gregg argues that efforts to nation-build in both countries focused more on what should be called state-building, or how to establish a government, rule of law, security forces, and a viable economy. Considerably less attention was paid to what might truly be called nation-building--the process of developing a sense of shared identity, purpose, and destiny among a population within a state's borders and popular support for the state and its government. According to Gregg, efforts to stabilize states in the modern world require two key factors largely overlooked in Iraq and Afghanistan: popular involvement in the process of rebuilding the state that gives the population ownership of the process and its results and efforts to foster and strengthen national unity. Gregg offers a hypothetical look at how the United States and its allies could have used a population-centric approach to build viable states in Iraq and Afghanistan, focusing on initiatives that would have given the population buy-in and agency. Moving forward, Gregg proposes a six-step program for state and nation-building in the twenty-first century, stressing that these efforts are as much about how state-building is done as they are about specific goals or programs.