This new, memorial edition features Connor’s original thorough-going treatment of The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, 1984). His study of the evolution of the relationship between communism and nationalism since 1848 demonstrates that Marx and Engels were eager to wed the world revolutionary movement to the forces of nationalism despite the incompatibility of the two aims. Refined by Lenin, a strategy for harnessing nationalism to the world cause in a prerevolutionary situation contributed to the rise of communism in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia; a plan to accelerate the demise of nationalism in a post-revolutionary situation was far less successful. The original study is situated between memorials to Connor by Donold Horowitz and Brendan O'Leary, a Tribute to Connor’s contributions to the study of ethnonationalism, particularly his insightful assessment of “the unwithering national question” in Marxist-Leninist polities, and a new combined Afterword by Connor and Kaiser which reviews developments since 1984 and assesses the significance of the Marxist-Leninist experience for the study of nationalism.

Walker Connor, perhaps the leading student of the origins and dynamics of ethnonationalism, has consistently stressed the importance of its political implications. In these essays, which have appeared over the course of the last three decades, he argues that Western scholars and policymakers have almost invariably underrated the influence of ethnonationalism and misinterpreted its passionate and nonrational qualities. Several of the essays have become together they represent a rigorous and stimulating attempt to establish a secure methodological foundation for the study of a complicated phenomenon increasingly, if belatedly, recognized as the major cause of global political instability.


The book opens by reviewing a wide range of scholarship on ethnonationalism. Connor examines nineteenth-and early twentieth-century debate among British scholars on the viability and desirability of the multinational state, the American "nation-building" school of thought that dominated the literature on political development in the post-World War II era, and the recent explosion of literature on ethnonationalism. In the second part of the book, he shows how progress in the study of ethnonationalism has been hampered by terminological confusion, an inclination to perceive homogeneity even where heterogeneity thrives, an unwarranted tendency to seek explanation for ethnic conflict in economic differentials, and lack of historical perspective. The book closes with a consideration of the inherent limitations of rational inquiry into the realm of group-identity.