| This dissertation addresses a need for international relations theory to account for and to explain nationalist phenomena and change in the international system. Currently dominant theories of international relations are strongly state-centric. They see the state as a fundamental unit of analysis that is unproblemmatically given, fail to inquire into its origins, or to delineate the state from the nation. They relegate domestic-societal interaction and sources of conflict and cohesiveness; such as ethnic, religious and cultural sources of identity and conflict; to the status of ephiphenomena. I directly engage these theoretical problems. Historical change in the legitimating principles, and of the institutional composition of the international system, are demonstrated to be dependent on the independent variable of societal collective identity. The relative modernity of national collective identity is shown to have significant implications for the current structure of modern international relations. Societal self-identification is demonstrated to have had causal significance for the state identities and interests in the transition from what I call "territorial-sovereign" identity that arose at the Westphalian settlement of the Thirty Years War, to the "national-sovereign" identity that had manifest itself in Europe by the late nineteenth century. State interests and behavior emerge from this analysis as variable products of the evolution of societal collective identity. The emergence of national-sovereign identity has brought significant changes in the behavior of nineteenth and twentieth century national-sovereign nation-states relative to the behavior of the territorial-sovereign states of the eighteenth century. The behavioral differences are explained as manifestations of the transformation of the historically contingent notions of interest that derive from the distinct sovereign identities that emerge between the two periods. Historical events examined include the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Concert of Europe, the Revolution of 1848, the Danish-Prussian War, the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian War, imperialism before and after 1870, and the First World War. |
