John Breuilly

Breuilly's core claim is that nationalism should be understood as a form of politics that arises in opposition to the modern state. Rather than seeing nationalism as an expression of pre-existing cultural identity, he argues that nationalist movements use appeals to national identity as a tool to mobilize support for acquiring or exercising state power. Elites, social groups, and even foreign governments deploy nationalist rhetoric strategically. Nationalism, in this framework, is a means of creating a sense of identity for political purposes, not a reflection of an already existing collective consciousness .

Breuilly developed a classification system based on the relationship between nationalist movements and state power. He distinguishes three primary types: separatist nationalism, which seeks to break away from an existing state; reformist nationalism, which aims to transform or capture an existing state from within; and unificationist nationalism, which seeks to merge separate political units into a single new state. He further categorizes movements by whether they oppose an existing state or a non-state political organization. This typology enables systematic comparative analysis across different historical cases .

Both are modernists who reject primordialist accounts of nations, but their mechanisms differ. Gellner explains nationalism as a structural product of industrial society's need for cultural homogeneity—a functionalist account rooted in economic requirements. Breuilly focuses on political competition for state power. For Breuilly, nationalism is not a response to industrial needs but a political strategy deployed by actors seeking to control the state. Gellner asks why nationalism emerged when it did; Breuilly asks who uses nationalist appeals and for what political purposes. Their shared modernism masks different causal priorities .

Breuilly challenges the conventional view that nationalism is an expression of pre-existing cultural identity. He argues instead that nationalist movements actively construct and deploy ideas of national identity as tools for political mobilization. Elites and social groups facing political opportunities or threats use nationalist appeals to rally support against or for the state. The sense of shared national identity is often a product of nationalist politics rather than its cause. This reverses the standard causal story and places political strategy, not cultural sentiment, at the center of analysis .

The most significant criticism is that Breuilly conflates politics with the state, restricting his analysis to conflicts centered on state power. Critics argue that politics operates across diverse sites and institutions beyond the state, and that nationalism materializes through multiple interacting domains—cultural, religious, and social—that Breuilly's framework neglects. By focusing exclusively on state-oriented political competition, he cannot fully account for how nationalist ideology and practice circulate through non-state arenas. This limits the explanatory reach of his model for understanding nationalism's cultural and everyday dimensions .

Breuilly has been Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics since 2004. Before that, he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham from 1995 to 2004, and prior to that lectured in history at the University of Manchester from 1972 to 1995. He received his D.Phil from the University of York in 1979 and holds a first degree in History and Politics from York. He has held visiting professorships at Hamburg and Bielefeld and a research fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin .

First published in 1982 and revised in 1993, Nationalism and the State became established as a central work on modern nationalism. It is recognized as one of the most comprehensive and systematic historical comparisons of nationalist politics, covering cases from early modern Europe through German and Italian unification, Habsburg and Ottoman separatism, fascism, anti-colonialism, and post-Soviet resurgence. Breuilly's political framework offered a distinctive alternative to both Gellner's functionalism and Anderson's culturalism, establishing him as a key figure in the modernist paradigm alongside those theorists .