Nationalism and its logical foundations

the long version

This book contends that there is a fundamental logic underlying the participation of non-elites in the nationalist enterprise. In order to understand this logic we must cast aside the standard myopia ingrained in most Rational Choice analysis. Those blinders restrict the realm of payoffs to the pursuit of tangible goods and incorrectly assume that all group members - elites and non-elites alike - pursue the same payoffs. We cannot understand the true nature of nationalist movements until we take into account that elite and mass strata have different motivations for supporting the same cause. There is an elite calculus and a non-elite strategy simultaneously operating under the aegis of an ethnically defined and supposedly unitary operation.