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Overview
Relying on a comparative perspective, this book fills the gaps among political, sociological, and historical analysis of separatism. Instead of starting, as is traditional, from a preconceived conception of nationalism, Roehner's approach reverses the perspective. He shows how the forms taken by liberation struggles provide a "fingerprint" of the kind of nationalism at work. For instance, bloody and desperate uprisings taking place mainly in rural areas are typical of a nation that has been deprived of its land, as seen in eighteenth-century Ireland or nineteenth-century New Zealand. On the other hand, protestation meetings taking place in cities reveal a revolt of the ruling class against political subordination as seen in Hungary in the nineteenth century, in Egypt or Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century, or in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Moreover the sociohistorical perspective adopted in this study reveals that religion and language are but two different facets of a nation's identity. In seventeenth-century Europe, religion was the principal social cement, but during the nineteenth century, languages progressively took over the role formerly assumed by religions. Through its broad perspective, this book allows new insight into the various ways separatism is likely to manifest itself in the world of the twenty-first century, and it provides a framework for understanding the diverse components of nationalism.