The train wrecks of modernization: Railway construction and national integration in Europe

A broad consensus in the social sciences views the rise and spread of nationalist ideologies and national identities across historical Europe as an outgrowth of economic, social, and political modernization in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite this consensus, there are few spatially and temporally disaggregated tests of the relationship between modernization processes and nationalism. More importantly, existing accounts yield unclear conclusions as to whether modernization led to national cohesion and increased stability in Europe’s multi-ethnic states or whether it destabilized them by fueling non-state nationalisms and separatist mobilization.

In this presentation, Lars-Erik Cederman will use the gradual expansion of the European railway network to investigate how one key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism between 1816 and 1945. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, country borders, and railway construction, he and his-coauthors have tested how the arrival of rails in non-core ethnic territories affected territorial conflict, secession, and independence claims. Difference-in-differences and event study models show that, on average and contrary to naïve interpretations of modernization theory, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization. Separatist responses to railway access concentrate in countries with small core groups and relatively weak state capacity and tend to emanate from demographically large and economically disadvantaged non-core groups. Exploratory analyses on causal mechanisms suggest that these effects are more likely to be explained by increasing market access than shorter travel times to national capitals. Overall, Cederman's research highlights a darker side of European modernization and cautions against drawing simplistic lessons for today’s multi-ethnic states.