Felix Haaß presents his research on "War and Nationalism". This event is part of the International Security Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for International Security.
Can wars breed nationalism? Together with his co-authors Alexander De Juan (Osnabrück University), Carlo Koos (Chr. Michelsen Institute), Sascha Riaz (Harvard University), and Thomas Tichelbaecker (Princeton University), Felix Haaß argues that civilians’ indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that reinforce hostility towards war opponents, increase identification with their nation, and thereby strengthen support for nationalist parties.
The authors test their argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after the First World War. To measure localized war exposure, they machine-coded information on all 8.6 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. The empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level death rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties.
They show that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with high death rates. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a culture of war commemoration. The paper offers a micro-level, sociopsychological perspective complementing macro-theoretical top-down accounts on the effects of war on nationalism. It urges researchers to carefully consider regional differences in war exposure and subsequent changes in political attitudes and behaviors.
Speaker
Felix Haaß
Felix Haaß is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on democratic institutions after war, autocratic politics, and international security. Felix employs a wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods, drawing on archival, survey, cross-national, and geospatial data from historical and contemporary episodes of contentious politics. Current research topics include the effect of World War I on nationalism in the interwar period, the cadre management of the former GDR's bureaucracy, citizens in peace processes after civil wars, and the politics of personalized representation in dictatorships and democracies. Felix gained a B.A. in political science from the University of Mannheim, an M.A. in peace research and international politics from the University of Tuebingen, and holds a PhD in political science from the University of Greifswald.
