[War, revolution, and nation-making in Lithuania, 1914-1923] : recenzija

ENThe history of the Lithuanian nation is one often punctuated by war and acts of violence. The story of how the nation comes into being in the face of such adversity routinely takes place amidst such settings. However, this book, described modestly by its author “as an attempt at a social history of war” (p. 8), inverts that narrative, exploring the question of whether the modern Lithuanian nation emerged not in spite of war and violence, but because of it. This is the second book from Tomas Balkelis, Senior Research Fellow of the Lithuanian Institute of History. In 2009, Balkelis’ revised doctoral dissertation was published as “The Making of Modern Lithuania” with Routledge. It presented a nuanced social and cultural history of the Lithuanian intelligentsia, from their origins in the mid-1880s until the advent of the First World War. “War, Revolution, and Nation-Making”, as its author himself remarks in the preface, can “be viewed as a sequel” (p. v) to “Modern Lithuania”. This book arises from Balkelis’ involvement from 2009 to 2013 in the European Research Council funded project “The Limits of Demobilization: Paramilitary Violence in Europe and the Wider World, 1917–1923” at the University College Dublin’s Centre for War Studies. Published as part of Oxford University Press’ The Greater War series, under the general editorship of Professor Robert Gerwarth (UCD), director of the aforementioned project that ran from 2009 to 2015. [Extract, p. 281]