[War, revolution, and nation-making in Lithuania, 1914-1923. Tomas Balkelis]

ENTomas Balkelis’s excellent study of Lithuania during and after the First World War is one of a range of recent studies that focus on the role of violence and challenge the notion of November 1918 as a zero hour (Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, War in Peace. Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War; Joshua A. Sanborne, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire; Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923). The author argues that violence represented a “mobilizing moment” and thus became “an essential part of the formation of the Lithuanian nation state and identity”. According to Balkelis, war and violence had a profound impact on people, policies, and institutions that shaped the interwar Lithuanian state. In line with nationalism studies, Balkelis argues that war and violence helped identify the enemy and thus disseminate national identity. Although the author devotes much of his analysis to the experience of soldiers and civilians as well as to the long term legacy of violence on Lithuanian society, the study also provides significant insights into the impact of the First World War and the Russian Revolution on state building, and thus on an interwar order of polities that defined themselves as nation states. The crucial context for this, as the author convincingly argues, was the competition between two statebuilding projects (not only in Lithuania, but in much of the former Russian Empire’s periphery): both nationalist and Bolshevik projects attempted to capitalize on the social unrest brought about by war and revolution. [p. 1047-1048].