Válka, armáda, stát a národ: byrokracie, disciplína a nacionalismus

The text deals with the connections between war, armed forces, nationstate and modern nation. The author mapes out selected research issues which demonstrate the interference between them. The first one is a role played by organized violence, and especially by the military forces in the nation-building process, the second one – the development of the national citizen army consisting of conscripts. The other such issues are the results of the industrialization of war and concomitant social processess, and the national army’s role as an agent which indoctrinated and imposed the disciplinary social control pattern on a most of the state’s male population. The author presents armed forces’s role as an institution, and a symbol of the nation, as well as war’s and armed forces’s role as building blocks of the national history. Despite the popular opinion about the crucial importance of nationalist ideas, which presumably induced whole populations to make unprecedent sacrifices in the name of the nation, the author suggests that modern organizational techniques and the modern dicipline were perhaps more important factors responsible for the political success of the nation-state, and later of the modern nation.