It has turned out much easier for specialists on earlier periods of history to criticise modernists for their historical myopia than to offer an alternative account of equal substance. They are as united in their rejection of modernist theories as they are divided in their historical location of nationalism’s origins. Some declare early medieval England the first nation state; others see it all beginning with the Bible and take the ancient Jews for the fathers of nationalism; some only speak of a pre-modern ‘ethnic’ prologue leading up to the modern nation, while others prefer to speak of pre-modern patriotism turning into modern nationalism; some, including myself, relate the first forms of nationalism to Renaissance humanism, and others treat it as an anthropological constant in many ways similar to animal behaviour.

Thus, many anti-modernists today have actually more in common with certain modernists than with other anti-modernists. Still – and this makes things even worse – they tend to be lumped together as ‘primordialists’ by their modernist opponents, a term reflecting the general confusion about constructivism, as it implies that arguing for pre-modern forms of nation formation is incompatible with a constructivist approach. So the ongoing dominance of modernists in nationalism studies owes a lot to the chronic weakness displayed by anti-modernists.