This book is the revised and expanded English version of the Dutch-language Nationaal denken in Europa: een cultuurhistorische schets (Amsterdam University Press, 1999). When it was decided to make that book available in English for a wider international readership, I took the opportunity to expand what was originally a survey handbook for students into an intervention in nationalism studies generally; an intervention which I thought was timely (despite the great amount of excellent work being done in that field, and the large number of existing publications) because I felt there was room for a view that was culturally oriented without reifying the notion of ‘culture’ into something static or primordial, and that was historically oriented without subordinating the cultural dimension of nationalism to its political one.

Portions of this book draw on previously published books and articles, referred to under my name in the bibliography. Some issues addressed here for the early nineteenth century are more extensively thematized in an ongoing project on the role of philologists and ‘men of learning’ in romantic and cultural nationalism; for that particular project, and its publications to date, I refer the reader to the website www.hum. uva.nl/philology.

When I have provided my own translations/paraphrases from non-English source material (rather than quoting published translations), the original is given with the source reference. Source references are given in the endnotes; the footnotes provide obiter dicta and information on side issues and background.

The form that this book has taken owes much to the European Studies programme at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, with its focus on the interaction between ideas and events, culture and politics, and European cross-border exchanges. I wish to thank my colleagues there, in particular the team with whom I teach the survey course on the cultural formation of Europe.

On going over this book I realized, even more than when I was first writing it, how deeply indebted my approach is to Hugo Dyserinck and his erstwhile Comparative Literature programme at Aachen University, where I studied in the 1970s. The fundamental tenets of this book (the contingent nature of state formation, the need to demythologize the discourse of national identity, the idea that nationalism is the political instrumentalization of ethnotypes, the link between romanticism and nationalism) all reflect the outlook of the Aachen comparatist school.