The aim of this book is to give a cultural and intellectual history of national thought in Europe. What does that mean, and how does this hope to add anything new?

There is an overwhelming body of research on nationalism, much of which focuses primarily on social and political developments. Nationalism is, after all, a political ideology – one of the dominant ones of the last two centuries. The rise of nationalism is usually analysed as a factor in the development of states, or in the development of national consciousness and national cohesion as part of a society's development towards modernity. After initial work by intellectual historians such as Isaiah Berlin and Hans Kohn, the study of nationalism was given a more political and social orientation in the 1960s and 1970s, and received a huge upsurge following the work of Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and A.D. Smith in the 1980s. Most of these studies attempted, on the basis of various sample cases, to arrive at a model of nationalism as an ideology. For Gellner, nationalism was a side effect of modernization with its shifting patterns of education and economic scale enlargement, driven largely by intellectuals; in this ‘modernist’ view, a sense of national identity was fabricated by nineteenth-century nationalists. Hobsbawm, while also taking a modernist view, advocated a more ‘bottom up’ societal model, claiming that nationalism was an ideology born of the people rather than imposed by intellectuals; Anderson stressed the developing role of media and the growth of communication as a crucial factor. There were also anti-modernist voices, which insisted that national identity has been a long-standing ideological presence in Europe since long before the nineteenth century. A very prominent role in this debate was played by A.D. Smith, who sought to steer a middle course, opposing Gellner's modernism by tracing the pre-nineteenth century ethnic origins of nations, while at the same time arguing that these ethnic identities were largely subjective and underwent an ideological transformation and modern instrumentalization in the nineteenth century.

These debates have brought to the foreground two main questions: How ‘modern’ or recent is nationalism as a historical phenomenon?