What is unchanged, and what has changed

In the twenty years since this book first appeared a revised edition has become necessary. The book's historical substance and central argument have remained unchanged. The aim is still to trace the longue durée emergence of nationalism in Europe as a transnational and ‘entangled’ process in intellectual and cultural history, and to do so by following its antecedent traditions, these being:

• – the post-1400 state-formation process;

• – the Enlightenment idea of popular sovereignty;

• – a long-standing discourse of ethnocentric stereotypes, opposing the domestic/familiar, ‘own’ cultural community against ethnotypes of foreigners; that discourse was systematized into schemata of ‘national characters’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

These three source traditions were fused into a political doctrine in the decades between Rousseau's Du contrat social (1762) and Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808). National thought and (in its political instrumentalization) nationalism have deeply affected cultural production (both knowledge production and artistic production), public opinion (the self-image around which communities defined themselves as a nation), and political agendas. In the century between the battles of Waterloo and Verdun, nationalism had manifested itself in three political modes:

• – as the adoption of ‘national’ cultural agendas by the centralizing 19th-century states;

• – as autonomist or separatist movements in self-defining cultural communities disaffected from the increasingly centralized state;

• – as unification programmes for self-defining cultural communities dispersed across different states.

In the process, the blueprint was created for the ‘nation-state’: an ideal one-on-one match between the state and its constituent ‘nation’ (i.e. the cultural community de-fining itself as such). Inasmuch as the ‘nation-state’ is still our default notion of proper or normal governance, the legacy of nationalism is still with us, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

All these elements have remained unchanged from the earlier editions and provide, in the outline as given here, the book's chapter structure. There are three reasons why a revised edition was considered timely. One is that the history of nationalism in Europe has gone through fresh twists and turns since the 1990s.