The historical impact of national movements in Europe has been dramatic and continues to be an issue of major importance. Leading historians authoritatively discuss European nationalism in its historical context.

The contributions in this volume, written by historians, political scientists and linguists, shed new light on the political development of the nationality question in Europe during the First World War and its aftermath, covering theoretical developments and debates, social mobilization and cultural perspectives.

This study of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union develops an original account of the interlocking and opposed nationalisms of national minorities, the nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national homelands to which they are linked by external ties.

Even before it collapsed into civil war, ethnic cleansing, and dissolution, Yugoslavia was an archetypical example of a troubled multinational mosaic, a state without a single national base or even a majority. Its stability and very existence were challenged repeatedly by the tension between the pressures for overarching political cohesion and the defense of separate national identities and aspirations. In a brilliant analysis of this complex and sensitive national question, Ivo Banac provides a comprehensive introduction to Yugoslav political history. His book is a genetic study of the ideas, circumstances, and events that shaped the pattern of relations among the nationalities of Yugoslavia. It traces and analyzes the history and characteristics of South Slavic national ideologies, connects these trends with Yugoslavia's flawed unification in 1918, and ends with the fatal adoption of the centralist system in 1921. Banac focuses on the first two and a half years in the history of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, because in his view this was the period that set the pattern for subsequent development of the national question. The issues that divided the South Slavs, and that still divide them today, took on definite form during that time, he maintains. Banac provides extensive treatment of all of Yugoslavia's nationalities; his sections on the Montenegrins, Albanians, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims are unique in the literature. In this unbiased account, all of the principals and groups assume a tragic fascination. When published in 1984, The National Question in Yugoslavia was the first complete introduction to the cultural history of the South Slavic peoples and to the politics of Yugoslavia, and it remains a major contribution to the scholarship on modern European nationalism and the stability of multinational states.

This volume examines the volatile nature and complex dynamics of national movements and ethnic conflict around the world.

The resilience of nationalism in contemporary Europe may seem paradoxical at a time when the nation state is widely seen as being 'in decline'. The contributors of this book see the resurgence of nationalism as symptomatic of the quest for identity and meaning in the complex modern world. Challenged from above by the supranational imperatives of globalism and from below by the complex pluralism of modern societies, the nation state, in the absence of alternatives to market consumerism, remains a focus for social identity. Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe takes a fully interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the 'national question'. Individual chapters consider the specifics of national identity in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Iberia, Russia, the former Yugoslavla and Poland, while looking also at external forces such as economic globalisation, European supranationalism, and the end of the Cold War. Setting current issues and conflicts in their broad historical context, the book reaffirms that 'nations' are not 'natural' phenomena but 'constructed' forms of social identity whose future will be determined in the social arena.

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of nationalist sentiment in East Asia, as in Europe. This comprehensive work explores how radical Chinese and Japanese thinkers committed to social change in this turbulent era addressed issues concerning national identity, social revolution, and the role of the national state in achieving socio-economic development. Focusing on the adaptation of anarchism and then Marxism-Leninism to non-European contexts, Germaine Hoston shows how Chinese and Japanese theorists attempted to reconcile a relatively new appreciation for the nation-state with their allegiance to a vision of internationalist socialist revolution culminating in stateless socialism. Given the influence of Western experience on Marxism, Chinese and Japanese theorists found the Marxian national question to be not merely one of whether the "working man has no country," but rather the much more fundamental issue of the relative value of Eastern and Western cultures. Marxism, argues Hoston, thus placed native Marxists in tension with their own heritage and national identity. The author traces efforts to resolve this tension throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and concludes by examining how the tension persists, as Chinese and Japanese dissidents seek identity-affirming modernity in accordance with the Western democratic model.