Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

 1. The volume by Ther and Sundhausen, eds, Regionale Bewegungen und Regionalismen in den europäischen Zwischenräumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts a bi-lingual collection of case studies, and the special issue ‘Regionalismus und Regionalisierungen in Diktaturen und Demokratien des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Comparativ 13, no. 1 (2003), are examples of a wider trend that has manifested itself in most national historiographies across Europe.

 2. This influential paradigm for interpreting the political geography of early modern Europe was coined in Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies”.

 3. The classic formulation of modernisation theory is the five-stage model developed by Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. See also Abrams, Historical Sociology, especially chapter 5, 108–46; and, more critically, and Attir et al. , eds, Directions of Change. An excellent survey of the connection between modernisation and nation-building is Eley and Grigor Suny, eds, Becoming National.

 4. Roger Griffin explored the notion of ‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’ as the true core of all fascist regimes in his The Nature of Fascism , and revisited the concept, while focusing on its links with a modernist ethos, in his Modernism and Fascism .

 5. The historiography of the failure of Italian nation-building is explored in more detail in Laven and Baycroft's contribution in this issue.

 6. Weber, The Protestant Ethic , famously argued that the modern, capitalist mind was a sublimated form of Protestantism, which is no longer conscious of its religious meaning.

 7. For example Anderson, Practicing Democracy; Déloye, Les Voies de Dieu; Skillen and Carlson-Thies, “Religion and Political Development in Nineteenth-Century Holland”.

 8. Kaufman, Consuming Visions ; David Blackbourn, Marpingen.

 9. Griffin, ed., Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion ; Gentile, Politics as Religion; and, specifically on fascism, idem, “Fascism as Political Religion”. An alternative reading of the connection of religion and National Socialism is Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, which has been criticised by advocates of the ‘secular religion’ approach, such as Milan Babík, in his “Nazism as a Secular Religion”. For a more general treatment of the affinities between modern nationalism and religious sentiment, see Geyer and Lehmann, eds, Religion und Nation.

10. The idea of ‘Heimat’ was long interpreted as a reaction against modernity, for example in Klueting, ed., Antimodernismus und Reform, and Hartung, Konservative Zivilisationskritik und regionale Identität am Beispiel der niedersächsischen Heimatbewegung 1895 bis 1919; Kramer, ‘Die politische und ökonomische Funktionalisierung von Heimat im deutschen Imperialismus und Faschismus’; and Williams, “The Chords of the German Soul are tuned to Nature”. The contributions in this issuee, especially by Núñez and Umbach, and by Wright and Clark, trace how this evaluation has been challenged in new work on Germany and beyond.

11. This paradigm refers to the notion that all political space is structured by a mutually constitutive relationship between a dominant ‘centre’ that depends on the subjugation and exploitation of a ‘periphery’. First popularised for cultural geographers and historians by Reynaud, Société, espace et justice, it is most frequently invoked in the study of the so-called Third World and its relations to the West.

12. The invited speakers were Timothy Baycroft (Sheffield); Richard Bellamy (UCL); Alon Confino (Virginia); Christopher Clark (Cambridge); Christopher Duggan (Reading); Andreas Fahrmeir (Köln); John Foot (UCL); Christopher Harvie (Tübingen); Michael Keating (EUI, Florence); Benoît Majerus (Luxemburg); Yaron Matras (Manchester); Macro Meriggi (Federico II, Naples); Alexei Miller (Central European University, Budapest); Xosé-Manoel Núñez Seixas (Santiago de Compostela); Ulrike von Hirschausen (GWZO, Leipzig); Robin Okey (Warwick); Carmen Popsecu (Sorbonne, Paris IV); Thies Schulze (Freie Universität, Berlin); Vera Tolz (Manchester); Julian Wright (Durham).

13. Canales Serrano, “El robo de la memoria”; Aguilar, “The Memory of the Civil War in the Transition to Democracy”; Núñez, “Die Diktatur vergessen, um die Nation zu retten: Das historische Gedächtnis und der ‘neopatriotische’ Diskurs in Spanien”. For a fuller discussion of this historiography, see the contribution by Núñez and Umbach in this issue.

14. Interview with Ramón Serrano Súñer, Destino 97, no. 8 (January 1939), unpaginated.

15. Georg Reimer, director of the office of cultural affairs of Leipzig, in 1938, quoted from Dahm, “Nationale Einheit und partikulare Vielfalt ”, quotation 226.

16. This is the subject of a newly emerging literature, as represented by John et al., eds, Die NS-Gaue , discussed by Núñez and Umbach in this issue.

17. Lynch , “Woodrow Wilson and the principle of national self-determination: A Reconsideration”.

18. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism . See also Kuzio, “The Myth of the Civic State”. For a critique of Kohn's typology, see Baycroft and Hewitson, eds, What Is a Nation?

19. Cited in Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border, 161.