A treatment of nationalism manifesting itself in an endless ordeal of wars and revolutions. Based on thousands of original and secondary sources in four languages, it is also cross-disciplinary, consulting works in psychology, neurology, sociology, anthropology, and political science.

Discussing the origins and devlopments of European nationalism, this text opens with an assessment of the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and further developments such as the unification of Italy and Germany respectively. It also examines the relationships between the concepts of liberalism, conservatism and nationalism.

This text analyzes nationalism in Europe from the French Revolution to the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Timothy Baycroft explains what characterizes modern nations, what the theoretical roots of nationalism are, and what interaction there has been with other significant theories. The book also presents reasons for the overwhelming importance of nationalism in the development of modern European history.

An up-to-date empirical and historiographical overview of the actual political relevance of nationalism and internationalism in post-war Europe. Adopting a largely chronological approach, Gerrits links the historiography of post-war Europe and the major theoretical approaches to nationalism with analysis of key historical developments and events.

This volume analyses and compares different forms of nationalism across a range of European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. It aims to put detailed studies of nationalist politics and thought, which have proliferated over the last ten years or so, into a wider European context. By means of such contextualization, together with new and systematic comparisons, What is a Nation? Europe 1789-1914 reassesses the arguments put forward in the principal works on nationalism as a whole, many of which pre-date the proliferation of case studies in the 1990s and which, as a consequence, make only inadequate reference to the national histories of European states. The study reconsiders whether the distinction between civic and ethnic identities and politics in Europe has been overstated and whether it needs to be replaced altogether by a new set of concepts or types. What is a Nation? explores the relationship between this and other typologies, relating them to complex processes of industrialization, increasing state intervention, secularization, democratization and urbanization. Debates about citizenship, political economy, liberal institutions, socialism, empire, changes in the states system, Darwinism, high and popular culture, Romanticism and Christianity all affected - and were affected by - discussion of nationhood and nationalist politics. The volume investigates the significance of such controversies and institutional changes for the history of modern nationalism, as it was defined in diverse European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. By placing particular nineteenth-century nationalist movements and nation-building in a broader comparative context, prominent historians of particular European states give an original and authoritative reassessment, designed to appeal to students and academic readers alike, of one of the most contentious topics of the modern period.