About this Book

The birthplace of the nation-state and modern nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was supposed to be their graveyard at the end of the twentieth. Yet, far from moving beyond the nation-state, fin-de-siècle Europe has been moving back to the nation-state, most spectacularly with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia into a score of nationally defined successor states. This massive reorganization of political space along national lines has engendered distinctive, dynamically interlocking, and in some cases explosive forms of nationalism: the autonomist nationalisms of national minorities, the "nationalizing" nationalisms of the new states in which they live, and the transborder nationalisms of the external national "homelands" to which they belong by shared ethnicity though not by citizenship. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu and the 'new institutionalist' sociology, and comparing contemporary nationalisms with those of interwar Europe, Rogers Brubaker provides a theoretically sophisticated and historically rich account of one of the most important problems facing the 'New Europe'.--Publisher description.