Abstract
To say that today we live in an age characterized by conflicting nationalisms is to risk proffering what appears to be a rather obvious truism. While recent television images of war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, to take but one example, may immediately come to mind, nationalism has been shaping the political agenda in Europe since the early nineteenth century. Indeed, as Hobsbawm (1990: 1) argues, ‘the last two centuries of the human history of the planet Earth are incomprehensible without some understanding of the term “nation” and the vocabulary derived from it.’
Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or whether it continues, albeit in different forms, perhaps.
(Edward Said, 1994: 1)
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© 1999 British Sociological Association
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Allan, S., Thompson, A. (1999). ‘The Time-Space of National Memory’. In: Brehony, K.J., Rassool, N. (eds) Nationalisms Old and New. Explorations in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27627-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27627-1_3
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