Abstract
At the end of World War II the countries of Western Europe were thought of as nation-states. With the major exceptions of Great Britain, and later the German Federal Republic and Austria, their Jacobin model stemmed directly from the French Revolution and Napoleon β the centralized unitary state. Nationalism was freshly awake in formerly colonialized Asia and soon thereafter in Africa, but Western European nationalism seemed a thing of the past, the term even colored with the stain of the barbaric nationalism of Nazism. Today, in many regions of Western Europe, regional sub-nationalism has both undermined Jacobin centralism and in effect altered the British constitution. There is a conventional notion that the existing national state system (whether centralized or not) is the final historical form of political organization. Here I investigate whether this is true or, as Michael Keating has suggested, βan asymmetrical state will replace the old paradigm,β one not dissimilar to premodern systems.1
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Notes
Michael Keating, βFederalism and Compounded Representation in Western Europe,β Publius, 29 (1999): 1, 71β86.
Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 112
Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 102.
Montserrat Guibernau, βNationalism and Intellectuals in Nations without States: the Catalan Case.β Working Paper (Barcelona: Institut de CiΓ¨ncies PolΓtiques i Socials (ICPS), 2003), 4.
Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3rd edition (London: Hutchinson, 1966), 9.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 156; Kedourie, Nationalism, 1;
Ernest Gellner, Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 69.
Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner, βThe Nation: Real or Imagined?β University of Warwick debate, October 24, 1995, Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996): 3, 366β70.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, revised edition, 1991), 5β6.
Richard Finlay, βNational Identity,β The Oxford Companion to Scottish History, ed. Michael Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 441.
David McCrone, βRedesigning the UK: The Politics of Devolution,β in The Conditions of Diversity in Multinational Democracies, A.-G. Gagnon et al., eds. (Montreal: The Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2003), 136.
On the Four Motors, see, inter alia, John Loughlin, ββEurope of the Regionsβ and the Federalization of Europe,β Publius 26 (1996): 4, 141β62.
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Β© 2012 Julius W. Friend
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Friend, J.W. (2012). Introduction. In: Stateless Nations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008206_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008206_1
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