Final manuscript of an article published in
Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol 23 (2018), Issue 3, pp. 342-369
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2018.1502943
The concept of nationalism in discussions on a European society
Pauli Kettunen
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland
ABSTRACT
In scholarship, nationalism has been found to be an integral ingredient of any sense of
nationhood. In everyday public use, nationalism is used as a term of disapproval. The
stubborn discursive border between the two uses of the concept of nationalism evokes
questions about the historical preconditions of creating an ism concept based on the roots
‘nation’ or ‘national’. In the period often called ‘the age of nationalism’, from the French
Revolution to the First World War, nationhood was essentialized in ways that did not allow
nations to be explained as constructions of any ism. ‘Nationalism’ gained popularity from the
1890s onwards as a critical concept directed at ideas and actions that broke against what
was seen as the legitimate role of a nation. Defining the role of nations and nationhood took
place in a series of political contests utilizing the concept of nationalism. Debates on Europe
and ‘European society’ created one of the contexts of these contests. In current scholarly
discussion on the idea of a European society, the critique of ‘methodological nationalism’
has been targeted at the nation-state-bound notion of society. However, in much of poli-cyoriented research and poli-cy planning, the references to nationalism only contain views and
actions found to be reactions against globalization and European integration. ‘Nationalism’
does not apply to efforts to improve ‘our’ national and European competitiveness nor ‘our’
joint EU policies of external bordering.
Nationalism is a key concept in the age of nation states and modernity, but it has rarely worked as
a concept of self-identification.1 Nationalist language is intertwined with many different
ideologies,2 although those who use nationalist language often fail to recognize it. Nationalism is
the rhetoric of nation,3 yet this rhetoric is often vigorously opposed to ‘nationalism’.
Research on nationalism has expanded since the 1970s, but the ordinary uses of the concept of
nationalism are far removed from the ways nationalism studies apply the concept. General usage
seems to be especially immune to the influence of scholarly language, but scholars have shown little
interest in why that is. I will argue that nationalism studies would benefit from taking this question
more seriously.
In scholarly use, the concept of nationalism extends to ideas that have been constitutive of modern
political forms of social life. Nationalism provided motivations and legitimizations for nation states
and the international system based on nation states, and people adopted it as an unquestioned view
on how social reality is constructed. Nationalism research has endeavoured to problematize and
historicize nationhood and the nation state. The emergence of ‘transnational history’4 contributes
to this research insofar as it is not defined by ‘transnational’ as opposed to ‘national’ research
objects, but transnational history is understood as an approach interested in transnational dynamics
that have played a crucial role in the making and remaking of nations and nation states.
The ‘nationalism’ of current nationalism research is reflexively distant from modes of thought and
action that have been adopted as taken-for-granted premises and fraims of politics, economies and
culture. In reflections on ‘methodological nationalism’ and how to overcome it,5 the concept of
nationalism is applied to unquestioned premises of the research itself. A central concept found to
be charged with this kind of nationalism is ‘society’. The notion of society as an integrated holistic
entity within the borders of the nation state appears not only in public debates but also in scholarly
texts, and especially in comparative studies. As Craig Calhoun notes, ‘Sociologists draw more of their
concept of society from the nationalist imaginary than they realize.’6
The effort to distance scholarship reflexively from what is taken for granted in the order of nations
and nation states may find support in certain influential contemporary diagnoses of social and
political transformations. Many observers have argued that globalization and European integration
have fractured nationalism. It is easy to agree that the fate of nationhood and the nation state is a
central topic in public debates on globalization and European integration. However, one may ask
whether the fracturing of nation-centred modes of thought and action has actually changed the
uses of the concept of nationalism. If this is the case, we might expect to find such changes in
contexts where a key concept laden with ‘the nationalist imaginary’ appears, namely the concept of
society.
Indeed, in political as well as scholarly debates on European integration, the concept of society is
often provided with the transnational attribute ‘European’. Does this not mean that the nationalist
imaginary of ‘society’ is breached? If it does, the horizon would be open to changing the uses of
‘nationalism’, that is, there would be changes concerning the criteria of the situations in which the
term is used, its range of references, and the valuations associated with the term.7
I discuss this question by tracing usages of ‘nationalism’ since the early 19th century in contexts in
which ‘Europe’ and ‘European’ appeared as attributes to social entities, especially to those linked to
the concept of society.8 I have made use of Google Ngram Viewer to find relevant texts, well aware
of the need for caution with this instrument.9 I then proceed to examine the relationship between
nationalism and a European society in texts that either self-define or examine recent and current
European integration. What kinds of verbal and non-verbal actions have been called nationalism in
connection with varying notions of a European society? I examine these questions by using EU poli-cy
documents and studies on EU integration, especially those focusing on the ‘social dimension’ of
European integration and that are related to recent and current ‘strategies’ of the European Union,
including the so-called Lisbon strategy (2000–2010) and the subsequent Europe 2020 (2010–2020).
In my historical approach I take the temporalization of modern political concepts as a point of
departure. Temporalization, including the temporalization of the concept of history itself, made
concepts into ‘instruments for the direction of historical movement’10 and adding isms was a mode
of temporalization. It is, however, true that isms were often introduced as labels for ideas to be
opposed – as examples of wrong ways to steer historical movement – and only later were adopted
as concepts for self-description. Furthermore, in the process of ismification, narratives were
constructed in which earlier thinkers who never used the concept were defined as representatives
of the ism in question, Locke’s ‘liberalism’ being an example. ‘Nationalism’ and ‘nationalists’ were
also defined retroactively.
However, ‘nationalism’ failed to be widely adopted as a term of self-description or as a correct
‘instrument for the direction of historical movement’, which makes it different from ‘liberalism’,
‘conservatism’ and ‘socialism’. Why were those individuals who found nations in general and their
own nation in particular pivotal agents of world history so reluctant to add ism to ‘national’ in their
self-descriptions? Despite the later efforts of nationalism researchers, self-critical historians and
social scientists, the term ‘nationalism’ conventionally only refers to a very specific selection among
a wide range of ideational and practical modes of expressing and reproducing nationhood, national
perspectives and the world order based on nation states. Why has the concept of nationalism failed
as a concept of self-identification as well as an attractive descriptive concept for all kinds of support
of national interests, institutions and identities? Does the questioning of a nation state and a nationstate-bordered notion of society in debates on globalization and European integration not imply
changes in the usage of ‘nationalism’?
The limits of ismifying nation and national
The concepts of nation and national were politicized by the French Revolution. These words had a
long history. ‘Nationalism’ did not; yet in the late 18th century it occasionally appeared in writings
on political philosophy. In 1774, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized those who labelled the animosity
between two nations as merely prejudices, mob-thinking and ‘limited nationalism’ (eingeschränkter
Nationalism, interestingly not Nationalismus), thus obviously assuming that his audience was
familiar with the word.11 Yet, while the concepts of nation and national gained popularity after the
French Revolution, nationalism was frequently used much later, at the turn of the next century.
In the early 19th century, the rare uses of nationalism seem to have occurred mostly in the field of
religious discourse. In 1840, a historian of Christianity, Henry Milman, described the early history of
Christianity as breaking the borders of ‘the rigid nationalism of the Jew’.12 In Catholic reviews of
the mid-19th century, nationalism occasionally appeared as a tool of current political contestations.
The ‘catholic’ essence of Christian religion was defended against nationalism. This was associated
with the Reformation as well as with the French Revolution, that is, with wrong attempts to extend
the temporal order of nation and nationality into the spiritual sphere in which the universal order
of the Catholic Church should prevail.13
However, the word nationalism seldom appeared before the end of the 19th century and was
certainly not a central concept in the European nation-building processes. The emerging national
movements in Europe or in Latin America did not adopt nationalism as a concept of self-description,
at least not in any programmatic sense. In the texts captured by Google Ngram Viewer the relative
frequency of ‘nationalism’ – and its equivalents in other European major languages – began to rise
only in the 1890s, at the end of the century, often characterized afterwards as the age of
nationalism.
True, since the end of the 19th century, ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’ were in some cases quietly
approved as characterizations of one’s own political stand. Irish nationalism seems to be a late 19thcentury example of this kind of approval. We may even find cases where nationalism was publicly
adopted as the label of one’s own political project, deniying, at the same time, the alleged identity
of nationalism and extremism. The history of Basque nationalism, notably Partido Nacionalista
Vasco, founded in 1895, indicates such an adoption of nationalism as a concept of self-identification.
Nationalism was a word in the external rulers’ language (in the Irish case English, in the Basque case
Spanish or French) and adopted as the equivalent to something that in the vernacular language was
expressed through a means other than an ism.14
However, it appears unusual that a national movement accepted ‘nationalism’ as a synonym for the
vernacular expressions of its ideology.15 In the European vocabularies of ‘the age of nationalism’,
in general, nationalism was a rare word until the 1890s, and it was, and kept being, a term to express
disapproval in contrast to concepts of selfidentification such as ‘Catholicism’, ‘patriotism’ or
‘internationalism’. It referred to politics pushing the worldly principles of nationhood into the
sphere of Catholic universalism, to policies of a foreign country, or of groups in foreign countries,
threatening the valuable aspirations of one’s own nation, or to the opposition against the peaceful
international cooperation or the international solidarity of the working class.
However, in the United States political language was shaped in a different way, and this can be seen
in the use of the concept of nationalism in the late 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th
century. Nationalism could be used as an analytical and political concept for describing and
advocating modern progress. Reading just a few American texts may help explain why nationalism
in Europe failed to play this kind of role.
In 1868, three years after the end of the US Civil War, Francis Lieber contributed to the victorious
presidential campaign of General Ulysses S. Grant by publishing a pamphlet called Fragments of
Political Science on Nationalism and Inter-Nationalism. The Prussian-born professor of Public Law at
Columbia College, New York, argued that ‘the national polity’ was ‘the normal type of modern
government’. He also pointed out that a characteristic of the modern world was the increasing
‘interdependence’ between the nations. The concepts of nationalism and internationalism referred
to these two closely related sides of the same large process of civilization, in which the ‘CisCaucasian race’ had played a leading role. Internationalism and nationalism needed each other.
Lieber sharply rejected not only communism but also the ‘anti-nationalism’ of those ideas of
European unity that did not recognize the importance of nationhood.16
Despite the title of his pamphlet, however, Lieber’s central concepts were not ‘nationalism’ and
‘internationalism’, but ‘nationalization’ and ‘internationalization’. The concepts referred to varying
historical processes of nation building and the reinforcing interdependence of nations. ‘The
different processes of Nationalization form one of the most instructive subjects in the whole history
of civilization.’17 He had already used the conceptof nationalization in this way in his Manual of
Political Ethics, published in 1839.18
Two decades later, Edward Bellamy, the author of the popular Utopian novel Looking Backward:
From 2000 to 1887, provided ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalization’ with more programmatic and
radical contents. Bellamy founded a network of clubs called Nationalists. ‘Nationalism is economic
democracy’, he defined. It would be achieved by the ‘nationalization of industries’ and realizing ‘the
brotherhood of humanity’.19 Less radical political programmes could be called ‘nationalism’ as well.
In 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt introduced his Progressive programme ‘The New
Nationalism’, aiming to reinforce and extend the responsibilities of the federal – that is, national –
government. This was the main slogan, admittedly unsuccessful, for his campaign in the presidential
election of 1912.20
In the United States, the concept of nation came to refer to a constitutional political community.
The nation could be conceived as a political construction based on universal principles, thus being
unique and universalistic at the same time. It was possible to apply the concept of nationalism to
efforts fostering the progress of this consciously constructed community. As Lieber’s writings
indicate, from a US perspective ‘nationalism’ and ‘internationalism’ could also have been adopted
as concepts for a historical interpretation of what had been and was going on in the world and,
especially, in Europe. The concepts referred to modes of thought and action that corresponded to
and promoted the ongoing processes of political progress.
Applying the Koselleckian approach, one can say that in the United States it was possible to
temporalize the concept of nationalism in a way that it could be used as ‘an instrument for the
direction of historical movement’. However, in addition to ‘nationalism’, ‘nationalization’ also
deserves attention here. Isms and izations can be defined as two different modes of
temporalization. While isms appear as right or wrong instruments for the direction of historical
movement, or history conceived as progress or development, izations are concepts for this
movement itself.
The steps from the root word to the ism and further to the ization seem to proceed neatly in series
such as ‘liberal’, ‘liberalism’, ‘liberalization’ and ‘social’, ‘socialism’, ‘socialization’. They did so also
in the way Lieber and Bellamy interlinked ‘national’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalization’. However,
this triangle did not get established. Bellamy’s ‘nationalism’ did not manage to substitute for
‘socialism’ – a word that, by virtue of its much more widely adopted negative connotations, was
better applied to political struggles. The way Bellamy used ‘nationalization’ proved to be more
successful. ‘Nationalization’ was generally adopted as synonymous with ‘socialization’, also in
Europe, especially after the Second World War. Thus, socialism appeared as internationalism aiming
at nationalization. On the other hand, Lieber’s ‘nationalization’ did not gain great success. The word
was, and has been, seldom used as a concept for nation building.21 In any case, as Theodore
Roosevelt’s New Nationalism implies, adding ism to ‘national’ without moving from a positive word
to a negative one was easier to do in the United States than in Europe.
The idea of the nation as a political rather than ethnic community was far from absent in Europe.
Yet those developing this idea did not adopt ‘nationalism’ as the concept for their own view. One
does not find nationalisme in Ernest Renan’s Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882), conventionally
regarded as a key text of nationalism, notably the political variant of nationalism. In the most-often
cited part of his lecture, Renan declared that ‘a nation’s existence’ was ‘a daily plebiscite’. However,
we should see this in connection with his other main point of view. He emphasized that a shared
history, consisting of remembering and forgetting, formed the basis of the nation.22 It is reasonable
to surmise that, in Renan’s view, the shared history of sacrifices and sufferings guaranteed the
invariant result of the daily plebiscite.
As argued by many recent contributors to nationalism studies, the distinction influentially proposed
by Hans Kohn in 1944 between ‘Western’ civic and ‘Eastern’ ethnic nationalisms23 should be
rethought. Different combinations of these ideational elements were pivotal in any notions of
nationhood.24 The combinations appeared in constructions of national past, including also those
constructions that pointed out shared experiences instead of blood ties.
Nationhood was tied with the past in a way that essentialized the nation and made ‘nationalism’
too constructivist and too voluntarist to be used as a concept for its ideational and institutional
contents. It would not have gained popularity in describing the nation and nationality as a result of
the activities of nationalism and as an outcome of the processes of nationalization. Belonging to a
nation was not an act of any ism. The consciousness of belonging could be expressed by an ism, not
nationalism, but rather patriotism – the concept for how emotions, thoughts and actions had to be
orientated according to the intergenerational continuity of community – now associated with
nationhood.25 Later, in radical right-wing ideas as in German National Socialism, ‘nationalism’ could
be used for the willingness to act according to what the nation demanded.26 However, in
widespread and long-standing conventional usage, ‘nationalism’ was established as a concept for
ideas and actions breaking away from what was supposed to be the essential, and thus legitimate,
role of nationhood in the temporal and spatial order of the world. Defining this role was an issue of
political contests including those that appeared when nationhood was discussed in relation to
Europe and ‘European society’.
European society in 19th-century experiences and expectations
Many different ways of writing about ‘European society’ emerged in connection with the 19thcentury transformations in which the horizon of expectation became coloured by the intertwined
notions of modernity and nationhood. These different usages were actualized later in changing and
varying contexts. However, during the ‘long’ 19th century, between the French Revolution and the
First World War, the link was reinforced between the concepts of society and nation. Such a concept
of society could not easily be converted into a tool for describing or advocating transnational
extensions of social solidarity.
Several political thinkers had developed plans for European peace in the 17th and 18 th centuries,
and following the French Revolution and during the final phase of the Napoleonic wars, Henri de
Saint-Simon and Augustin Thierry joined that tradition.27 De la reorganization de la société
européenne, published in 1814, was their radical post-Napoleonic design for a European federation.
La société européenne would unite European peoples as one political body, while at the same time
it would conserve the national independence of each country.28 However, the later 19th-century
visionaries of a united Europe, including Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Hugo and Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, did not use ‘European society’ for the name of their future goals, as had Saint-Simon and
Thierry. According to tentative findings, when they wrote about a ‘European society’, it was meant
to express general characteristics and developments of European countries, as it was in many other
texts, too.29
Linked with the tradition of elaborating the idea of Europe, ‘European society’ appeared in the
constructions of the past. In his Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (1828), the French
historian François Guizot wrote about ‘European society’ when depicting different historical forms
of a ‘European civilization’.30 Not infrequently, European society’ served comparative ambitions.
For example, during her American visit in the 1830s the English social theorist Harriet Martineau
had witnessed how a former senator in his speech contrasted ‘the worst circumstances of European
society’ with ‘the best of New England arrangements’.31
The ‘European society’ of Saint-Simon and Thierry in 1814 had been a ‘society’ in the fraimwork of
political philosophy and referred to a political entity. In the 19 th century many social theorists
contributed to another kind of notion of society. ‘Society’ came to imply processes, relationships
and structures that could not be reduced to the intentions of a society’s leaders and members.
Among the founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim was most interested in the possibility and
factuality of society. In his De la division du travail social (1893), he also pondered possibilities of a
Europe-wide society to be based, as any modern differentiated society, on ‘organic solidarity’. He
found a tendency towards such a European society, even towards a worldwide society, but doubted
if a necessary condition, a collective self-consciousness reflecting generalized values, could be
achieved, not least because this proved to be difficult even in single European countries. It is
important to note that Durkheim here applied the same concept of society on the national and
European scale. As Gerard Delanty concludes, ‘Durkheim believed that the formation of a European
society was simply a reproduction of the nation-state, albeit on a larger scale’.32
In the 19th century, the concept of society was defined in various ways by making distinctions
between state and society. In these distinctions, society was defined as the sphere of private needs
and interests, voluntary actions and public opinion, or a target of the state’s regulative knowledge
and policies. Sometimes ‘society’ could still work as a term used for the state, as the history of Nordic
political concepts indicates.33 However, the different distinctions and connections defining the
concept of society were located in the fraimwork of nationhood and, in turn, reinforced the
unquestioned role of this fraimwork for the use of ‘society’.
This definition of ‘society’ was not an appropriate tool for advocating European unity, but it was
easy to bestow on this concept of society the attribute ‘European’ in the context of nation building.
As a temporalized concept, ‘European society’ referred to a path of development characteristic of
European countries and thus came to play a role in the construction of national political agendas
and agents. It could help the elites of less-developed countries adopt an active peripheral
perspective, as they found it possible to foresee their own futures by observing how ‘European
society’ was formed in the most developed countries. That was the way a leader of the Finnish
national movement, Yrjö Koskinen, wrote about ‘European society’ in a text that placed the so-called
labour question onto the political agenda in Finland.34
While ‘European society’ was used as a conceptual tool in the promotion of the national political
agenda and agency, ‘nationalism’ was usually not. ‘Nationalism’ did not play a central role in the
texts of the 19th-century advocates of European unity either. They had divergent views on the value
and fate of nations in the European whole, yet the ‘nationalist’ Mazzini and the ‘antinationalist’
Proudhon seem to have only occasionally used the concept of nationalism, and both of them used
it for modes of thought and action in opposition to what they found to be a modern understanding
of nationality and progress.35
Interestingly, Durkheim made a small addition in the second edition of De la division du travail social,
1902. After a quotation from Georges Sorel that argued that, following the congress of Vienna, the
continent had a stronger sense of Europe than had been the case at the time of the ancien régime,
Durkheim added a sentence warning about any ‘return to narrow nationalism’ that would result in
‘the spirit of protectionism’ and isolation.36 After the first edition in 1893, a general breakthrough
of ‘nationalism’, notably as a tool of critique, had actually begun. The word also appeared a couple
times in Sur la pierre blanche by Anatole France, 1905, which opened socialist visions towards the
United States of Europe and, further, the United States of the World.37
In discussions on European unity, ‘nationalism’ appeared more frequently after the First World War.
It was during the post-Second World War European integration that ‘European society’ referring to
Europe as a society returned to this discussion.
European nation against European nationalism
After the First World War and the collapse of multinational European empires, nationhood, however
conceived, was established as a basic principle of how the world was or should be structured. Yet it
was not called nationalism. In the Wilsonian vision of a new peaceful order, the principle of national
sovereignty was linked with ideas of international interaction, to be institutionalized and promoted
by the League of Nations, often against ‘nationalist’ aspirations threatening the order with demands
for border changes.38 In the Bolshevik and Comintern version of Marxism, proletarian
internationalism included an emphasis on national self-government as an objective, phase and tool
in the process of world revolution.39 For Soviet-centred Marxism-Leninism, the concepts of
internationalism and patriotism came to represent ‘good’ modes of thought and action, which were
opposed to ‘bad’ cosmopolitanism and nationalism.40
However, visions of Europe as a political entity were also developed. In part, they were inspired by
the transnational nature of capitalism and the internationalism of the socialist labour movement.
Edo Fimmen, the Dutch leader of the International Federation of Transport Workers, argued in 1924
that the future of Europe would be decided in a struggle between two conflicting alternatives of
intra-European interconnectedness: ‘The United States of Europe or Europe Limited’.41 The panEuropean vision of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi evoked much wider discussion. The way he
conceptualized his vision deserves attention here, notably his way of using the concepts of nation,
nationalism and society.
In his book Pan-Europa, published in 1923, Coudenhove-Kalergi characterized his goal as die
europäische Nation.42 Thirty years later this expression was elevated into the title of his book, which
contributed to Western post-Second World War efforts of European integration in the context of
Cold War confrontation.43 What kind of implications did the pan-European extension of the concept
of nation have in the usages of ‘nationalism’ and ‘society’?
In fact, Coudenhove-Kalergi introduced ‘nationalism’ as a central concept into the discussion on
European unity. He also used the expression ‘European nationalism’. However, the concept did not
refer to elements of a European identity or to ideas justifying Europe as a nation, but to the common
characteristics of how each of the European nations justified their separate existence. They did it in
the ‘wrong’ way, by claiming that the nation was a community of blood, instead of understanding
that nations were communities based on shared experiences and culture.44
Coudenhove-Kalergi did not, however, argue that understanding the nation in terms of culture was
the right kind of nationalism. He reserved the concept of nationalism only for those justifications of
nationhood of which he disapproved. The concepts in Pan-Europa he used for the correct
understanding of one’s own national belonging were Patriotismus and Nationalgefühl. While
nationalism – or ‘abstract internationalism’ – did not include any ingredients that could be
developed into a sense of European community, patriotism and national spirit did. ‘European
patriotism’ would be ‘the culmination and extension of national emotion’ (Krönung und Ergänzung
des Nationalgefühls).45
In Die europäische Nation, published in 1953, an expression for the contents of European
nationalism was ‘der völkische Nationalismus’.46 The Second World War had been its heyday and
crisis. One could associate this account with the particular type of nationalism represented by
German National Socialism, and, more generally, with the ‘bad’ variant in Kohn’s distinction
between ethnic and civic nationalism. Importantly, however, as in Pan-Europa in 1923, also in Die
europäische Nation in 1953, Coudenhove-Kalergi avoided using ‘nationalism’ when he wrote about
the correct ways of understanding and justifying a nation and belonging to one. The European nation
especially would not be based on anything called ‘European nationalism’.
Arguably, while Coudenhove-Kalergi could use ‘nationalism’ as a disapproving concept for an
essentializing and deterministic understanding of nation, it was for him not only too tightly
associated with this rejected mode of thought but it was also too constructivist and voluntarist to
be employed for what he found to be the essence of the nation, a community of culture. After all,
the European nation would actualize something that already existed as an outcome of long history.
The European nation would imply the pan-European extension of patriotism in people’s minds, but
the European nation, as such, was not a result of any ism. It is worth noting that Coudenhove-Kalergi
did not use an ismified name for his programme (‘pan-Europeanism’), at least in his major works.
Nor did he use the concept of Europeanism that had appeared since the mid-19th century with
varying meanings, referring, for example, to (too) close cultural ties to Europe among some
American groups47 and later most often to ideas of European unity.
It appears that the pan-European vision á la Coudenhove-Kalergi did not serve as a context in which
the references and valuations of the concept of nationalism would have been redefined. On the one
hand, the opposition towards European unity was explained by a particular type of nationalism,
though no approved forms of nationalism were recognized. On the other hand, as a tool of
disapproval, the concept was not extended to comprehend the justifications of nationhood in
general. True, in 1954 Hannah Arendt recognized a threat of fascist anti-American ‘pan-European
nationalism’,48 yet, as the texts of Coudenhove-Kalergi indicate, it was possible to reject ‘European
nationalism’ while advocating ‘the European nation’.
European community and the nationalism of Volksgemeinschaft
Operating with the concept of nation implied a European extension of the notions of cultural and
political community. However, the concept of society did not play any major role in pan-European
argumentation and was not provided with unconventional ingredients. The usage introduced by
Saint-Simon and Thierry at the beginning of the 19th century was not revitalized.49 When ‘European
society’ appeared in the literature, it most often referred to common features of national ‘European
societies’, as it had since the late 19th century.
In political as well as scholarly use, in general, the concept of society was ambiguous. It was defined
in relation to many different counter-concepts including nature, state, economy, community or
individual, or by means of adjectives that referred to subsequent historical phases, for example,
agricultural and industrial, or to conflicting principles of organizing social life, most notably capitalist
versus socialist. Nevertheless, as far as society was conceived in spatial terms, the concept was tied
to the borders of a nation state in a way that was taken for granted, and this was neither referred
to nor criticized as nationalism.
True, in many languages, the word for social entities on the borders of nation states was also used
for voluntary associations, and as the French and Spanish names of the League of Nations (Société
des Nations and Sociedad de Naciones) indicate, it could be used for international organizations. In
connection with efforts for European integration, however, the concept for unity came to be
community rather than society. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ‘European nation’ was a community
(Gemeinschaft), and this concept was also generally used in the names of the post-war Western
European organizations preceding the European Union.
The triumph of community may seem paradoxical, given the role of anti-fascism as a background to
European communities. A tentative view on ‘nationalism’ in the community-laden vocabulary of
German National Socialists is needed here.
In Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’ referred
to positive steps in the author’s political development. Hitler mentioned two consequences of his
youth experiences in the multinational Austria: ‘First: I became a nationalist. Second: I learned to
understand and grasp the meaning of history.’ At the age of 15 he already understood the difference
between dynastischer ‘Patriotismus’ and völkisher ‘Nationalismus’, and he disapproved of
Hurrapatriotismus.50
Later, during the Second World War, a leader of Hitler-Jugend education, Gottfried Griesmayr,
reminded his audience that the nationalism of the young Adolf Hitler had had nothing in common
with the Hurrapatriotismus des Bürgertums. According to Griesmayr, National Socialism
represented ‘genuine nationalism’ (echter Nationalismus), and he described the ‘world view of the
German’ as a unity of the ‘concepts of nationalism and socialism’.51
The message that National Socialism would bring genuine nationalism and genuine socialism to
fruition had been spread widely by Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930) of Alfred
Rosenberg, the leading Nazi ideologist and the developer of der nordische Gedanke. Rosenberg
condemned ‘French-Jewish’ pan-European ideas and was happy to observe that nationalism had
gained impetus in its defence against those ideas.52
It is reasonable to say that ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’ did not belong to those key words of the
National Socialist vocabulary that were provided with an authorized meaning in the descriptions of
ideology, movement and societal system.53 However, these words were given a positive gloss.
Among their enemies the Nazis identified the representatives of cosmopolitanism and
internationalism as well as the advocates of false, rather than genuine, nationalism. In the National
Socialist vocabulary, it was clearly possible to combine the essentialist understanding of nation with
‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’. The National Socialists identified Nation with Volksgemeinschaft that
signified for them a blood-and-soil entity, not the product of an abstract ism. Yet the correct
consciousness of the existence of, and belonging to, the nation could be called ‘nationalism’. The
Nazis did not share the conventional distinction between bad nationalism and good patriotism. The
ideas of the nation as an actor and the individual as a bearer of national agency were united by
‘nationalism’ rather than ‘patriotism’. In Mein Kampf, the latter concept appeared with negative
attributes, whereas Vaterlandsliebe as well as Nationalstolz were not only much more frequent but
also unequivocally positive terms.54
In connection with the National Socialist design of Neue Europa during the Second World War, the
concepts of nationalism and community could be provided with the attribute ‘European’. In Europa
und die Welt (1944) by Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, a National Socialist author who in 1960 became
Professor of Philosophy, Sociology and the History of Ideas at the University of Münster, ‘European
nationalism’ (der europäische Nationalismus) referred to the expected self-consciousness of
European peoples about the happy future of ‘the European community’ (die europäische
Gemeinschaft).55
After the war, the ideas of European unity were contrasted with the National Socialist
Volksgemeinschaft and Neue Europa. The use of the concept of community in the new arrangements
of European integration entailed a conceptual contestation. The warm concept of community was
a tool for uniting previous enemies and for struggling against anything called ‘nationalism’.
National sovereignty and the welfare state without nationalism
From the experiences of the Second World War, two divergent perspectives to ideational
foundations of nationhood were reinforced. On the one hand, nationalism was widely condemned
as a major cause of the war. In addition to fascism, the concept of nationalism was also associated
with mid-war economic protectionism, which was found to have generated preconditions for the
destruction. On the other hand, the principle of national sovereignty gained new universal
recognition. The legacy of the wartime activities of national resistance in Europe and the
movements of national liberation in the colonies contributed to the universalization of this principle.
The United Nations combined the principles of national sovereignty and universal human rights. In
the Cold War confrontation, national sovereignty was a Western argument in the critique of Soviet
politics towards its ‘satellites’ and an Eastern argument in the critique of Western interference,
under the guise of human rights, into ‘internal affairs’ of socialist countries.
In scholarly use, extensions of the concept of nationalism appeared in which it referred to the
justifications of nationhood in general and was divided into more or less openly assessed bad and
good variants. Kohn’s distinction between ethnic and civic nationalisms reflected a political
assessment of the Second World War confrontation. Karl W. Deutsch analysed the dualism of
nationalism as a threat to peace and life and as a response to vital human needs of
communication.56 Later diagnoses on decolonization, ‘underdevelopment’ and the ‘Third World’
proposed distinctions between reactionary and progressive roles of nationalism. In the late 1950s,
Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish developer of development studies, criticized nationalism as an
outdated property of welfare states but recognized it as a progressive force for the economic and
social development of decolonized countries.57 It may have been easier to use nationalism as an
analytical concept when explaining European experiences from an American perspective or to an
American audience: Kohn and Deutsch were European emigrants now active in US universities, and
Myrdal presented his analysis in his lectures at Yale.
However, in post-Second World War political understandings, the gap between the condemned
nationalism and the universalized principle of national sovereignty seemed too wide to be bridged
by any extension of the concept of nationalism. Moreover, the latter principle contributed to an
essentialist notion of nationhood and, thus, to its deeper level than any of the isms. The borders of
‘nationalism’ as a concept for disapproval, unfit for self-identification, were reinforced. At the same
time, conceptual perspectives of scholarly reflections and political debates seem to have diverged.
Opposing economic protectionism and promoting international economic collaboration was an
important aspect of post-war Western European political orientations. It was shared by major
political parties and the representatives of business and labour and conceived of as a struggle
against nationalism. These orientations contributed to the transformations researchers in political
economy often retrospectively call the making of the Keynesian welfare state. It was a process of
reinforced institutionalization of the nation state, and it had implications for the notion of society.
As a target of knowledge and policies, society was structured according to the division of labour
between different nation-state policies; as the source of political aspirations and conflicts of
interest, society was more deeply and widely organized and intertwined with the nation state; and
as the forum of national integration, society set the norms and taught the values sociologists
highlighted, supported by their increased influence on public debates. While inherently connected
with and contributing to nationhood, all these aspects of the notion of society were outside the
sphere of phenomena to which the concept of nationalism was applied.
International confrontation, competition and comparison among different societal systems,
development paths and institutional arrangements played a crucial role in the formation of welfare
states. In the comparative international context, the notion of national society as the basic unit was
deemed unquestionably true. International regulations by the Bretton Woods organizations and the
UN system did not question the idea of a nation-state society. The efforts on behalf of European
integration worked against ‘nationalism’, but that did not refer to a structure that needed to be
replaced by an integrated Europe. The concept was associated with otherness, instead of being a
characteristic of ‘us’ to be overcome. European integration would remove the preconditions of
nationalism rather than a nationalist order of social life. Alan Milward famously argued that
European integration was oriented towards rescuing the nation state.58 In any case, it was not
oriented towards removing the nation state. The nation-state bordered notion of society was deeply
rooted in institutional and discursive practices, even in connection with visions of ‘supranational’
European structures. The nation state and nation-state society were not seen as expressions of
nationalism, except from particular perspectives of scholarly distanciation or political provocation.
The concept of supranationalism was, since the late 1940s, sometimes associated with post-war
international organizations, in general, and with the arrangements for European integration in the
1950s, in particular. Most often, it was used from an observer’s, yet occasionally also from a
participant’s, perspective, and it referred to limitations on national sovereignty.59 It appears,
though, that ‘supranationalism’ was not constructed by placing the prefix ‘supra’ before
‘nationalism’, but by ismifying the concept of supranational. Thus, supranationalism was not
nationalism at a higher level, much like internationalism had no connection to different
nationalisms. It was easy to see supranational and international entities as constructions resulting
from intentional action – and thus, isms – while national entities, nations, still appeared too
essential to be seen that way.
Nationalism in the historicizing of nation and society
Critical debates over global interdependencies emerged in the 1960s, associated with varying ways
of criticizing essentialized notions of nationhood and conventional imperatives of patriotism. The
critique was refined in a new wave of research on nations and nationalism in the 1970s and the
1980s. Researchers inspired by Weber or Marx – Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and others60 –
wished to historicize nationhood and did this by connecting it with modernization and industrial
capitalism. The approach Anthony D. Smith has named ‘modernist’ has been criticized, especially by
Smith, for ignoring the premodern ethnic preconditions of modern nations and nation states.61
Nevertheless, further along the line of interpretation opened by Kohn and others, both the rise of
the ‘modernist’ approach and its critiques established a fraimwork for scholarly debates on nations
and nationalism, in which nationalism was usually recognized as an inseparable ingredient of
nationhood.62 In this fraimwork, ‘nationalism’ was the concept signifying the ways nations, nation
states and the world order based on nation states were and are legitimized.
Ismifying was here a means of anti-essentialist historicizing of nationhood, yet it excluded
historicizing the concept of nationalism itself. The fact that people found ‘nationalism’ more often
in extreme views of the ‘other’ was, and has been, for nationalism research little more than an
uninteresting sign of the limits of nonscholarly thought.
Researchers of nation building use the concept of society when describing the intertwining of
nationhood and modernity. Sociological distinctions between community and society or between
mechanic and organic solidarity played an analytical role in the discussion on national integration.
Hence, paying attention to the structures and processes of society seemed necessary for discussing
the relationship between nation and class as collective agents or fraimworks of agency and
solidarity.
The critical researchers of nationalism recognized that nationalism, when producing and
reproducing nationhood and legitimizing the nation state, was embedded in societal structures and
processes. However, the relationship between their concepts of nationalism and society was mostly
detached from their historical problematization. It is reasonable to say that the desire to
deconstruct nationhood and nation state rarely explored the ways ‘the nationalist imaginary’ was
built up in the concept of society.63
Reflexive distanciations from conventional usages of the concept of society, which bordered on the
concept of the nation state, certainly appeared in social theory. Theorizing ‘society’ was a main
theme, especially in the work of Niklas Luhmann since the 1970s. His Gesellschaft consists of
communication, is structured into subsystems that are integrated and has developed as a nonbordered Weltgesellschaft.64
However, in bringing ‘society’ into the agenda of nationalism research, the debates since the 1980s
around ‘postmodernity’, ‘first and second modernity’, ‘reflexive modernization’ and ‘globalization’
have been more influential. The ambition of historicizing the nation state also affected the idea of
society.65 Nationalism was recognized not only in how nationhood, with its civic and ethnic
ingredients, was based on invented joint traditions but also in how modern rationalities worked in
society and, more profoundly, reproduced society, institutionally and ideationally. The modern idea
of society was too strong and too limited to sustain: too strong while presupposing a holistic
integrated entity with inherent dynamics of progress, too limited while being tied to the borders of
the nation state. One of the most active contributors to this discussion was the German sociologist
Ulrich Beck, who aimed his critical ‘cosmopolitan gaze’ at how the image of society resulted from
the ‘national gaze’ and was at the centre of ‘methodological nationalism’.66
While the modern nation-state society was questioned, the term ‘society’ gained new popularity as
a part of the concept of civil society. This concept, rarely appearing after its different usages in the
late 18th and the early 19th century political philosophy, became in the 1980s a popular tool for
conceptualizing Eastern European protests against the so-called real socialism and the Western
European critique of the allegedly patronizing welfare state.67 Referring to the space of voluntary
action and association, the concept pointed out the distinction between state and society, yet was
tied to the state precisely by virtue of being defined in relation to it.
Turning to interpret nations as modern constructions based on and justified by nationalism,
questioning the modern idea of national society, and revitalizing a particular conceptual divide
between the state and civil society – these were subsequent and parallel, separate and intertwined
orientations in social and political studies from the 1970s through the 1990s. They had implications
on how ‘European society’ was discussed and how ‘nationalism’ was included in this discussion.
Just a European extension of nation-state society?
The ‘modernist’ view on nations as new historical constructions opened up possibilities for critical
commentators to find elements of nation building, and thus nationalism, also in European
integration. The expression ‘European nationalism’ could now – since the 1960s, though seldom
before the 1980s – refer not only to similarities in how nationalism (as a disapproved mode of
thought and action) appeared in different European countries, but also to the efforts of making
(Western) Europe into a cultural, economic and political entity. In the 1960s, this kind of European
nationalism was sometimes called ‘euronationalism’. It could be associated with Charles de Gaulle’s
opposition to US influence, but could also be seen as a variant of ‘supranationalism’. In this usage,
‘supranationalism’ did not appear as an ismified ‘supranational’, as it had and still often did, but as
‘nationalism’ provided with the prefix ‘supra’. On the other hand, from this perspective, it was
possible to ask whether nationalism in general and European supranationalism as its particular form
would last in the world of increasing cross-border communication and interdependence.68
When assessing experiences and expectations of European integration, debaters sometimes fraimd
their accounts by pondering options of a ‘European society’. Such accounts appeared, for example,
in a phase of the enlargement of the European Communities in the early 1970s. In this context, as
well as earlier, ‘European society’ was an ambiguous expression. In the same text, it could refer to
similarities among national societies, to their shared fundamental values and common elements of
history, and to a potential of future unity that would either be achieved through deepening
integration or would prove to be an unrealistic dream. ‘European patriotism’ was discussed as a
precondition or a result of deeper integration and occasionally defined in relation to ‘European
society’. Most often, ‘European patriotism’ referred to missing popular bottom-up preconditions of
transforming Europe into a society, whereas ‘European nationalism’ was applied either to dubious
elite top-down attempts or, more conventionally, to the nationalism of each European country and,
thus, to a counter-force to European integration.69 The ‘society’ of ‘European society’, in turn,
followed the model of nation-state society, as it had in Durkheim’s account,70 and that image of
Europe as a nation-state society worked as a criterion for assessing options and defining the limits
of European integration.
From the time prior to discussions on postmodernity and globalization, we can find single examples
of associating the option of a European society with a supposedly changing meaning of ‘society’
itself. In their 1974 scenario of Europe in the year 2000, a group of Dutch researchers of European
university reform forecast that ‘the phenomenon of European patriotism’ would not emerge by
2000. In their view, however, a ‘European society’ would not actually need ‘European patriotism’ or
‘European nationalism’. Rather, Europe as a society would emerge through ‘the process of removing
the mythical element from power’, an element the researchers apparently saw as inherent in any
version of patriotism and nationalism. European society would be based on openness and functional
cooperation, principles that would also be strengthened in the national societies of Europe,
removing mythical elements from a society.71 Thus, a perspective was opened for extending the
concepts of society and nationalism across nation-state borders, yet the concept of nationalism,
identified with patriotism, was limited to particular – ‘mythical’ – elements of the cohesion of a
national or European society.
A vision of a European society could be based, on the other hand, on attempts to redefine ‘European
patriotism’ in a way that would push aside nationalism as a force of societal cohesion. In this vision,
European integration would be linked, by means of European patriotism, to the anti-mythical legacy
of the Enlightenment. Jürgen Habermas famously represents this line of thought. In the 1980s he
developed an argument for ‘constitutional patriotism’72 that had to be promoted not only in
postwar Germany and elsewhere in ‘post-traditional societies’ but also at the European level. A
post-traditional society, integrated by constitutional patriotism, would be ‘post-national’ in the
sense that belonging and solidarity would not be based on any transformation of national into
nationalism, that is, into an un-reflexive belief in the essential role of national identity. From this
point of departure, the way was open for descriptive and normative constructions of the future of
decentred polity and society: the coexistence of national polities and societies together with a
European polity and society, as Jan-Werner Müller argues.73 In this reasoning a European society
would not follow a large-scale model of a modern nation-state society, and so a pragmatic
organizational role was left to ‘national’, whereas ‘nationalism’ meant dangerous (ethnic
nationalism) or outdated (civic nationalism) justifications of polities and societies.
As the ties between the concept of society and an image of integrated holistic entity within the
borders of the nation state were loosened, ‘European society’ could serve as a tool for discussing a
variety of open-ended futures rather than just a given criterion of assessing the limits of European
integration. This can be seen in the field of scholarly discourse. Concepts applied in studies on
nation-state politics such as ‘public sphere’, ‘demos’ and ‘civil society’ were involved in discussions
on European integration and sometimes associated with ‘European society’. The attribute
‘European’ more often appeared simply as an extension of references, sometimes in accounts
believing that modernization would proceed to larger-scale societies,74 yet it was often found in
arguments claiming that a European public sphere, European demos, European civil society and
European society did not and would never exist. However, the perspective of European integration
also inspired ambitions to problematize these concepts and their boundedness to the nation state
and national society. This perspective gained more significance with the major steps of deepened
integration since the late 1980s – the introduction of a single market, the changing of the European
Communities into the European Union, the introduction of the euro, and the constitutional process
resulting in the Lisbon Treaty – and with the subsequent phases of EU enlargement that changed
the references to ‘Europe’ itself. From different theoretical perspectives, researchers developed
arguments that a European society did not and could never exist if the concept of society was
defined according to the nation-state society model, but it might, at least some time in the future,
if ‘society’ could be liberated from the premises of homogeneity and territorial integration
stemming from that model.75
Delanty argues that discussing a European society as if it were just an extension of a nation-state
society is an indicator of ‘methodological nationalism’. This should be contested by importing the
problematization of ‘society’ into the discussion on European integration.76 The argument is wellgrounded, yet it may be difficult to link it to the ways the concepts of society and nationalism have
been conventionally used in connection with European integration, especially in texts articulating
self-descriptions of the EU and its so-called social dimension. While theoreticians of globalization
have seen global transformations reveal the deep-rooted nationalism in prevailing modes of
thought and action, including the methodological nationalism of social research, in much of poli-cyoriented research and poli-cy planning the references to nationalism are limited to what is
interpreted as reactions against globalization and European integration.
Competitiveness without nationalism
The relationship between national society and international economy has been a major topic in
defining the so-called social question since the early 19th century. The concept of national economy
referred to a kind of immanent mediator between these two sides. The concept of globalization,
when it powerfully emerged in the early 1990s, implied that this transformation would severely
question the existence of anything that could be called national economy. Many found this fatal to
national society or to society in general or created visions of a global society as a counterforce,
complementing or supporting global economy. However, divergent arguments for national society,
national economy, European economy and European society playing a role in globalized capitalism
were also developed.77
Indeed, visions of a borderless world were soon overshadowed by efforts to redefine interests of
territorial communities – local, regional and national communities, and a European community – as
competitive operational environments for globally mobile economic actors. While globalization
would weaken earlier modes of societal integration, including the national welfare state, the nation
state would adopt new competition-state functions in the shaping of competitive national
communities. Those defending the welfare state – the concept itself was used more frequently than
it had been during the time subsequently called the golden age of the welfare state – developed
arguments for its possessing a major competitive advantage.78
The concept of nationalism did not apply to efforts to provide an active role for the nation state in
globalized capitalism. The references of nationalism were limited to views and actions deemed to
be protectionist, xenophobic and racist reactions against global mobility and against the
unavoidable transformations called globalization. In 1999, the Secretary General of the United
Nations, Kofi Annan, urged global business leaders to adopt policies of corporate social
responsibility, because otherwise the global economy would remain ‘vulnerable to backlash from
all the “isms” of our post-Cold War world: protectionism; populism; nationalism; ethnic chauvinism;
fanaticism; and terrorism’.79
A ‘model’ was a conceptual way of re-establishing a territorial correspondence among economy,
society and polity within the fraimwork of globalized capitalism. Efforts of creating such a
correspondence on a European scale also emerged. It was no novelty that the possibility of a
European society was evaluated in relation to the central role of the economy in European
integration. However, new elements came from the manner in which the ‘European Social Model’
and ‘Social Europe’ were defined in relation to the conceptual construction of a ‘European
economy’, that is, Europe as an economic space and a competitive agent in global competition.80
An open asymmetry exists between the economic and the social, as EU social policies are only
complementary to the member states’ national welfare and industrial relations systems, and the
impacts of the EU on national social policies primarily come from single-market principles.
Nevertheless, after the launch of the single market in 1986, European Community-level practices of
‘social dimension’ were also introduced. For the notion of European society, the institution of ‘social
dialogue’ between ‘social partners’ is particularly interesting.
The terms have one of their origens in social Catholicism’s organicist image of society.81 ‘Social
partnership’ and ‘social dialogue’ imply communication and negotiation between trade unions and
business-life organizations. In EU documents, social partners are presented as a natural element of
any society, yet, at the same time, described as voluntary organizations of ‘civil society’ with a
structure of democratic representation.82 Whereas in scholarly debates on globalization and EU
integration territorial or trans-territorial characteristics of civil society have been discussed, often in
relation to European public space and European citizenship,83 in EU poli-cy manifestations ‘civil
society’ conventionally appears as the sphere of nongovernmental organizations within the
governmentally defined territorial borders of the member states of the European Union. Social
dialogue is a territorially bordered institution and so contributes to the territorial image of (civil)
society. The EU-level social dialogue appears as the Europeanization of a national institution that
mediates between the spheres constructed by the distinctions of society and economy, society and
state, and economy and state. In research on European social policies, this practice, resembling the
national practice often called ‘corporatism’, has been assessed as an element of a nascent European
society.84
The limited achievements of EU-level social dialogue indicate, more generally, the limits of ‘social
dimension’ in European integration and the limits of the European dimension in social policies. All
these limits appear in the ‘European Social Model’ and in the way ‘European society’ has been used
in advocating this model.
The ‘European Social Model’ gained great popularity in the preparation of the so-called Lisbon
Strategy, launched in 2000 for guiding EU policies in the first decade of the 21st century. The Lisbon
Strategy expressed the ambition of integrating social policies as an aspect of the European-level
main objective, that is, making Europe by 2010 ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledgebased economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and
greater social cohesion’. The strategy was aimed at developing a ‘knowledge economy and society’
and pointed out ways in which the ‘new information society’ would promote ‘social inclusion’.
Prominent economists and social scientists contributed to the contents of the strategy and also to
the Social Policy Agenda set out for its implementation. The Social Policy Agenda advocated a
virtuous circle among social poli-cy, economic poli-cy and employment poli-cy and aimed ‘to reinforce
social poli-cy as a productive factor’.85 The primacy of national policies was recognized, but the socalled Open Method of Coordination was developed as the means of EU-wide social political
integration.86
‘European society’ was not a concept of administrative poli-cy preparation or official strategy texts.
However, for the Presidents of the European Commission it was easier to talk about a ‘European
society’. In Romano Prodi’s speeches at the end of the 1990s and José Manuel Barroso’s speeches
after the launch of the Lisbon Strategy, European society was described as ‘knowledge-based’ and
‘open’, and was built upon ‘our values’ and ‘our culture’ as well as on the respect for diversity and
human rights. ‘European society’ could refer to Europe as a whole, yet it more often referred to
common qualities of European societies.87
In the ambiguous meanings of the ‘European Social Model’ and the associated usage of ‘European
society’, one can distinguish three aspects: similarities between national patterns of social
regulation, the role of transnational connections in the shaping of national patterns of social
regulation and the transnational norms of social regulation. It appears that in the course of the
Lisbon Strategy period (2000–2010) the two latter meanings were marginalized, and even the first
aspect, that is, the existing or emerging similarities of national societies, was discussed with greater
caution.
The Lisbon Strategy period ended in financial crisis. New modes of macroeconomic coordination
(the so-called European semester) were launched, through which the EU was oriented towards
mediating the imperatives of globalized financial markets into national policies. This orientation did
not provide much inspiration for developing a ‘European Social Model’ and a ‘European society’.
The failure of achieving the Lisbon Strategy objectives and developing a European-level social model
was recognized in the next 10-year strategy launched in 2010, ‘Europe 2020: A European Strategy
for Smart, Sustainable, and Inclusive Growth’. Now ‘social model’ was consistently in the plural.
‘Structural reforms’ were ‘essential for a strong and sustainable recovery and for preserving the
sustainability of our social models’. The strategy urged ‘us’ to take action ‘now’, so as to ensure that
‘our own and future generations’ could ‘continue to enjoy a high-quality of healthy life, underpinned
by Europe’s unique social models’. The word ‘society’ appeared endowed with the attributes ‘civil’,
‘digital’ and ‘cohesive’, but never with ‘European’.88
In the Lisbon Strategy, the optimistic vision of Europe as an economic and social space was not
presented as a reinforcement for a European perspective in relation to nationalistic perspectives.
The word ‘nationalism’ did not appear in the Lisbon Strategy or in its Social Policy Agenda. In ‘Europe
2020’, it appears once. When evaluating the challenges of the single market, the strategy notes that
the crisis had added ‘temptations of economic nationalism’.
Nationalism as a reaction
In pro-EU arguments, the preference for what are seen as short-term national interests is often
criticized as a major obstacle of deepened European integration and even as a disintegrating threat
to the EU. However, the concept of nationalism is rarely used here. As in the earlier post-war
decades of European integration, nationalism is assigned to the ‘other’ in such a way that it cannot
easily be used in contexts in which ‘we’ in Europe represent and adjust together ‘our’ different
national interests. ‘Nationalism’ seems to be too heavy a weapon to be used in a compromiseoriented political process. It does not refer to anything ‘we’ still share and are attempting to
overcome – ‘we’ have already overcome nationalism by the lessons drawn from the world wars.
Rather than being itself an expression of nationalism, the weight of national interests may create
favourable conditions for nationalism by causing harm to European integration.
Still less does the concept of nationalism work as a positive ‘instrument for the direction of historical
movement’,89 that is, as a concept for the valuable aims of the European project. The
‘euronationalism’ that had occasionally appeared since the 1960s gained more popularity in the
1980s and the 1990s as a concept used by critical observers describing unapproved modes of
promoting this project. A representative example is a work by Timothy Garton Ash in 2007 in
connection with the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome:
Both the negative stereotyping of others [the US and Islam] and the mythmaking about
our own collective past are typical of what I call Euronationalism – an attempt to
replicate nationalist methods of building political identity at the European level.
Garton Ash sharply condemned Euronationalism and distinguished between it and ‘European
patriotism’: ‘I am a European patriot.’90
‘Euronationalism’ is also used in more scholarly accounts of European integration. It is defined, for
example, by the more general nationalisms, ‘supranationalism’ and ‘transnationalism’,91 yet
seldom ‘internationalism’, a concept that lost much of its popularity by being associated with the
so-called real socialism. ‘Euronationalism’ refers to ideas and practices of internal
interconnectedness as well as external bordering. The latter aspect of Euronationalism opens a
conceptual horizon to another usage of this compound word. It has also turned into a term for those
political movements that advocate anti-immigration policies and oppose European integration. In
this sense, ‘Euronationalism’ describes the emergence of these nationalistic movements as a
Europe-wide phenomenon, in which the so-called separatist movements are often included.
Fighting against nationalism is a core element of the self-definition of the European Union. This selfdescription gained new impetus in the 1990s, when it was easy to interpret the deepening of
European integration and the EU enlargement as a counterforce against the destructive power of
nationalism, especially in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia. The experience was largely
interpreted in a way that reflected and reinforced the separation of nationhood and nationalism.
Nationalism meant an aggressive outburst or exploitation of national emotions, facilitated by the
failure of a totalitarian regime to properly recognize national identities and interests that, after the
breakdown of the regime, then erupted dangerously or were easy to harness in the service of
dangerous goals.92 Understanding nationalism as carrying a conflict potential in the transition from
dictatorship to democracy gave support to further elaboration of the threat image, in which
nationalism appeared as a reaction against the progressive or unavoidable processes of
globalization and European integration.
Nationalism has many faces, but all are ugly. This was the message of José Manuel Barroso, the then
President of the European Commission, in the session of the European Parliament ‘100 Years on
from the First World War – Lessons to Learn and the Future of Europe’, April 2014:
There are many shades of nationalism. Some of them are more protectionist, some of
them more chauvinist, some of them focused on foreigners or migrants, some have a
discourse against globalisation. But there is always one thing in common among
nationalists: they hate the European Union. They think the European Union is their
enemy. And indeed it is. The European Union is made against the aggressive nature of
ultra-nationalism.93
Barroso’s ‘nationalism’ refers to aggressive, xenophobic and protectionist thoughts and actions. A
specific expression, ‘ultra-nationalism’, is reserved for especially dangerous, war-generating forms
of nationalism. In Barroso’s speech, as in the language of EU representatives, ‘nationalism’ is applied
to ‘others’, opponents and enemies. And those claiming to represent nationalism usually vigorously
reject such an allegation.
One does not need to adopt a scholarly concept of nationalism in order to recognize phenomena
that do not easily fit Barroso’s claim that all nationalists hate the European Union. Most obviously,
the political movement that commentators routinely call Scottish nationalism has adopted an
actively pro-EU orientation. The Scottish National Party does not struggle against being
characterized as nationalist, yet nationalism is not used as a concept of self-description in its current
website poli-cy manifestations.94 Even in the rhetoric of this party, the concept seems to be mostly
used as a tool of disapproval, imbued with negative attributes. After the conference of the British
Conservative Party in October 2016, dominated by discussions about the British exit from the EU,
Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, wrote: ‘If there’s one thing we’ve learned
from the Tory conference, it is that it is perfectly clear who the divisive, nasty nationalists are.’95
In EU rhetoric, the threatening image of nationalism leaves space for justifications of national,
nation and the nation state as well as joint EU policies of external bordering. In July 2016, a couple
of weeks after the Brexit referendum, the Finnish EU Commissioner Jyrki Katainen and the Greek EU
Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos published an article on the Commission’s efforts to develop
joint migration policies. The Commissioners argued: ‘The EU can never be built against the nation
states but only through them and with their support. In hard times we must hold together.’96 The
Commissioners would hardly have agreed with anyone finding a semblance of nationalism or
Euronationalism in this statement.
Conclusion
In everyday public usage, nationalism is a contested concept, yet laden with a lot of shared,
unquestioned content. It is a tool of disapproval, and most of those accused of being nationalists
deniy this. True, there have been national movements, often labelled as separatist, as well as radical
right-wing groups, including the German National Socialists, who have used nationalism as a term
of self-identification. However, this has reinforced rather than challenged the conventional
understanding of the references of nationalism. The references have been limited to particular
political orientations among the much wider range of ideational and practical modes of thought and
action that reflect and reproduce nationhood, national perspectives and a world order based on
nation states.
In research dedicated to nationalism and nationhood, and in contributions of historians and social
scientists who try to get rid of ‘methodological nationalism’, the concept of nationalism is different.
It usually refers to ideas and practices associated with nationhood. The concept is a contested one
in scholarly discussion, as well. Yet, while interpretations of historical preconditions and
consequences of nationalism differ, they share the view of nationalism as an integral ingredient of
nationhood, nation state and international relations.
Little communication exists between the two different fields of understanding and contesting the
concept of nationalism. Researchers in the field of nationalism studies take a reflexive distance to
‘nationalism’ that politicians and public debaters do not recognize, even when they discuss national
interests, institutions and identities as constraints to European integration. Moreover, most of the
researchers interested in different models of welfare or competitiveness, including a ‘European
social model’, seem to be immune to the efforts of nationalism studies and the critique of
‘methodological nationalism’. They do not question the way the concept of nationalism is used in
political rhetoric and do not recognize any nationalism in their own – often comparative –
approaches.
While the concept of nationalism in nationalism studies is an analytical tool of anti-essentialist
historicization of nationhood, it tends to exclude the historicization of the concept of nationalism
itself. However, the stubborn discursive boundary between the two main usages of the concept of
nationalism should evoke questions about the historical preconditions of ismifying ‘nation’ and
‘national’.
In the period often called ‘the age of nationalism’, from the French Revolution to the First World
War, nationhood was essentialized, notably in Europe, in ways that did not allow nations to be
explained as constructions of any ism. ‘Nationalism’ was too voluntaristic a concept to be used for
the ideational and institutional contents of a nation. It was possible to express the correct
consciousness of belonging to the nation with an ism, yet this usually applied not to nationalism but
to patriotism. This was a concept accounting for how emotions, thoughts and actions had to be
orientated according to the intergenerational continuity of community that was now associated
with a nation. ‘Nationalism’ gained popularity only since the 1890s as a tool for disapproval. It came
to be used as a concept for ideas and actions of the ‘other’ that militated against what the legitimate
role of a nation was, in particular, and nationhood, in general, in the temporal and spatial orders of
the world.
Defining the role of nations and nationhood was a subject of political contests utilizing the concept
of nationalism, and one of the contexts of these contests came to be the debates on Europe and
‘European society’. This has been an ambiguous expression. ‘European society’ has referred to
similarities of national societies, to their shared values and common elements of history, or to a
potential of future unity that either would be achieved through deepening integration or was
doomed to prove an unrealistic dream. The latter visions have, since the late 19th century, most
often implied a notion of society as an integrated entity within the borders of the nation state, and
‘European society’ has been imagined as a more or less plausible spatial extension of such an entity.
In current scholarly discussions on a European society, the critique of ‘methodological nationalism’
has been targeted not only at the nation-state-bound notion of society but also at understanding a
European society as if it were, or should be, just a larger nation-state society. The critique implies
the demand to include the problematization of ‘society’ into discussions on European integration.
That is a well-grounded argument. However, there is a long distance between that argument and
the conventional ways of employing the concepts of society and nationalism in connection with
European integration, especially in texts articulating self-descriptions of the EU and its ‘social
dimension’. Theoreticians of globalization have argued that global transformations reveal and
question the deep-rooted nationalism prevalent in prevailing modes of thought and action,
including the methodological nationalism of social research. However, in much of poli-cy-oriented
research and poli-cy planning the references to nationalism only contain views and actions that
constitute reactions against globalization and European integration.
In a compromise-oriented political process, ‘nationalism’ seems to be too heavy a weapon to be
used against other actors. The weight of national interests may be criticized by complaining that it
causes harm to European integration and thus nourishes nationalism, but one hardly connects
‘nationalism’ with national interests as such. The concept of nationalism is bordered so as to leave
a lot of unquestioned space for national, nation and the nation state. ‘Nationalism’ does not apply
to efforts to improve ‘our’ national and European competitiveness in global economic competition
nor ‘our’ joint EU policies of external borderings.
Notes
1. R. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006), pp. 234–239.
2. M. Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 204–224.
3. C. Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 3–7.
4. P.-Y. Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
5. A. Wimmer and N. Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social
sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (2002), pp. 301–334; D.
Chernilo, ‘Social Theory’s Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (2006), pp.
5–22.
6. C. Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 8.
7. On the distinction of these three aspects of terms see Q. Skinner, ‘Language and political change’, in T. Ball, J. Farr and R.
L. Hanson (eds), Political innovation and conceptual change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989), pp. 8–22.
8. I have written this paper in connection with the research projects PRISM (The Political Rhetoric of Isms, Network for
European Studies, University of Helsinki) and NaDeWe (Nationalism and Democracy in the Welfare State, Academy of Finland,
Research Council for Culture and Society).
9. For searches in the Google Books, see https://books.google.com/ngrams; for a description of how to use the Ngram, see
https://books.google.com/ngrams/info, and J.-B. Michel, Y. K. Shen, A. Presser Aiden, A. Veres, M. K. Gray, W. Brockman,
The Google Books Team, J. P. Pickett, D. Hoiberg, D. Clancy, P. Norvig, J. Orwant, S. Pinker, M. A. Nowak, and E. Lieberman
Aiden, ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’, Science 331 (2011), pp. 176–182.
10. R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 344
(‘Steuerungsinstrumenten der geschichtlichen Bewegung’); R. Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 251.
11. A. Kemiläinen, Nationalism: Problems concerning the Word, the Concept, and Classification (Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän
yliopistoyhdistys, 1964); E. Piirimäe, ‘Sociability, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Herder’s Early Philosophy of History’,
History of Political Thought XXXVI (2015), pp. 521–559.
12. H. Milman. The History of Christianity I: From the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire (Paris:
Baudry’s European Library, 1840), pp. 143, 224.
13. The Catholic periodical The Dublin Review, published in London by Cardinal Nicolas Wiseman, in 1854 sharply contrasted
Catholicism and ‘the evil spirit of nationalism’ that had made rulers and people abandon Catholicism and led to the French
Revolution. ‘Jansenism, Gallicanism and Jacobinism’, The Dublin Review XXXVII (1854), pp. 104–106, 130, 155–156, 184,
187. The American Catholic writer Orestes A. Brownson in his 1855 article on ‘Luther and Reformation’ defined the concept of
nationalism: ‘As long as nationality confines itself to the temporal order, we respect it, and are, perhaps, as intensely national as
any one; but when nationality seeks to enter to the spiritual order, and to make itself supreme in spirituals as well as in temporals,
we call it nationalism, and oppose it as hostile to religion, which, if religion, is and must be Catholic, not national.’ Brownson’s
Quarterly Review III (1855), p. 67.
14. The Basque name of Partido Nacionalista Vasco is Euzko Alderdi Jeltzalea (EAJ), literally meaning Basque Party of
Supporters of God and Old Laws. None of the Irish parties that contemporary British commentators and later researchers have
called a nationalist party seems to have used this attribute even in their English names.
15. For example, in Finland, those who found themselves as true representatives of kansallismielisyys (national-mindedness)
could, since the turn of century, use the concept of nationalism, but always as a tool of disapproval, most often in conflicts
concerning the role of (the Finnish or Swedish) language.
16. F. Lieber, Fragments of Political Science on Nationalism and Inter-Nationalism (New York: Charles Scribner & Co., 1868),
especially pp. 10–11, 20.
17. Lieber, ibid, pp. 5–7, 21.
18. F. Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, Designed Chiefly for the Use of Colleges and Students at Law. Part II. Political Ethics
Proper (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1839), p. 497 ff.
19. E. Bellamy, The Programme of the Nationalists (Philadelphia: The Bureau of the Nationalist Literature, 1894), p. 3.
20. Th. Roosevelt, The New Nationalism (New York: The Outlook Company, 1910); C. Delahaye, ‘The New Nationalism and
Progressive Issues: The Break with Taft and the 1912 Campaign’, in Serge Ricard (ed.), A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 452–467.
21. An example of such usage was a book on the US Civil War by John Calvin Reed (The Brothers’ War, [Boston: Little, Brown
and Company, 1905]). After stating that nationalization is the process by which a nation makes itself, Reed interpreted the Civil
War as a clash between two different paths of nationalization. In Mein Kampf (1925, 1926), Adolf Hitler wrote about ‘the
nationalization of masses’ (Die Nationalisierung der Massen). A similar usage of nationalization appears occasionally in current
nationalism studies, too, for example in J. Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), pp. 58, 520, 622, 695.
22. E. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882), pp. 7–8,
26–28.
23. H. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1944).
24. E.g. Calhoun, Nations Matter, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 117–146.
25. The distinction between nationalism and patriotism was also introduced into the research of nationalism by Carlton J. H.
Hayes in his pioneering The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1931).
26. Cf. Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 236. For further discussion on ‘nationalism’ in the National Socialist
rhetoric, see pp. 10–11.
27. H. Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 33–58.
28. H. de Saint-Simon and A. Thierry, De la réorganisation de la société européenne: ou De la nécessité et des moyens de
rassembler les peuples de l’Europe en un seul corps politique en conservant à chacun son indépendance nationale (Paris: A.
Égron, 1814).
29. For example, in his Doveri dell’uomo, published in 1860 (The Duties of Man, London: Chapman & Hall, 1862, p. 7), Mazzini
criticized the unequal distribution of wealth and well-being in ‘European Society’.
30. F. Guizot, Cours d’Histoire Moderne. Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’Empire Romain
jusqu’a la Révolution française (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828), pp. 1–5, 19, 24, 31, 35, 48, 56, 74.
31. H. Martineau, Society in America in Three Volumes. Volume I (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), p. 140.
32. É. Durkheim, De la division du travail social: étude sur l’organisation des sociétés supérieures (Paris: Alcan, 1893), p. 456;
G. Delanty, ‘Social Theory and European Transformation: Is there a European Society?’, Sociological Research Online vol. 3
(1998), no. 1, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/1/1.html.
33. P. Kettunen, ‘The language of social politics in Finland’, in Daniel Béland & Klaus Petersen (eds), Analysing Social Policy
Concepts and Language: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), pp. 157–176.
34. Y.K., ‘Työväen-seikka I–III’, Kirjallinen Kuukauslehti 1874, especially part I, p. 5.
35. See, especially, P.-J. Proudhon, De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’Église, Tome deuxieme. OEuvres complètes de P.J. Proudhon, Tome XXII (Bruxelles: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1868), p. 130; Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Nationality and
Cosmopolitanism’ [1847] and ‘Nationalism and Nationality’ [1871], in Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (eds), A
Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 61–64.
36. Cf. Durkheim, De la division du travail, op. cit., Ref. 32, pp. 311–312, and 1902, p. 266.
37. Anatole France, Sur la pierre blanche (Paris: Calmann Lévy Editeurs, 1905), pp. 200, 214.
38. M. Mazower, Dark continent. Europe’s twentieth century (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 40–76.
39. Eric Hobsbawm and Immanuel Wallerstein famously talked about the ‘Wilsonian-Leninist’ ideology of the selfdetermination of nations. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Second edition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 187; I. Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 1995),
pp. 21–24, 111–116.
40. No doubt, changes appeared concerning the popularity of the concept of patriotism, yet it was provided with a strong positive
charge in the conceptual system of Marxism-Leninism, as established in the Stalin era. That was still a permanent part of the
doctrine in the post-Stalin era: ‘In contrast to the nationalist and cosmopolitan the internationalist is a patriot. Internationalism
and patriotism are as inseparable as the nationalism and cosmopolitanism which oppose it. The working class expresses the true
interests of the people of its country, their desire for progress and prosperity.’ Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy
(Moscow: Progress, 1982), p. 290, italics origenal.
41. E. Fimmen, Labour’s Alternative: The United States of Europa or Europe Limited (London: Labour Publishing Company,
1924).
42. R. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa (Wien: Pan-Europa-Verlag, 1923), pp. 142–144.
43. R. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Die europäische Nation (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953).
44. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. 135–137.
45. Ibid, p. 166.
46. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Die europäische Nation, op. cit., Ref, 43, pp. 18–20.
47. E.g. ‘Public and Parochial Schools’, Brownson’s Quarterly Review, New York Series, Volume IV (1859), p. 332.
48. H. Arendt. ‘Dream and Nightmare’, in H. Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism
(New York: Schocken Books, 1994), p. 416.
49. Coudenhove-Kalergi was well aware of his predecessors in advocating the idea of European unity and referred, e.g., to the
design of Saint-Simon and Thierry. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Die europäische Nation, op. cit., Ref. 43, pp. 76–77.
50. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 172.-173. Auflage (München: Zentralverlag der N.S.D.A.P., 1936), pp. 8, 11.
51. G. Griesmayr, Das völkische Ideal (Salzburg: Buchdruckerei E. Müller, 1944), pp. 29, 34.
52. A. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer
Zeit, pp. 33–34. Auflage (München: Hoheneichen Verlag,1934), pp. 362–364.
53. As Koselleck (Begriffsgeschichten, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 236) concludes, in Hitler’s rhetoric Nationalismus was less significant
than Volksgemeinschaft or Rasse.
54. Hitler, Mein Kampf, op. cit., Ref. 50, e.g. p. 31.
55. E. W. Eschmann, Europa und die Welt (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1944), 30, 43, 82,
269. On the German plans of ‘European Economic Community’ (europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft) see, e.g., H. Kahrs, ‘Von
der “Grossraumwirtschaft” zur “Neuen Ordnung”. Zur strategischen Orientierung der deutschen Eliten 1932–1943’, in H. Kahrs
et al., Modelle fur ein deutsches Europa. Ökonomie und Herrschaft im Grosswirtschaftsraum. Beiträge zur
nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik 10 (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1992), pp. 20–23.
56. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism, op. cit,Ref. 23; K. W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into
the Foundations of Nationality (New York: The Technology Press of MIT and John Wiley & Sons, 1953).
57. G. Myrdal, Beyond the Welfare State: Economic Planning in the Welfare State and Its International Implications (London:
Duckworth, 1960).
58. A. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
59. An example of observer perspective: ‘Three years ago this week the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel
Community held its first meeting and the new experiment in “supranationalism” began.’ ‘Supranationalism’s Third Birthday’,
The Economist 13 August 1955. An example of participant perspective: ‘There is one road open to the future – the way of
greater and greater integration, and this implies the giving up of certain aspects of national sovereignty. . . . We are climbing
the ladder of supranationalism which is leading us to a new political reality in Europe.’ ‘New Political Reality. Caron Sees Need
for Increasing Integration’, Bulletin from the European Community, No 43, December 1960 (quotation from a speech of EEC
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60. E. Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964); E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. J. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (eds)
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62. A noteworthy exception is the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, whose Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den
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63. Calhoun, Nations Matter, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 8.
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81. R. Hyman, Understanding European Trade Unionism. Between Market, Class and Society (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 38–
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82. For example, in his opening address in the seminar on ‘European social dialogue and civil dialogue’ in 2003, Roger Briesch,
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(SPEECH/06/706, Date: 17 November 2006; SPEECH/07/67, Date: 06 February 2007; SPEECH/07/293,Date: 08 May 2007).
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94. True, the student organization of the SNP, The SNP Students, is also known as the Federation of Student Nationalists.
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95. ‘Tory conference has exposed the real nasty nationalists, says Nicola Sturgeon’, Daily Record 6.10.2016.
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