ABSTRACT
The political map of this region has been redrawn several times during the last 150 years. After the disappointments of the ‘springtime of nations’ in 1848, Bismarck’s united Germany became the region’s first modern state and in spite of all the twentieth-century vicissitudes it has remained the most powerful. Ottoman and Habsburg Empires did not last long into the present century. With the collapse of the socialist supra-national states, the triumph of *nationalist ideology now appears complete: the political boundaries are, more than ever before, congruent with those of the nation.
