ABSTRACT
The longevity of nations has long exercised a fascination for scholars and public alike. For many people, nations and national states are part and parcel of the modern world, their comforting presence, durability and future continuity not seriously in doubt. Yet, over a century ago, Ernest Renan foresaw the likely supersession of nations by a European federation, though not in his epoch. Marx and Engels too looked to the transcendence of ‘national narrow-mindedness’ by the restless energy of international capitalism. In the last century, Karl Deutsch envisaged the subordination of nations to wider continental and regional political communities, while Ernest Gellner, as part of his debunking of nationalist myths, projected a future without nationalism (though not without nations) once the great hump of industrialisation had been surmounted and an affluent modernity attained (Renan 1882; Marx and Engels 1959; Deutsch et al. 1957; Gellner 1983).
