Introduction

On July 28, 1990 two ostensibly unrelated articles appeared side-by-side on the Op Ed page of The New York Times. In one of them, “An ‘Ism’ That Won’t Go Away,” the British journalist George Brock questioned the current “fashion” for pan-European institutions like the EEC by reminding his readers that “for the past two centuries nationalism has been the mainspring of history. ” Dismissing as wishful Eric Hobsbawm’s belief that the power of nationalism is receding across the globe,1 Brock cited recent events in French Canada and Eastern Europe to bolster his claim that “the nation satisfied a need for love and allegiance-and still does.”