ABSTRACT
The European Union has brought about a new form of legal and political order in Western Europe. This creates a politics "beyond the sovereign state". Old conceptions of state sovereignty and of the absolutism of the nation-state are consigned to history. This does not abolish nations as politico-cultural communities. It may create space for the flourishing of nationalism tamed, a fully liberal and humanistic nationalism. The commonly recognized human rights of the present epoch, those for example contained in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, or in the UN Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and Social Rights, correspondingly express basic requirements for human autonomy. Ernest Gellner has pointed out how the politics of large-scale modern political societies has required an assertion of a "flat" common nationality through educational and communications systems, has required, that is to say, an assertion of a "nation" for the state.
