ABSTRACT
In the course of this book I have critically examined the key factors that I believe account for the development of modern nationalism in Western Europe, I have avoided what Max Weber would have called a 'one-sided vision of history' because I think that the complexity of nationalism precludes any explanatory framework which is strictly monocausal. If I say that nationalism can only be explained historically it may sound a rather banal or at least hardly novel statement, but all depends on the implicit concept of history used. What I am here referring to is not a linear, 'evenemential' history, even if such a concept does play a role in the scheme of things concerned with the development of nationalism. The concept of history that I work with is highly structured and functions like a feedback mechanism in that selective information from the past is fed firmly into the present through images, myths and symbols which allow us to interpret our times and to control and direct them in the desired way, within the limits of the existing correlation of forces.
