ABSTRACT
The concept of a ‘national community’ was an integral part of national historical master narratives in modern Europe. 1 However, the content of what constituted that ‘national community’ was strongly contested among competing master narratives in virtually every existing or aspiring nation-state in Europe. An often somewhat elusive idea of ‘national community’ was related to a range of other spatial and non-spatial ideas of community, many of which have been examined in other chapters in this volume. They include conceptions of urban, rural and regional communities, of transnational communities as well as those based on ethnicity, class and religion. Languages of national community were interrelated with those other languages of community in manifold, often ambiguous and contradictory ways, but attempts to frame ‘national communities’ almost always sought to integrate, subsume and submerge other forms of community construction under the national frame. 2 Hence, the potential ‘others’ of a ‘national community’ became part and parcel of the very construction of the national. The national was often already inherent in them and they themselves formed important building blocks of what the ‘national community’ was imagined to be. In this brief essay, I would like to investigate the diverse and contested languages of national community in national historical master narratives in relation to those other languages of community, many of which are highlighted in other chapters of this book. I will adhere to this volume’s historical framework, which ranges from the end of the First World War to the 1960s. After reviewing the impact of the First World War on concepts of national community, I will examine the role of contested borderlands in interwar Europe in re-forging notions of regional as well as national community. Subsequent ethnic, racial, social, religious and political constructions of national communities will be analysed with a view to demonstrating the complex layers of possible mixtures of the national with other spatial and non-spatial conceptions of community. I will argue that the alleged break with ideas of national community after 1945 is often overemphasised, as historians who have put forth this view have sought to reinvent conceptions of national community across the Cold War divide, often using very traditional tropes and narratives.
