Historians find it mostly as difficult as the general public to think about public authority in the past without referring implicitly or explicitly to the states as they exist in their own days. It is hard to talk about countries whose names may still be the same as in the Middle Ages, but whose borders and internal structure were largely different. General and compulsory education played a huge role by imprinting upon our minds the identification with the national state. The history curriculum, as imposed more or less directly by state authorities since the late nineteenth century, belonged to the instruments to foster the sense of belonging to the state. During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, the ruling state elites have made great efforts to propagate the unity of the populations living within their borders.1 However, it was difficult to find any state in Europe which did not include more than one nation, meant as a community aware of its distinctive common identity. Most national states tended to undervalue the variety of cultures within their borders, in their educational programmes just as in other domains. Centralized multinational states systematically favoured the dominant culture, pretending its identity to be that of ‘the nation’ – which in reality was an identity constructed by and mainly for the elite.2 The combination of social mobility, the increasing influence of state institutions such as compulsory schools, the army, the administration and justice, led to the gradual adaptation of large parts of the non-dominant nations in some countries such as France.3 There, as well as in other states, however, some suppressed national identities resisted and nowadays even show a reinvigorated self-awareness – such as that of the Catalans and the Basques, the Scots and the Welsh, not to speak about the Irish. In other multinational states, where the dominance of the centre over the peripheries was

1 Wim Blockmans and Jean-Philippe Genet (eds), Visions sur le développement des Etats européens. Théories et Historiographie de l’Etat Moderne (Rome, 1993); Paul Nolte, ‘Shifting Boundaries. The Rise and Fall of European Nation-States in Comparative Perspective’, in Joachim Jens Hesse, Jan-Erik Lane and Yoichi Nishikawa (eds), The Public Sector in Transition. East Asia and the European Union Compared (Baden-Baden, 2007), pp. 23−38.