ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that it is a mistake to assume in pursuing the goal of national solidarity the state had things all its own way or even that the state was the most active agent in the process. So far from simply imposing its own definitions of the national interest, in fact, government entered some bitterly contested terrain, on which socialists and Catholics, liberals and democrats, radical agrarians, anti-semites, and Pan-Germans, had all entered their claims. The most satisfying accounts of nationalism have related it to the uneven development of European capitalism, to problems of modernization. Of course, the formal ideology of nationalism has its own history, which seems to originate with the French Revolution. Political independence can be either a condition or a consequence of the ideological and cultural activity, and the growth of nationalism can just as easily follow as precede the formation of territorial units of the nation-State type.
