ABSTRACT
In 1974, when West European Politics was perhaps a glimmer in the eye of its founding editors, there appeared the paperback edition of Samuel Finer’s Comparative Government in which the author asserted that ‘Britain too has had its “nationalities’’ problem, its “language’’ problem, its “religious’’ problem, not to speak of its “constitutional’’ problem. These are problems no more’ (Finer 1974: 137). 1 In retrospect, we can see this work, and similar ones from other parts of Europe, as the culmination of a literature on national integration that had been developing since the nineteenth century and which, as so often happens, reached its peak just as the conditions were changing. Our understanding of territorial politics has indeed been radically transformed in the 30 years of WEP’s existence.
