ABSTRACT
The history of nationalism in modern Europe spans revolutions and wars, proud victories and painful memories, stories of achievements and of untold destruction. It is a history of intellectual and cultural creativity, of political and social freedom, of noble acts of integrity and self-sacrifice as much as it is a chronicle of hatred, violence, persecution, and death. From the nineteenth century onwards nationalism dominated the scene of identity-formation, on the individual and collective levels alike. It became so powerful a sentiment, so pervasive an ideology, and so diffuse a political agenda that it reshaped institutions, ideas, and experiences-even those ones that had predated it. There has been no better testament to its success and dynamism than the widespread belief-unabated still today-that it has an almost suprahistorical legitimacy, as if by default. For an ideology that was mainly the product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hobsbawm 1992: 3), this is no mean achievement.
