ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that cultural nationhood is a value - one of the highest values of modernity in so far as it evokes the secularized religious sense of community - which different social groups, including states, will try to appropriate for themselves. By using the expression 'nationalist paths to modernity', the chapter wants to signify the different national patterns that have made modernity possible. Fascism was the culmination of state nationalism. All Western European countries developed radical nationalist movements that could be labelled, following Charles Maurras's felicitous expression, 'integral nationalisms'. The post-war period in Western Europe has been characterized by an extreme stability of political borders. The development of imperialism reinforced the determination of Western European states to contain their internal national minorities or emerging nationalisms against the state by engaging ever more actively in policies of national homogenization, as well as in outright repressive measures against the cultural and political manifestations of the awakening nationalities.
