ABSTRACT
Before proceeding to a discussion of that project, let us begin by reminding ourselves of the relative newness of nation-states and what is entailed in maintaining national identities. We must start where nation-states started - in Europe. One hundred and thirty years ago, the anti-nationalist Lord Acton remarked that, unlike in his day, ‘In the old European system, the rights of nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the frontiers.’ Nationality was associated not with political sovereignty but rather, where it did exist, with shared ethnological and cultural characteristics. Only with the decline of absolutism and the rise of democracy (popular sovereignty) did nationality become the basis for the state.
