ABSTRACT
It has been common practice in over a century of works discussing the nature of nations and nationalism to end with predictions for the future. The gradual erosion of national identities and the replacement of nationalism by some kind of pan-European or global group sentiment has long been heralded. As far back as 1916, for example, John Holland Rose believed that this process had begun, claiming that ‘nationalism shows signs of having exhausted its strength’.2 Equally, other authors have periodically envisaged the catastrophic consequences of nationalism unchecked. Edward Krehbiel, for example, believed in the same year that the inevitable perpetuation of nationalism would mean ‘war between great nations compared to which past wars will appear insignificant’.3 Both forecasts went unfulfilled, but this tendency towards prediction is in many ways still a feature of contemporary works on nationalism. While in 1992 Eric Hobsbawm identified a ‘crisis of national consciousness in the old nations’, which were ‘retreating [ . . . ] before the new supranational restructuring of the globe’, Fred Halliday argued in 2000 that ‘nationalism is with us to stay’.4
